The upcoming Ovi Store application is due to replace Nokia's existing Download!, MOSH and Software Market services, and there has been speculation about what else it might absorb. However, Nokia has now gone on record to say the N-Gage application will be kept as a separate service, at least for the moment, though they also said that their medium term goal is to "converge everything into a single distribution channel".
Would you be happy if you were told by someone how much you had to charge for your application? Not in a gentle “perhaps you should try this” way , but in a “choose one of four prices, no variance.” It's not something that I think developers would take to kindly, but Research in Motion have set up a bank of fixed prices for their soon to arrive App World, with a minimum charge of $2.99 per application.
Nokia today announced the availability of version 4.5 of the Qt cross platform application and UI framework. The new version sees the first release of the Qt Creator, a cross platform IDE, which combined with the Qt SDK, gives you everything you need to start cross platform development. The release is also the first licensed under LGPL, which is more permissive license and should increase the adoption of Qt.
It is just a matter of time before the Nokia Music Store (purchase per track) goes DRM free, but reports from Nokia's 'Comes with Music' launch in Singapore cite Adam Mirabella, Director of Global Digital Music Retail at Nokia, as saying DRM free music is also 'on the roadmap for the future integration of Comes With Music'. Clearly such a move is still some time away and the statement is not definitive, but it's a sign of how keen Nokia is to push its music offerings.
UK networks Orange and O2 may not carry the latest Nseries devices, including the N97, if Nokia insist on placing Skype on their hardware (reports MoCoNews and others). While other networks have had success with the Skype infrastructure (notably 3 in the UK), the idea of being able to route calls over the internet and not the GSM services has struck fear into others.
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic will be available in Australia on the 20th of March, and the Comes With Music all-you-can-eat subscription service will launch there simultaneously. The Nokia 5800 will have a recommended retail price of 979 AUD (£440) for a device with a 12 month Comes with Music subscription.
Nokia have recieved a loan from the European Investment Bank to support Research and Development in the Finnish company. Spread over five years, the 500 million euro loan will be used by Nokia to "make Symbian-based smartphones more competitive." While not directly for the Symbian Foundation the work will benefit the Foundation and other Open Source initiatives.
At last night's GSMA awards, Nokia walked away with the inaugural award for Outstanding Environmental Contribution for their global environmental program that includes a recycling scheme for unwanted phones operating in 86 countries. Sports Tracker, while still a beta product, took the prize for Best Mobile Internet Service. Since the full launch in July 2008, it has seen over 2.5 million downloads, allowing users to track and share their daily fitness routines while out and about.
Nokia and Skype have announced plans to fully integrate Skype into selected Nokia devices. Kicking off with the Nokia N97, Skype will be part of Contacts, enabling users to easily see when their Skype contacts are online, to call and to chat using a data connection. Other selected Nseries devices are also likely to come with integrated Skype functionality, through initial inclusion and through firmware upgrades.
Today sees an announcement from Qualcomm that they will be working with Nokia in developing UMTS devices, initially for the North American market. Given that, up until a few months ago, the two companies were at legal loggerheads over the licensing of IP over 3G implementations and chipsets, we'll read this as an amicable end to the disagreement (helped, no doubt, by Nokia's one time payment of close to 2.3 billion dollars to Qualcomm in October 2008).
The Symbian Foundation, as well as debuting their new corporate style at MWC, are using a number of social tools to allow you to follow them. The most obvious is their blog at blog.symbian.org which runs on the open source Wordpress system. Alongside this, they have a photo pool at Flickr where anyone can add relevant pictures; a Twitter account for the Foundation; and most importantly for a conference... their own coffee machine on Stand 8A77 in Hall 8.
Sony Ericsson has laid out a proposition for their customers at MWC. Entertainment Unlimited is their name for “the true fusion of communication and entertainment” that the partners have been working on since 2001. It's a statement that makes clear their corporate direction of smartphones, and as such is a good marker to remind journalists what Sony Ericsson want to do. Coupled with their concept smartphone Idou announced yesterday, this is a line in the sand drawn by the Swedish company, answering the obvious question of “what now after UIQ?”
Someone in Barcelona will be going round all the stands at this years Mobile World Congress (starting on Monday) to see how big the displays are, how much floorspace is being used by each company, how large are the parties... in short, how much money has a company spent on their presence at MWC?
Ahead of next week's Mobile World Congress next week Symbian has issued a press release with a roll call of the latest companies who pledged their support to the Symbian Foundation. These include Atelier, Bank of America, Gemalto, HP, Imagination Technologies, Mobica, MySpace, Nanoradio AB, OMRON Software, Qualcomm, SanDisk, SESCA, SiRF Technology Inc, and Virtual Logix. This takes the number of companies endorsing the Symbian Foundation to seventy-eight. Read on for more.
Regulars to AAS will know that I hate DRM (Digital Rights Management). Not because it stops me getting stuff for free, though that would undoubtedly be some people's reason, but because it gets in the way of how I want to use content that I've paid for. See below for a tale of woe - I was trying to give Nokia Music Store one last chance and it let me down yet again. Oh, and did I mention that I hate DRM?....
