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Nokia Developer Summit 2009. Recap

It's not the first summit of this caliber for Nokia, although all prior events had different names, such as Nokia Internet Day, Nokia World. Fear not, though, these events won't go anywhere - they have simply added one more with a special emphasis on developers. Although now they have removed operators from the official agenda, this doesn't prohibit them from showing up at the event and sharing their experience. So as far as familiar faces go, this year's Developer Summit was no different from the last year's convention - same announcers and speechmakers, same group of journalists, however there was a small exception made for Germany and the UK in light of the fact these countries had seen the release of Nokia's cherished OVI Store first, so their delegations were enormous in size, whereas Russia and China sent nine people total to the event. Which means that not only does Nokia try to create a well-functioning forum, but also promote it via the press, and that's fair enough - Apple employed a similar approach, when they launched their latest and greatest products at developer events, and while it's more of a thing of the past these days, Nokia didn't have in mind any particularly noteworthy announcements for Monaco either. Essentially, this meeting was meant to serve as an introduction into Nokia's business, an outlook on what's going on in the industry from the "driver's seat", the market's leading company. But was it all that intriguing? Yes and No. Ordinary users didn't have anything to stare at, while services, developer kits and applications ended up in the spotlight almost in almost every single slide and illustration. And even though regulars at these events weren't presented with anything radically new, we did notice that the format of this year's Developer Summit was somewhat different - presentations appeared livelier, that's for sure.

In this write-up we will try to cover both days of the Summit and also tell you more about what was shown and talked about over there. The opening statement was made by Rob Taylor, the head of Forum Nokia, the company's very own developer community. And since that was the first speech of the day, nobody really expected it to be an eye-opener. And it wasn't - he started with a short story about the Summit's target audience, Nokia's goals for this event, a couple of words on what was coming in other presentations and demo-zones. It shouldn't come as a surprise that Nokia's major focus for 2009-2010 are services and most of the manufacturer's representatives touched on this topic in one way or another. Off the top of my head, here are several numbers that stuck in my memory: 50 million devices will have support for OVI Store in June, when it's scheduled to launch. Now is that a lot? In my opinion this number is just enough to ensure the store's flying start.

Also, Nokia have shipped over half a billion of camera-enabled phones since the day they became available for the wide audience. And this is a figure one can't underestimate, at the same time, Nokia didn't fail to slip in a small brag about the Nokia N86, dubbed as the best imaging-savvy solution of 2009, according to TIPA. However, this award has always looked suspicious to me, solely because every time they issue the award, they give it to a phone that isn't even available for purchase, or worse, when these phones don't have finalized camera software in them. And I refuse to believe that it's even technically possible to judge image quality offered by prototypes when it can still go either way, since final versions of the firmware don't guarantee anything. On the other hand, if they make the pick based on what specs phones have on paper, then indeed, why not?

The next presentation showed everyone in attendance a way to control Nokia's phones via gestures. The Eyesight demo was based on a technology called… Eyeplay. This software package allows managing the phone's menu and applications through gestures captured and recognized by both of its cameras (the one on the back, and the forward-facing camera). For example, it lets you skip through tracks in the MP3 player, pause and unpause playback, scroll through images in the gallery, play games and so on. Also they allowed to play some eyesight-enabled games in the demo-zone, which seemed like fun. Although obviously, the main issue with this technology is energy consumption given how frequently it needs to track all your motions in real time, however its developers claimed that we wouldn't be able to drain the battery even in a couple of hours. Another drawback to Eyesight is that it becomes next to useless in poor light conditions. All in all, it's pretty hard to say whether we liked it or not from several minutes of quality time with this technology - we'll need to play around with it some more. Nevertheless it does look promising, we'll see how they will implement this kind of functionality in real-life environment.

Undoubtedly, one of the highlights of the Summit's agenda was the Nokia N97, set to land in under a month on most markets. One of the things this phone is famous for are widgets and some of them were showcased during day one. But apart from that, probably the most important even of the whole show was that Nokia finally released a beta-version of the N97's SDK - better late than never (since a lot of people wanted to get their hands on this kit back when the phone was first outed).

