Last week Nokia announced that the Ovi Store had reach the milestone of 3 million downloads a day, an increase of 1 million from the beginning of September. All About Symbian's Ovi Store tracking estimates there have been around 710 million downloads from Ovi Store since June 2009, with half of this total coming in the last 5 months (from July onwards). We estimate that Ovi Store will reach the 1 billion download mark in February 2011. Read on for some further numbers.
You'll remember that, in addition to Symbian and the low-end Series 40, Nokia also now supports MeeGo, the development of the old Maemo system and Intel's Moblin. The first MeeGo conference was held last week, in Dublin, and you may be interested in this conference roundup over on our sister site, All About Meego, with some interesting and personal accounts of the event from members of the community.
SYMBEOSE, a consortium of organisations, led by the Symbian Foundation, has successfully applied for funding from the Artemis Joint Technology Initiative, which is partly backed by the Europe Commission and aims to facilitate public-private partnership for research and development activities in embedded systems. As a result, the Symbian ecosystem will see an investment of €22 million, which will be focused on improving the ease of device creation, improving a number of the platform's core enablers and meeting requirements for future embedded systems.
Possibly of most interest to developers and those 'in' the industry, I wanted to flag up that, despite all recent announcements and speculation, The Symbian Foundation's SEE 2010 event takes place on the 9th and 10th of November at the Beurs van Berlage in Amsterdam, billed as "the only event dedicated to bringing the Symbian community together and providing unique knowledge and insight from industry experts". Attendance is free to all, as usual. Some more details below.
Nokia today made an announcement that clarifies and simplifies its developer and software platform strategy. Nokia will focus on Qt as the sole application development framework across both MeeGo and Symbian, reinforcing and accelerating Nokia's previous commitment to it. Nokia will also develop its own future UI applications using Qt.
The planned and future development of the higher layers of Symbian OS itself will also rely heavily on Qt; Nokia says this will "allow a continuous improvement of the Symbian experience" and, critically, will be compatible with the existing Symbian^3 platform and devices. This will mean that existing Symbian^3 devices will be included in future updates and will receive many of the user experience and application improvements originally planned for Symbian^4. Going forward, Nokia will simply refer to the platform as 'Symbian', without any version specifics.
While the previous Ovi Calendar (version 1.6) that was in the Nokia Beta Labs is now in general use, it’s time for the next version to be subject to public test. So Ovi Calendar 2.0 is now available for public testing at the Beta Labs. Adding in new facilities to invite people to meetings and events, attendance at events, manage public calendars, and a raft of user interface tweaks.
Forum Nokia has released a package of software for Symbian^3 devices that enable developers to test Qt 4.7.0 applications on the Nokia N8 and other Symbian^3 devices. The package consists of two sets of SIS files, one to install Qt 4.7.0 and another to revert back to Qt 4.6 (the version of Qt shipped with the device) if needed.
Here’s one reason why Nokia need to keep pushing the “story” of the Ovi store. A recent post on Game Theory by Digital Chocolate founder Trip Hawkins critiqued the Android app store and highlighted three main issues… such as carrier billing, returns policy and competing download routes for applications. Issues that the Ovi Store specifically, and the Symbian platform globally, are already addressing. Some thoughts below...
Nokia's new CEO, Stephen Elop emphasised 'developers, developers, developers' during his curtain call appearance at Nokia World. Today, that emphasis is given form, with the announcement of the latest round of Nokia’s Calling All Innovators competition for North America. Presented by Nokia and US network AT&T, with a $10 million prize pool, it represents a significant push into US market. With the number of downloads from the Ovi Store counting towards the winning entry, it should help accelerate the addition of new content to the Ovi Store.
Yesterday Nokia announced the official release of Qt 4.7, the latest version of the cross-platform application and UI framework. A key addition is the inclusion of the first stages of Qt Quick (QML and Qt Declarative), a technology that allows for the rapid development of user interfaces and closer co-operation between designers and developers. The Nokia specific (Symbian and MeeGo) version of the Qt SDK, Nokia Qt SDK, will add support for Qt 4.7 shortly.
An interesting closing paragraph from Kevin Tofel’s observations on developing for Symbian OS sums up some of the issues facing Nokia and Stephen Elop over the next few months and years. Tofel was covering the event for GigaOm, and has talked to a number of developers to ask “what’s it like to develop for Symbian?”
Some smart thinking on the part of Nokia at the Nokia Developer Conference, taking place alongside NokiaWorld 2010, with every developer picking up a new Nokia N8 to test and develop their applications. It’s a similar strategy that was used to get last year’s Nokia N900 into the hackers hands, and it should help the availability of new and tweaked/ported software when the N8 gets to public availability in the next few weeks.
At the Nokia Developer Summit today, Nokia unveiled a number of major improvements in its developer tools, including "significant enhancements to the Nokia Qt (SDK), resulting in a 70 percent reduction in the number of lines of code required when developing for Symbian", improvements to the Ovi Store "including a new look and feel, making it faster and making apps easier to find", plus a "lower barrier of entry and increased monetization opportunities for developers, including free Java and Symbian signing, in-app purchase, improved revenue share, and advanced developer analytics".
One of the more interesting numbers I came across this weekend was in regards to the use of Facebook. With over 500 million members, some 30% of them are accessing the site through a mobile device. Which means that 150 million people are not using the desktop web interface for the social network site. How long until the majority of users around the world are from mobile handsets?
Applications are rarely completely static. Anything with a decent amount of functionality is bound to have either flaws - which then hopefully get fixed - or planned improvements. The big question is how to best to get these new versions out to users. In this news editorial, I look at how application updates work for the three big smartphone platforms of the moment, Symbian, iPhone and Android. What can those in the Symbian world learn or implement?
