LONDON – Mobile phone giant Nokia announced last week that it would introduce major steps to improve its developer tools in line with a host of new and improved smartphones in order to regain a foothold in the mobile phone market.
The mobile firm held its annual Nokia World event in conjunction with its developer summit in London where it announced a new and improved approach to catch up with other mobile phone brands such as Apple and Blackberry which have managed to dominate the smartphone market.
Last year Nokia shipped over 364 million phones while selling around 260,000 smartphones daily which is higher than any other mobile phone provider but the company concedes that it hasn’t been as competitive as it should be over the last few years.Purnima Kochikar, Vice President of Forum Nokia & Developer Community said that Nokia is making it simpler and more lucrative for developers to create applications for Nokia phone users in over 190 countries who use the Nokia application store ‘Ovi store’.
“Our announcements will certainly bring more great apps(applications) to Nokia products, especially our new family of Symbian smartphones,” she said while adding that Nokia plan to ship over 50 million new smartphones soon.
They also announced that some of the improvements made will include enhancements to the Nokia Qt software development kit which will result in a 70% reduction in the number of lines of code required when developing for Symbian smartphones while the Ovi Store will also be improved with a new look making it faster and easier to find applications.
Developers are able to distribute their applications to around 175 million people who use Nokia symbian phones and the mobile company has revealed that it has already taken steps to increase that number through providing affordable phones.
Speaking to the Business Times on the sidelines of the conference, Mary McDowell, Executive Vice President of the Mobile Phone Unit at Nokia said that affordability was of great concern to Nokia especially when dealing with markets in the region of Emerging Asia under which Sri Lanka along with Bangladesh and Nepal fall.
“We have to look carefully into functionality as well as expanding our services in these regions while promoting local apps,” she said.
Nokia will look to an open innovation approach to cope with the fast growing market while cultivating local innovations as part of its plan to sell locally and not globally in emerging markets such as Sri Lanka.
This approach has been a success in countries such as India where Bollywood related applications developed locally have been in high demand by a large portion of Nokia users. “At Nokia we have decided to change our development techniques into more agile ones which have proven to be more user oriented and user friendly,” McDowell said.
She also added that Android technology which has provided tough competition to the Symbian market will not be explored by Nokia developers because they believe that Symbian technology offers more to developers and users.
Niklas Savander, Executive Vice President of Markets said that despite new competition, Symbian remains the most widely used smartphone platform in the world.
“Our new family of smartphones introduced today feature the all-new Symbian OS, rewritten to be faster, easier to use, more efficient and more developer friendly,” he said.
Among the phones introduced by Nokia at the event were the Nokia E7, C7 and C6 which joined Nokia’s Symbian line along with the previously announced N8. The star of the show, the Nokia N8, is solely built for entertainment purposes and was on show at the event where developers and journalists got their first look at the phone which Nokia hails as the ultimate entertainment smartphone and the world's best cameraphone, boasting a 12 megapixel camera.
It remains unclear as to whether or not Nokia will regain its previous position as the front runner in this market alongside the likes of its competitors but it was the general consensus of those who attended their world event that Nokia were stepping in the right direction with the release of a line of smartphones that seemed far easier to operate than any of its previous products. |
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