The presentation delivered by Symbain Foundation compared various platforms, but was full of generalizations and to a certain extent lacked substance. In a word, I'm not sure whether that was exactly what the Summit's savvy and experienced audience craved for. On the other hand, later that day I accidently chimed in a couple of conversations, where some participants talked about platforms, and I came out pretty surprised, as their knowledge of specific operating systems and related strategies/forecasts left much to be desired. Perhaps over at Symbian Foundation they spotted this problem as well, and came up with such a basic presentation.

The final slide was more than just controversial, but I'd rather leave my thoughts and rants outside of this write-up.

The MySpace presentation contained a bunch of interesting slides, such as those claiming that in 2008 the mobile version of the service had seen a 450 percent growth, while the amount of pages viewed from mobile devices had exceeded 7 billions. Curious about what MySpace users browse from their mobiles? See below for a self-explanatory diagram.

Now let's fast-forward our story a bit and move to the demo-zone, home to a couple of small booths with very peculiar gadgets and/or information. Let me start with a slide showcasing where Java found in Nokia-branded phones is headed:

Location APIs are now available for Series 40, meaning that Nokia are looking to create a unified environment across various platforms (S40 and S60 in particular). I doubt they will be able to "merge" these platforms, but some elements won't differ too much, which will make developers' lives a great deal easier already.

Nokia says that Maps must become social, show weather forecasts and plot routes to the user's friends' locations, but the most important thing is that Nokia are trying to get third-party developers involved. Everyone knows what a crowd of active developers support Google Maps - Nokia are looking to pull off a similar trick.

No way they would leave NGage out of the show, at this year's Summit they showcased two games, but that was more of a tribute to the platform, rather than a real necessity.

The most prominent event of the whole Day One of the Summit was Nokia's report on OVI Store and its future. Although I'm not going to recount every slide of the presentation here, as you'll be able to find all of them right below and they are pretty self-explanatory and informative. What I will share with you, though, is my impressions from the Store's booth - the application catalogue was pretty swift, it allowed sorting applications by various criteria (freeware/shareware, recommended, top 10 etc), plus the user could send a link to any application he or she liked to a friend via an SMS. As far as billing is concerned, both premium SMS and credit cards are enabled. All in all, I didn't come out disappointed, but we'll need to wait and see how vast OVI Store's game catalogue will be.

As far as amusing things go, there was a wireless car running around the venue, controlled via the N97's bundled motion sensor.

And I've saved some interesting news for last. Let's start with a special program for accessory makers, that clearly has distinctive "Made for iPod" roots. Nokia's vision of it, however, will feature three levels of cooperation - the basic level is "Works with Nokia", signifying that all accessories bearing this sticker were tested for compatibility with Nokia's phones. The second level is "Made for Nokia", covering all accessories made exclusively for Nokia's products. And finally, "XXX for Nokia", where "XXX" stands for the accessory maker's name. Nokia will invite partners into this program themselves, potentially granting them access to some of their technologies, as well as distribution channels, which is quite a boon.

While the idea is absolutely spot-on, I have reasons to believe that they might not be able to implement this program - back in 2007 (in London), Nokia already announced a whole array of joint ventures with accessory makes, aiming to boost their XpressMusic series.

Unfortunately, none of their ideas and plans have actually taken off, and the much-hyped cooperation with Philips came to a halt shortly thereafter.

The presentation held by Glu (a game developer) was pretty boring and hypnotic, however more towards the end they flashed a very valuable piece of information - one of their slides mentioned that by the end of 2009 we'll see a wealth of phones built on Broadcomm's multimedia processor - the BCM-2727 HD. If you really don't want to google what this really means, here is a hint: processors like this one herald a whole new era for video and 3D graphics on mobile devices.

For me, one of the revelations at this Developer Summit was the Nokia Messaging presentation, even though I hadn't had any high hopes for it prior to the event. But before we get to it, I'll take the liberty and try to cover a handful of things I might have missed in this article up until this point.

