Nokia's mobile road map still hard to follow



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May 15, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 2)
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.



Related Search Term(s): Mobile development

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