Vote Now: Must Have App of the Year Awards 2010 – predict the winners correctly and win a Nokia N8!

The time has come once again, Ovi Daily App is hosting the “Must Have App of the Year Awards” where YOU can vote for your favourite mobile apps from the year gone in the six individual categories. Incredible – it feels like Yesterday we were voting for the first App Awards

There’s a BIG incentive for you to vote, as one lucky person who correctly predicts all six app winners will WIN A NOKIA N8 loaded with the winning apps!

So where and when to vote? Voting is open 15 – 31 December 2010 at: http://blog.ovi.com/dailyapp/appawards/

More details and video below:

The Western blogosphere and their constant negativity concerning Nokia.

I think all of us here have borne witness to this, major US/UK blogs and their stance towards Nokia, Symbian and anything smartphone related originating outside of the US, the exceptions being HTC and Samsung for reasons obvious to anyone with eyes. The question is why?  Why is it that Nokia get constantly lambasted for doing ANYTHING or mocked for coming to the table too late while the others are constantly praised for doing admittedly mundane things (Facetime anyone?) . This post/rant is intended to look at common criticisms leveled at Nokia and by proxy, Symbian, each of which will be evaluated as best as possible by yours truly. Let’s get started then!

Ovi Store reaches 3.5 Million Downloads a day! Up from 3M 3 weeks ago.

Word on the tweets: Ovi Store has reached another new record! Only 3 weeks ago we heard that they crossed the massive 3M/day download threshold. Now it’s up a further 16.7% to 3.5M/day. That’s 1.2775 billion a year if Ovi Store doesn’t grow any more (though we know this is just the beginning).

Content, ringtones/themes and most importantly, Apps are increasing in quality as well as numbers. Today we saw a couple of great and Free apps with Roller Coaster Extreme and thetrainline.com’s ticket app by Masabi. (That’s just what’s posted here. There are many more in my piling list of great apps to review as well as well as apps already reviewed in the community).

We’ll update this post when we find more details and figures.

Video: TheTrainLine.com App for Symbian demoed on Nokia N8. Buy train tickets and check train times with ease!

Back in October we saw thetrainline.com advertising their application using the Nokia N8.

This app has been available for download from Ovi Store for a few days now and let me tell you that it’s awesome!

It is a really slick useful application for UK train travellers. You can check train times as well as buy train tickets but it goes so much further in making a very smooth and visually appealing interface to interact with. Over checking the browser version, this is leaps and bounds in speed and usability since it’s mobile (thumb input) focused and also uses very little data (no constantly clicking a new page).

We’ve got a video demo below as well as screenshots and more details about this great app!)

How to: Downloading Ovi Store .sis installation files from Desktop Web Browser for offline phone install

Here’s a very quick and useful tip from Iain Wallace of doitdifferent.wordpress.com on how to download the .sis/.sisx installation files directly from Ovi Store. Now why would you want this? Well you might not have WiFi or mobile data on your phone but may have access to a desktop with internet.

I’d sure as heck like a PC download and installation of apps as my uni accommodation this year has pants signal and NO WiFi. (Come on Ovi Suite!)

Installation instructions after the break!

Future of Ovi Maps with PixelActive’s 3D expertise?

A couple of days ago, NAVTEQ (subsidiary of Nokia) bought PixelActive who specialize in the creation of 3D buildings, roads, highways and cities. They have a city builder tool that you can use to create your own city (or recreate a real one).

Alex68 (cheers for the heads up) says that the PixelActive video has been removed. I don’t know what the content was but there are similar videos of other folk who have created some neat cities with PixelActive.

How cool would Ovi Maps look with this type of 3D mapping? We know NAVTEQ’s already working on their own BETTER version of Google’s Street View. Would they still have the option to work offline?

Click 720p please to see the video more clearly.

2metri

RenoPhoenix

Ovi Store hits over 1 Billion/year download rate with 3 Million downloads a day!

Ovi Store grows again! It’s not a surprise since content AND handsets are ramping up. Ovi Store downloads are now at 3 million a day or 1.065 Billion per year were Ovi Store NOT to grow for 365 days.

• Over 165 million Ovi Users, across more than 190 countries
• 250,000 new users every day
• 90% of visits lead to app download

• On average, each registered visitor downloads 2.6 apps (per what?)
• 92 developers have reached the 1-million+ download milestone each for their apps
• 1.5 million downloads of the Qt SDK in 2010
• 400,000 new developers have signed up with Forum Nokia over the last year

Nokia Conversations / Nokia / Mobile-ent

 

Thanks to Yoel Gvirtz, Alex Kerr and GadgetBuff for the heads up

 

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Nokia taking Symbian development back in house, Foundation remains to control licensing and patents

 

As mentioned before in the press release Jay posted, and has been rumored in the blogosphere for quite a while, it seems that Nokia and the Symbian board have taken a decisive step towards improving the Symbian OS, speeding up time to market, improving developer and OEM relations and at the same time cut out some of the bureaucracy that has held Symbian development up for so long. This move was hinted at when Lee Williams stepped down from the Symbian Foundation as executive director and was replaced by Tim Holbrow (former CFO) with rumors circling that winding down operations would commence imminently.  It seems that such a guess was not far off the mark.