The running theme among all Nokia's presentation was the idea that OVI-branded services, and especially mail will be craved for in developing markets, such as India, Brazil, Latin America and Africa. Below are three slides that the second day of the Summit began with - the first one reads that the financial crisis won't last forever and the period of growth that is to come will cover all losses of 2009. The second one features Nokia's assessment of the role of services in sales, and the third one showcases some figures for developing markets.

Now let's get back to the Messaging presentation, which, probably, was one of the few things that made a trip to this year's Summit really worth it - it was electrifying, interesting and at the same time quite deep and informative. It started out as any ordinary presentation, though, where Messaging was dubbed as one of Nokia's five key services.

Why "key"? Nokia came up with a quick answer - it turned out that less than 10 percent of email accounts were mobilized and around 78% of web mail users actually wanted to mobilize their email.

Another slide I really liked in their presentation was a graph showing total time spent on specific activities (in billion minutes per month), however for some reason they opted to remove another vital scale - how much traffic users spent on all these amenities. But the diagram is still great.

According to Nokia, the most prominent barriers to overcome in this field were complex setup process, fear of getting padded bills and fiddly experience in general.

One thing I loved about the presentation is how Nokia managed to needle one of the self-proclaimed technology leaders that had failed to come up with an easy-to-use mail service for its users. Some unlabeled phone (strangely reminiscent of a Sony Ericsson's device) was accompanied by a laundry list of steps one needed to go through in order to setup a Hotmail account - and they really did it step-by-step, with explicit commentaries and screenshots. My tests, however, showed that one could take a few shortcuts and make it 19 steps or 26 steps, but that was beside the point - OVI Mail still offered a much more user-friendly setup routine.

And a traditional slide about sky-rocketing prices, high barriers and things of that nature.

The ultimate goal of Nokia Messaging is to break through all these barriers and offer a wide selection of services to any user, be it OVI Mail access (via device or PC), Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and other services, or Exchange and Domino frameworks.

At the same time OVI Mail is aimed primarily at developing markets, as the next slide claimed, 10 out of top 12 OVI Mail countries were emerging markets. Also, up to 70 percent of new sign-ups were made from mobile phones. And, for example, in Africa this is the only real possibility of getting an email, since the vast majority of the population doesn't have personal computers.

What I was really intrigued by, however, was what Nokia would do on the next stage - whether they would bundle OVI Mail with other services delivered by local carriers, or tie it up with specific tariffs and data plans etc. I didn't manage to squeeze any details out of the company's officials, but I do believe that such announcements will be made in selected countries some time this autumn.

Next slides were all about the service's UI and simplicity of its settings.

This slide, however, was a true gem, depicting the user interface available in the Nokia N97's update, and also a standard part of the S60 5th edition FP2 interface. Probably you have already noticed that all social networks and IM clients are grouped up in the top line, which allows the user to jump between them within seconds. Furthermore, this toolbar is fully customizable, meaning that you'll be able to add as many services as you please, including those that don't even exist today. As of today, other companies are way behind Nokia on this front, except for Apple that are trying to put everything in one package as well.

"Operator Momentum" slide listed all local carriers that agreed to employ Nokia Messaging. However it's possible to use the service even without your carrier's support - effectively, all you need is an active data connection.

But let's get back to Nokia's plans and what'll come tomorrow - all in all, that was the juiciest part of the entire presentation. As of today, Messaging is a separate app, but tomorrow, as Nokia claim it, it'll be a part of contextual messaging functionality across various applications and services. See below for explanations. Another thing of note is that they are going to release APIs for third-party developers, empowering them to develop even more complex applications.

After the feast that the Nokia Messaging presentation was, a couple of slides on Nokia Interactive Advertising didn't seem impressive at all, to put it mildly.

The following bunch of slides revealed where Apple went "wrong" and what types of ad types exist. Nothing mind-blowing, so we moved on.

The presentation on games featured a whole section with various statistics and figures - pretty interesting results there.

What they were getting at, however, was this: "Games are developed for ordinary people, so somehow we need to communicate this idea to them". Nancy's thought process didn't look very convincing, though.

And again, a handful of slides with research summaries.

And the last, but not the least, OVI Store demo for developers (full version of the clip).

Nokia Developer Summit 2009. Recap

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