Free or Fantastic?
Posted by: Purnima Kochikar, March 1
Since taking the role of VP of Forum Nokia last July, I’m often asked “What does Nokia have to offer to developers in North America?” It’s a fair question and I love to answer it. Nokia has a lot to offer!
Our size and scale means we have a lot of customers and a variety of devices. But what is interesting is what developers can do with our devices that they can’t on other platforms. Take for instance, Qik, who enables the sharing of video via the mobile via access to our video APIs. Or Fring who is able to use background processing for their Skype video calls. And don’t get me started on Flash. Nokia has shipped more than 400 million Flash-enabled devices (since October 2009). It can be the difference between “Free” and “Fantastic”.
We believe that in the future, you can argue that it is true today, that apps will be either free or fantastic (that is not to say that they cannot be both). Customers are willing to pay for something that is fantastic and to offer fantastic, the app has to be very compelling, very useful and very relevant.
For the majority of free, casual and social applications, the key is a low cost of investment and rapid development time; building web apps with Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) comes immediately to mind as the best choice of technology where developers can use standard Web technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript. And with more than 30 Nokia device models (as of Oct 2009) shipped with WRT, the platform opportunity for mobile apps is sizable at a very low cost.
Fantastic though, requires much more lower-level access, meaning much deeper integration with device features. Access to the camera, phone book, telephony APIs for example, give developers the ability to create interesting, differentiated applications. For developers looking for fantastic, Nokia’s Symbian platform offers such access. And the newly announced Maemo device, the Nokia N900, goes even further in enabling access for the open source developer.
Further, for developers interested in cross-platform development (across mobile platforms and desktop-to-mobile), Nokia offers Qt.
A variety of development options can sometimes be confused with complexity. And we acknowledge we have a long way to go to make it simpler for the developer. The teams are working hard on that as I write. But today, our development options, our size and strength, our strong carrier relationships and market knowledge – along with a developer support organization, Forum Nokia, offers a lot to the North American developer.
I should point out that Free can sometimes mean free in cost in exchange for something else, like advertising. What do you think about Free and Fantastic?
