Nokia Puts Focus on Developers

MONTE CARLO -- Nokia shed more light on the upcoming launch of its Ovi Store at the Nokia Developer Summit 2009 here.

Though the cell phone giant will announce more detail on its application store at the event, it is not set to actually open until the first of May, sources within the company said.

The Ovi Store is a one-stop shop for consumer content. The Ovi Store will consolidate the best experiences from Nokia’s current content services including Download!, MOSH, and WidSets, to a single channel, company officials said. The evolving service will deliver media according to the consumer’s social location, the combination of their social connections and physical location.

Moreover, a key element in Nokia’s value proposition is providing users with the ability to personalize their mobile devices with a rich assortment of applications and content. With more than a billion consumers carrying Nokia devices, the company alone can’t satisfy the diverse requirements of this growing global user community. Nokia works with a variety of third-party developers who provide innovative applications and services needed to fulfill consumer requirements.

And Forum Nokia, the company's developer outreach organization, has for more than 10 years helped developers add value to Nokia devices and the consumers who use them. Forum Nokia enables developers get their products to market quickly and efficiently, by delivering resources covering the entire mobile application lifecycle, from development to sales.

Indeed, company officials said Forum Nokia delivers resources to more than 4 million registered developers and receives more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month to forum.nokia.com. For application and Web developers this includes: Symbian C++, OpenC, Java technology, Python, Flash and Web technologies. Content developers working with images, video, audio, SVGT, themes, SMS, MMS, and the Web are also supported.

Forum Nokia offers developers free access to tools and software development kits (SDKs) to assist with their development efforts. Resources include documentation, videos, training, a Wiki, blogs and discussion boards. The SDKs enable developers to create applications and content for Series 40, Symbian and Maemo devices.

Meanwhile, the company's Carbide family of tools provides developers with key development environments for Nokia-supported technologies. Carbide.c++ supports all Symbian C++ and OpenC developers working with the Symbian platform. Carbide.ui supports content developers with a complete tool for theme creation.

In addition, Nokia is investing in a wide range of Web tools to support the ecosystem being built around Web Runtime (WRT). Aptana is the first of these solutions to help developers create, edit, test and deploy WRT widgets for Nokia Symbian devices

Nokia also provides various levels of support for developers, including the Forum Nokia Launchpad. This is a premium membership service that gives developers early and exclusive access to Forum Nokia resources and support, as well as marketing opportunities with Nokia. Other levels of support include Forum Nokia Pro and Forum Nokia Pro Accelerator, an elite, invitation-only mobile developer program.