Four positives from the Screen Yorkshire Nokia Ovi event
With general opinion being that Apple [iPhone] has the mobile market wrapped up and that Google [Android] might, if they’re lucky, come in a distant second, it was with some interest that I attended the Nokia Ovi event on Tuesday night in Leeds. It’s widely recognised that Nokia are on the back foot at the moment, slipping [rapidly?] both in terms of market share and consumer appeal. However, from a developer perspective, four positive things things struck me about Ovi by Nokia:
- Due to leveraging the web and Flash technologies that Nokia have been trying hard to integrate into all their handsets for some time, Ovi offers a speed of development for ‘low level’ apps that isn’t currently as easy on iPhone/Android. Whilst both those platforms also offer ‘packaged web applications’ as an alternative to full software development, neither is yet as feature rich as the Ovi options.
- Ovi is available on Nokia Series 40 as well as Series 60 phones. What this means is that Nokia Ovi enables developers to reach the mass middle market phones rather than just the high-end smartphones. Naturally, this position will change quite rapidly, with cut-down iPhone/Android devices always being rumoured and with ‘mid-range’ users rapidly migrating upgrading to ‘high-end’ year on year anyway.
- Nokia were keen to stress that they really really want to help us [to help them]. It would be too bold to suggest they were ‘desperate’ to help, but there did seem a genuine acknowledgement that to make Ovi anywhere near as successful as the Apple App Store, Nokia would have to leverage their massive existing developer community by making themselves genuinely available, so that things get moving before it’s too late.
- And lastly, I was inspired to feel that they are still, after all, Nokia. It seems crazy to hear so frequently how Nokia are “down and out”, despite being a company that have understood and dominated mobile for so long. They certainly do have a battle on their hands, but being in the same space as the handful of guys representing Ovi certainly demonstrated that their absolute core business is mobile. Whether that’s enough, only time will tell.
Anyway, we’ll let you know how we get on but you can expect us to be visible on Ovi some time in the near future.
