Mobile development unplugged

MONTE CARLO, MONACO: Picture this. You are driving your car and get an alert that a new voicemail has been received. Your mobile phone, as always, is seated comfortably on the passenger seat. You lean over, and wave (literally) over your phone. If you wave upwards, it goes to your next voice message, if you wave downwards, it goes to the previous one. If you tap on your screen, your mobile device ‘reads out’ your voice message.

Headquartered in Tel-Aviv, Israel, eyeSight Tech uses the back and front cameras of a Nokia handset, and uses complex image algorithms to understand and decipher the motion of your hands and converts them to sensible actions. This demo was the biggest talking point of the keynote at the first ever Nokia Developer Summit, which kicked off today at the Grimaldi Forum, Monte Carlo, Monaco.

The demo was an illustration of how Nokia collaborates with third-party developers to create applications that would reside on Nokia phones, using an open platform as part of the Symbian foundation – an effort to upgrade the Finnish Handset manufacturer into a solution-focused company.

Bringing together 345 developers from around 40 countries, students from 11 countries and select international media, the summit kicked off with the simple mantra of ‘let’s make more money together’!

A developer could have expertise in Carbide, Maemo, Eclipse, Ajax or any popular programming language, and Nokia provides to him, a cross-platform development environment – rather cutely called – Qt.

In his kick-off keynote, Rob Taylor, head of Forum Nokia, also emphasized on the company’s continued commitment to Flash and Java applications.

As a win-win formula to developers, he said, “Nokia is looking forwarding to pre-loading applications on its mobile devices and this is an excellent opportunity for developers. Alternatively, developers can look to featuring their apps in the Ovi Store – Nokia’s online global marketplace for application downloads. The third option, of course, is Service Possibilities where developer companies and Nokia can work together, or with network providers.”

Going a step further and helping developers understand the nature of application that can be built, Tero Ojanpera, executive vice president, Entertainment and Communities, Nokia said, “Maps, music, messaging, games and media – these are the focus areas for development for Nokia – all landing into Ovi. It confederates broadly to people and places – and if you put them under a common umbrella, it is what Nokia called Social Location.

“Users today need the power to integrate the pictures they shoot, the music they listen to, the calls they make – to their online social lives. Today, the Nokia platforms allow widget-integration to the extent that the user does not need to click and open an application. It is ‘live’ on his home screen.”

The two day summit concludes on Wednesday, and along the way, the participants and media get to interact on topics ranging from cross platform development to optimizing Web services for mobile browsers to messaging for the masses.

The Nokia Developer Summit proclaims a startling reality that today the challenge is not to create a killer app. The killer app is the mobile phone itself. The challenge is to use the APIs to make the user experience better and more productive.