I’m certain that a large percentage of people in the blogosphere are now shouting at the top of their voices that Symbian is dead, Nokia is down the toilet and are doomed and that Symbian has no place in the smartphone market (Engadget commenters are truly  remarkable no?). But I’d have to respectfully say that they are patently wrong. Below I’ll outline a few of the reasons why this change has happened and what the future may/may not hold for Symbian development in light of current news.

One of the most telling statements concerning Symbian development were the announcements of Sony Ericsson (SE) and Samsung, that they were discontinuing Symbian development and had no plans for the continued support and/or production of Symbian devices. Looking at those two announcements in a vacuum one might be inclined to think that two of the three major OEM  supporters and Foundation contributors (not dissing Fujitsu here) had withdrawn from an OS that was seemingly about to fail miserably.

Looking at the situation in context however, yields a starkly different story. Having tracked code package submissions to the Symbian Foundation from the fledgling days of S^2 & S^3, I’d yet to see any significant contributions of code by either company. While that’s not to say they didn’t provide any monetary support, the fact that the entire idea of the foundation was to distribute work amongst large companies with significant resources in the hope of faster iterating the OS than any single company could possibly achieve. Unfortunately for the Symbian Foundation, this was not to be, and Nokia has and will continue to contribute the VAST majority of the code.

 

 

 

Worse still, Android came along whereby OEM’s could get a free ride in essence, contributing little if any code, little if any monetary support while getting an OS that they could basically flash onto the base hardware provided by Qualcomm and run with it. While that’s not to say that this is a “bad” approach, in some ways it leaves the OEM’s at the mercy of Google’s whim and provides no real benefit, in the long term at least, for OEM’s looking to differentiate, grow profits significantly and control their own fates.

 

Android also had the benefit of provided an app store that integrated directly into the OS in the form of Android Marketplace, something that Symbian had categorically lacked before 2008. When Nokia came out with the Ovi Store in 2009, it became clearer still to all OEM’s involved with Symbian that not only could they not compete with Nokia in terms of hardware costs, reliability and scale, but they also couldn’t compete in terms of value added services to Symbian OS.  Worse still, Symbian Horizon, which would have been the go-to application repository for Symbian applications for all OEM’s, failed spectacularly leaving Samsung and SE high and dry with regards to added services, through no fault of the Symbian Foundation of course.

NB. Symbian in it’s base implementation comes without mapping applications and application stores

 

Having realized that there would be no financial benefit in sticking around, both companies decided to jump ship to an OS where all the work was done for them and they simply needed to toss an OS on some hardware and meet some nebulous requirements concerning the use of Google services and market and they’d be just peachy.

 

 

The second most telling statement made was by Nokia where they said that they had no intentions of sticking to the large-scale generational changes to the Symbian platform formerly known as S^3, S^4.x , S^5 etc and that they would be sticking to continuous, smaller scale improvements to what they would call “Symbian” with most recent devices getting the changes initially slated for the generational S^4 release. Furthermore, they publicly stated that Symbian development would give way to Qt development, in essence both dog-fooding and relegation of Symbian C++ to legacy status.

In hindsight, these events in addition to the rapid pace of development of both software and hardware in the mobile sphere has led to the predicament the Foundation has faced, and thusly the decision made in the conference call and board meetings today.

 

 

 

On the bright side of course, SEE2010 begins tomorrow with the MeeGo conference slated for the following week. Here’s to hoping for at least SOME positive news and seeing positive strides being taken in both domains.  Keep your browsers pointed here for more news on both Expos in coming days.

 

Nokia N8 TV adverts

Web tv

Contacts

Ovi maps

Ovi store

I reall like the direction Nokia is going with these ads my favorite one is the Ovi maps one

via GLOBALHARDWARE

Ari Jaaksi, VP of MeeGo Devices resigns

Well that’s something none of us expected. Given Nokia’s push for MeeGo as their singular high-end solution to compete with (read: crush) iOS and Android and the amount of buzz that has been generated both within and external to the company about this coming OS, it’s rather surprising that one of the most important men in charge of bringing these much-vaunted devices to the public is stepping down. This after 12 years at Nokia both on mobile browser development as well with Maemo/MeeGo and associated open source initiatives. I’m sure that the loss will be strongly felt within the company when he does indeed depart but we can rest assured that most of the work surrounding the upcoming MeeGo devices was probably finished in advance of the tendering of his resignation.

NB It takes around 12-24 months to create and productise any mobile device from concept to shipping.

Here’s to hoping that political and/or bureaucratic issues didn’t force Ari out and that he’s simply making use of the current period of transition in order to pursue new opportunities.

This news does make you wonder though, with 3 senior Finns leaving the company in relatively quick succession, does this signal a marked change in the type of thinking, management and communication that we can expect to see from the company in the future. Or is this a case of rats fleeing a sinking ship? Leave your opinions in the comments section

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