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.

“This was the ideal time to get the device into the hands of the developers,” Nokia told us. “[The N8 devices] are ready to be developed on, even though they are not yet the full consumer experience the N8 will offer when it is released.”

Which makes sense, while the software developers inside Nokia and the Symbian Foundation put the final touches on the built in applications, the third party developers can do the same with their applications and get them ready for distribution through their websites and (Nokia hopes) the Ovi Store.

-- Ewan Spence