Quick write up from this morning’s Ovi Developer Event run by Nokia at the Century Club in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue.
Roughly 100 odd people showed up with standing room only, so it demonstrated that the London mobile crowd is clearly interested to hear Nokia’s story. I suspect the promotion across Mobile Monday London helped as I spotted a few familiar faces in the crowd. Attendees over indexed on business types, as a voluntary show of hands revealed only about 25% of the crowd were coders.
There was a degree of confusion about the purpose of the event, with messages mixed between a developer event and a launch event for the upcoming N8 handset, so may be that helps explain the relativity low developer turn out for a “developer” event.
The was an air of expectation, mixed with some healthy cynicism, as evidenced on the event Twitter stream #ovidevsldn.
Mark Loughran, Nokia UK MD opened up proceedings and highlighted a couple of recent Ovi success stories. He also mentioned that Ovi was running its first UK TV campaign in August – more on that in a second.
Janaina Pilomia from Forum Nokia then ran through the changes on Forum Nokia. The main message was one of simplification. Forum Nokia has been re-designed to focus around three core elements: Design, Develop, and Distribute.
Design focuses on research, conceptual design, prototyping, access to UX evaluation experts, design and optimization.
The clear message around Develop was that the previous Nokia offering was too complex. IT has now been consolidated down to three core areas web apps, java apps, and QT native apps (pronounced as Cutee)
There are also three target device grouping: Phones (S40), smart phones (Symbian), and Computers (Maemo / MeeGo)
It was noted that QT (based on C++ ) already has a 100,000 strong developer community on desktop apps and Skype was given as an example of a QT desktop app. (figure edited after comment from Hamish Wille)
Windows, Mac or Linux SDK’s available, with one click installs – tools, build, debug, and testing on host PC’s. Developer no longer need device specific SDK’s, and Janaina also referenced a live handset testing environment that sounded like Device Anywhere, but was not confirmed.
Amongst the new api’s are ones for sensors, location, and messaging. Nokia pushed the “write in once” native development framework then compile for Meego, Symbian etc
QT comes preinstalled on Symbian ^3 onwards, with install on demand for earlier devices – the smart installer is available now from Forum Nokia.
QT Quick is a user interface creation kit, with visual tools for UI creation based on QML language (extension to JavaScript)
The QT web runtime – runs on top of QT and QT webkit, and is a W3C standards bases web runtime (HTML 5, CSS 3) and open source.
Moving on to Distribute, individuals can now publish to Ovi store (as opposed to registered companies), with Nokia “taking the risk” as the publisher. There is a public beta of Nokia signing Symbian apps for free. “That’s how much we care”. Note the offer only applies if publishing in the Ovi store, not for independent distribution.
Keith Varty from UK Services and Marketing came next to preview the Ovi TV ad due to break on the 9th August. He described the work that Nokia are doing to directly influence big brands, quoting over 50 branded apps were now available in Ovi, like MTV, Tesco, and the Daily Mirror.
He said a reminder to the brands that Nokia own 37% of the UK Smartphone market and deliver 1.7 million app downloads a day surprises the brands, who I suspect suffer from iPhone blindness. The TV ad features Spotify, You Tube and Sky on the end frame.
Keith also discussed the summer Ovi press campaign, run in The Metro and The Sun over the last 8 – 10 weeks featuring topical themes like festivals / weddings / holidays highlighting apps in the Ovi catalogue. They have also used their creative agency, Marvlous, to create a series of “rapid apps” to leverage PR opportunities – fun / different, e.g. world class excuses for missing work to watch the world cup.
We got some additional statistics; the average user downloads 8 content items (no time period quoted), Q2 2010 saw a 100% increase in downloads vs Q1 2010, 11 million people have downloaded Nokia’s free sat nav app, the most popular download devices are 5800, X6, N97 mini, and tellingly everyday 1.2 billion people use a Nokia phone.
We then were treated to a demo of the N8 in action, and it is an impressive piece of kit. A home screen demo showed the customizable UI, the user can add modules like iGoogle. Ovi has direct home screen access, and live content can be displayed from your email inbox, Facebook, etc.
Some time was spent showing off the phones video capabilities. The N8 can output at 720p resolution, has HDMI out and can play HD video at 25 fps. It also has Dolby 5.1, and can play BBC iPlayer content at 30 fps making the N8 a great entertainment choice. The video chip can motor at 60 fps for menus and cover flow art work in the music application.
A new feature “USB on the go” was demoed. Via an adapter in the box, a standard USB stick can be plugged into the N8, opening a window on the phone UI, offering full drag and drop and playback functionality.
The N8 comes with 16Gb memory onboard, expandable by 32Gb via SD. The battery can handle 7 hours HD video playback or 50 hours music play back. There is an FM transmitter onboard, and a 12mp camera, with mechanical shutter & wide angle lense.
The hardware demo impressed the crowd (see twitter stream for more commentary) it really is packing a hell of a lot in. Nokia has tried this approach in past and I hope that the “swiss army” knife approach doesn’t mean Nokia struggle to effectively position the device. Sony Ericsson successfully segmented their phones: Walkman (great music) and Cybershot (great camera). Time will tell if Nokia successfully convey the right message for the N8 when it packs so much in.
There were some rumblings of disappointment that an event labeled “developer” lacked any detailed technical information, it also felt like a missed opportunity to reach out to the independent developer crowd. Rather than working with indie developers, Nokia had worked exclusively with their agency to create widgets to support their ad campaign, and the theme of the marketing message was Nokia’s focus on working with tier one brands, seemingly at the expense of the indie’s. I understand the reasons for Nokia doing this from the consumer perspective, as the end punter wants to see brands they know and trust, but none the less, a more polished story around how Nokia can support indie developers from a marketing perspective would have been welcomed.
The partner story was also missing. I’m not sure if that is because there is no partner story, or if there wasn’t time to cover it, but there was a sense that it was a Nokia closed ecosystem – it would be nice to understand how a developer working with Nokia can open up other opportunities and it would make sense for Nokia to leverage its powerful relationships throughout the Mobile ecosystem to the benefit of developers.
Overall the event, and N8, seemed to be well received with some positive sentiment on Twitter. I guess the key challenge for establishing the N8 in the UK will be that its primary target audience will already be locked into long term iPhone contracts. To grow its 37% UK Smartphone market share, Nokia will need to tackle this issue head on by either aggressive targeting of iPhone users, or by attempting to sell into the UK market currently not carrying Smartphones, or both. However, today left me with the strong feeling that Nokia are not out of this game.
Follow the Twitter back channel here: #ovidevsldn
