Nokia N8, QT SDK and Ovi App Wizard

For months, I have been complaining about Nokia beeing to slow, while the Apple and the Android world is evolving fast. But it looks like the giant woke up, at least with a wake up call by mobile-review leaking a pre-release N8.
Nokia reacted in a way, which me and many others thought they could not: they moved forward and moved forward fast. They opened the specs and wrote many blog entries on Nokia conversations. They published demo photo shots and also some videos on YouTube. Within hours, the blogsphere has been full of Nokia news. It looks Nokia has learned how marketing in the Web 2.0 works.

But it is not only Nokias marketing, the N8 is a very promising device. It has the largest camera sensor of any camera phone on the market and with 1/1,83'' this sensor is also large for high end compact cameras, matching the high end cameras like the Canon G11, the Panasonic LX3 or the Fuji F200EXR. With the high end still camera and HD video capture, the N8 will definitely be the #1 phone for everybody looking for a camera phone.

But it is not only the camera. The N8 comes with Bluetooth 3.0 and USB on-the-go, giving eg. the possibility to back up the N8 to an external USB drive. With 256 MB Ram in combination with the memory efficient Symbian^3 and the 680 MHz ARM CPU, the N8 will probably will be a speedy phone.

And Nokia fixed a big problem, although Steve Ballmer told it the world some time ago. It is about "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers, yeah, Developers, Developers...". Nokia Released the Qt SDK beta. In the past, it could take you a weekend to figure out all the components needed to create a S60 5th Ed. app and how to get everything set up. One thing that probably make app development for the iPhone popular is the availability of an easy to use SDK. Now with Qt SDK, Nokia seems to be on the same level. A one click installer and I had my "Hello world!" example build and run in the N97 emulator in less than 5 minutes without looking into any documentation. Well done, Nokia!

And for everybody tho whom C++ development is too complicated, Nokia also released the Ovi App Wizard beta. This is a web based development framework to built your own app based on your RSS feed and release it to Ovi Store. This surely will lead to a huge amount of read-my-RSS-feed apps, but at least it is an idea to make the Ovi Store more popular.

The giant woke up, finally. And this is not the work of an old industry giant, this is more the behaviour of a young and hungry start up. Now it is important that Nokia will keep this level of output, be it products or communication. If this is not a one hit wonder, Nokia will be in a good position for competing with Apple and the Androids. Hopefully ...