Nokia's mobile road map still hard to follow

By Robert Mullins

May 15, 2008 —

As newly reorganized Nokia introduces developers to its services and software initiative to build applications to run on their phones, key questions persist about how developers will work with the company.

Until the company’s pending acquisition of Trolltech closes, developers cannot be sure which platform road map they should follow, an industry expert said. Among the products in play are software development kits and tools unveiled at last month’s Forum Nokia exhibit Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Back in January, Nokia made a US$150 million offer to acquire Trolltech, best known for its Qt cross-platform development framework, including the Qtopia mobile platform code library. Nokia followed up in March by announcing support for Microsoft’s Silverlight, a cross-platform browser plug-in for Web applications.

Despite Nokia’s nurturing of the Forum Nokia developer community and the Trolltech deal, developers face a confusing array of choices, said Michael Mace, a principal at Rubicon Consulting.

Until Nokia decides, “ ‘Here’s our one platform that everyone should be developing for,’ then developers are still going to have this problem of not knowing which they should be supporting,” said Mace. “It’s really hard for a developer to know where they should be putting their energy.”

The company’s S40 platform is the basis for low-end feature phones, while the S60 is the entry-level smart phone platform. Nokia phones, except for the S40 lines, run on the Symbian operating system, a minor presence in the U.S. market, though widely known globally.

To be sure, he acknowledged, Nokia could tell developers to write in any language or framework, and a middleware layer could enable the application to run. But developers need guidance for that to work properly, he added.

Still, the company’s commitment to building rich mobile applications is clear. In January, Nokia combined three device business groups into one, called Devices and Services, and then created a business unit, Services and Software, to build Internet applications and services to run on its phones.

In addition, Nokia’s Mobilize and Share (MOSH) marketplace for building and deploying mobile applications is expected to go live in June. Since the beta release of MOSH in the summer of 2007, 484,300 widgets have been downloaded from the site; 3,900 software development kit downloads were recorded in March alone, he added.

“That is a great indicator for us that we are getting uptake in this space,” said Eric John, Forum Nokia program director. “The message to developers is, ‘Come talk to us.’ ”

One company already has done so. Plusmo, a mobile widget service provider, has compiled a library of 20,000 widgets and offers a wizard for anybody to publish his or her own. “One advantage to working with Nokia is that the widget runtime environment that Plusmo uses is embedded into the latest version of the S60 platform,” said Plusmo CTO Srinivas Mandyam. Downloading a Plusmo widget to a Windows or BlackBerry device first requires installing a software client application to run it.

Instead, with a Nokia Symbian device, “the widget gets installed directly onto the phone menu. It’s more convenient,” Mandyam said.

But when John was asked whether Qt would become the main platform for creating applications for Nokia phones, he said, “We really can’t talk about a strategy for something that hasn’t happened yet. We’re still investigating how it’s going to work.”

Cross-platform user experience
Company officials have to be guarded about discussing plans until the Trolltech acquisition closes before the end of the second quarter. But Lenn Pryor, Nokia’s vice president of services and software, was somewhat more expansive: “We want to bridge the user experience gap between the PC and the mobile device and the Web. The Qtopia cross-platform library is a very interesting piece of technology” that Nokia hopes will make it easier to “port a user experience across multiple platforms.”

Sometimes-rival, sometimes-partner Sony Ericsson is also supporting a mobile application developer community, announcing in February a collaboration with handset makers, including Nokia and wireless carriers in Europe to develop interoperable rich communications services. On March 25, Sony Ericsson consolidated developer wikis and an online forum into one Sony Ericsson Developer World Community, where visitors can share code samples and development advice.

Even as handset makers grapple with how to grow rich mobile Web applications, Nokia’s developer community would be advised to stick with the company, said Julie Ask, vice president and research director at JupiterResearch. Nokia, for instance, may be just one of many handset makers, but its global market share exceeds 50%.

“If you’re Nokia, one of the things you offer is that ‘We can guarantee your app will work on all of our phones,’ ” Ask said. “They can make this commitment to developers that if they develop the app, it’s going to work on a lot of devices.”

Related Search Term(s): Mobile development

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