During the Nokia Developer Summit 2009 in Monte Carlo, the mainstream and social media are given some time to talk to the executives in Nokia who are involved with the event. Other than meeting the two main keynote speakers: Rob Taylor (Head of Forum Nokia) and Tero Ojanpera (Executive VP - Entertainment and Communities, Member of Nokia Group Executive Board), I have also manged to meet up with Mark Ollila (Director, Nokia Games Publishing) and Lee Williams (Executive Director, Symbian Foundation) with Jason Goh (who also writes a blog on Symbian in Malaysia). So, here are some quick notes from the Nokia Developer Summit 2009 which I have gotten from looking at the Nokia N97, talking to Mark Ollila on Nokia N-Gage and Ovi Store and Lee Williams (Executive Director, Symbian Foundation) on the future of Symbian.
Nokia N97 and Ovi Store: During the Nokia Developer Summit, they announced the launch of Nokia N97 Beta SDK to the developers. The main focus of that is to tie the Ovi Store (Nokia's one stop stall for purchase and downloading of apps, similar to the iTunes Store) which will be launched in the coming month (May 2009). The SDK is meant to give the developers a way in publishing their content directly to the N97 home screen. Unlike the iPhone, developing apps on Nokia phones require developers to work on different phones with different screens and resolutions. Of course, I did take a look at the SDK during the event but the real treat to attend such a summit is to see the prototype version of the Nokia N97 before it hits the market. So, here are the pictures which I took while a Nokia engineer is showing us his prototype Nokia N97:
Photos 1 and 2 : N97 with the Qwerty Keyboard, TFT resistive touchscreen - 16M colors, 360 x 640 pixels, 3.5 inches with these features: (1) Proximity sensor for auto turn-off, (2) Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate, (3) Full QWERTY keyboard and (4) Handwriting recognition with 32 GB storage.
Photo 3: Nokia N97 - 5 MegaPixels Camera
Photo 4: Music Player on Nokia N97
Mark Ollila on N-Gage and Ovi Store: A short 20 minutes chat with Mark Ollila (Director, Nokia Games Publishing) focused a lot on the N-Gage and Ovi Store. For a start, Mark revealed the basic figures of N-Gage has distributed games over 200 games, with a repeat purchase rate of 35% and finally about 1M people signing up for N-Gage Arena forums so far since its launch in April 2009. Of course, he also stressed that the new game titles will be sold through Ovi Store once it is being launched, and one of the next challenges ahead will be to include independent 3rd party developers, as currently, Ovi only accepts developers with a business registration ID. The most interesting and off the cuff question that was posed to him revolved around why Nokia N73 did not have N-Gage installed. He gave a very straightforward answer that the technical specifications and memory configuration of the N73 device would not provide good user experience for N-Gage. He also reiterated that whether a device will have N-Gage installed is very much dependent on the device being able to provide strong user experience.
Photo: (From Left) Jason Goh, Kelly Goh (The Star), Mark Ollila and Myself
Lee Williams on Symbian: The meet up with Lee Williams (Executive Director, Symbian Foundation) focus a lot on discussion on the development of the Symbian Foundation, the engagement of developers and working groups with the Foundation and the future of Symbian. The first point is on the current status of Symbian Foundation, which Lee told us about why the Symbian Foundation has gone through a rebranding exercise and the reason is to increase awareness and spreading the word of the operating system. The foundation will increase its current manpower from 70 to 200. One of the challenging tasks according to him, when the foundation first started is to ensure that the Symbian OS and S60 are being integrated to a proper repository. We also discussed some specifics regarding development and how conflict on code development are resolved by working groups in Symbian. From talking to Lee Williams, my sense is that the Symbian OS will evolve towards a development model analogus that resembles the Model-View-Controller framework (used in web development) that isolates business logic from user interface design considerations.
Photo: (From Left) Jason Goh, Lee Williams and myself.
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