Nokia Developer News

This week at Mobile World Congress we announced the arrival of the world’s greatest camera smartphone, the Nokia 808 PureView.

The Nokia 808 PureView is a revolution in mobile imaging technology, delivering imaging capabilities previously unavailable in a smartphone. Its incredible images and full HD video come from Nokia’s innovative PureView imaging technology, Carl Zeiss optics, xenon flash, and an unprecedented 41 megapixel sensor.

Starting up in under a second — even from lock — the camera uses an unprecedented 41MP sensor combined with Carl Zeiss optics and a xenon flash to deliver outstanding images in almost every shooting situation. Nokia PureView imaging technology can distil 7 pixels into 1 for stunningly sharp and clear 5 MP photos that are easy to share. Discover the details of Nokia PureView technology (whitepaper)

The phone also offers 3x loss-less slide zoom, with no loss of image quality, and all the shareability you expect in a premium smartphone.. The Nokia 808 PureView goes beyond the still image, with 1080p full HD video recording at 30 fps with 4x slide zoom — without loss of image quality.

The image quality is only half the video story. For the first time in a smartphone, the Nokia 808 PureView utilizes Nokia Rich Recording: Offering pure crystal clear, distortion-free audio at levels of up to 140 dB by combining a unique digital microphone with advanced Nokia algorithms.

Qt and the Nokia 808 PureView

Qt is the way for you to create apps that harness the revolutionary abilities of the Nokia 808 PureView. The smartphone has the latest Qt APIs built in, including: Qt 4.7.4 with Qt Mobility 1.2.1, and Qt Quick Components 1.1, making it a perfect device for your latest Qt and Qt Quick-based apps.

To access the remarkable imaging and audio capabilities of the device, you will take advantage of the Qt Mobility multimedia APIs. Using these APIs, your app can connect to the phone’s camera as well as its other sensors. You also get a range of features to manipulate the content from the camera, including control over auto focus. Now you can easily bring the outstanding quality of PureView and Nokia Rich Recording to the images, video, and audio content captured by your apps.

See how both National Geographic and Pikchur used Qt to bring their apps to Nokia 808 PureView.  What you do next is entirely up to you.

Using the Qt Mobility APIs, you can unlock the potential of NFC, sensors, and almost every part of the phone your apps will need.

• Learn more about the Nokia 808 PureView

• View the Nokia 808 PureView device specifications

• New to Qt? Check our Getting started with Qt guide

We are proud to present a great new target for your Windows Phone apps - the Nokia Lumia 610 - announced at Mobile World Congress yesterday.

Aimed at young people who want an affordable introduction to Lumia and Windows Phone, the Nokia Lumia 610 provides easy access to social networks, web browsing, music, games, navigation and tens of thousands of apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace. It comes in four vibrant colors and will cost just EUR 189, before taxes or subsidies, and is expected to begin shipping in the second quarter of 2012.

The fourth Nokia Lumia means more opportunity to developers, particularly given its barrier-breaking price point.  Its distinctive profile and finely beveled metallic edges are built to convey quality and aspiration.

It offers a 3.7” TFT LCD display, with the same 800 x 480 pixel (WVGA) resolution found across the Lumia range and a 5MP camera wrapped in the iconic industrial design for which Lumia is becoming renowned.

It also offers A-GPS and an enhanced Adreno 200 GPU, to deliver the rich Windows Phone and apps experience to more consumers.The key to the Nokia Lumia 610 delivering Windows Phone to new places and new people is a new software release from Microsoft that delivers enhanced capabilities to the Windows Phone 7.5 platform.  The software release, available from April, optimises Windows Phone to support lower memory and processor requirements, while still delivering the same great experience for more affordable products.

The Nokia Lumia 610 features an 880 MHz QC MSM7227A processor and 256 Mb of RAM. This baseline spec, combined with other smart component choices, significantly reduces the cost of the Nokia Lumia 610 without compromising consumer experience.

Nokia Lumia 610 specs

More tools
To help you prepare your apps for the Nokia Lumia 610, there is a technical preview available of an SDK update to the Windows Phone SDK . This update gives you access to the 256Mb emulator to let you determine how your apps run and install on lower memory devices. Note that the preview does not include a 'go live' license, so you can not publish apps created with it. A final version of the SDK, with 'go live' licence, is expected next month.

Learn more about the development tools, including the technical preview of the updated Windows Phone SDK

Best practices for 256MB
The Nokia Lumia 610 will offer users the same rich Windows Phone experience found across the Nokia Lumia range, but it does so using less memory – which does mean less memory available to your apps. To help, our Principal Engineer Windows Phone Justin Angel has prepared some best practice guidelines for delivering apps to 256MB Windows Phones. 

More markets, more marketplace
As the Nokia Lumia 610 will bring the amazing Windows Phone experience to new markets and people, you won’t be surprised to learn that the Windows Phone Marketplace is also expanding. Five new countries — Argentina, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, and the Philippines — have been added already and many more will follow during the rest of 2012. With more markets, more currencies, and more languages supported your Nokia Lumia opportunity in 2012 will be greater than ever.
Get the tools for developing Nokia Lumia apps

Video - how to build a top Windows Phone app 

Code examples

The Grand Prize winners of Nokia’s 2011 Create for Millions developer contest were featured at a special awards ceremony held today during the Nokia Developer Day at Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Spain.

This global developer contest received more than 1,200 total submissions, resulting in the same number of new apps published to Nokia Store for use on Nokia Series 40 phones, including the new Asha line. The contest supported Nokia’s strategy by identifying locally relevant content, and served to showcase Nokia’s Series 40 developer offering around both Java and web apps.

Here are the top three winning apps in each of the contest categories:
 
Access to Knowledge:
1. Baby Write Number by Mico Wendy, Indonesia
2. myQR.Card by Damian Dominiak, Poland    
3. YouTube Teletext by David Bello, Colombia

Emotional Closeness:
1. I'm Feeling..! by Mohammed Diab, Egypt            
2. Soundtracker Radio, by Daniele Calabrese, United States
3. qeep, by Stefanie Merten, Germany    

Fun and Games:
1. Sushi Loop by Kosti Rytkönen, Finland    
2. Sandbox by Alexander Fürgut, Germany        
3. Crash Test Dummies 2 by Ledicia Perez, United Kingdom

In the Know:
1. AroundMe by James Mwai, Kenya    
2. HeatMap by David Bello, Colombia
3. TransJakarta S40 by Kemas Dimas Ramanditya, Indonesia

The top 10 winning apps in all four categories will receive cash prizes from Nokia (in those categories with tie results, all winners will receive cash prizes, too). For each of the four contest categories, there is a top prize of 50,000 euros in each category. The winning apps will be promoted globally in various Nokia-owned channels including: online, social media, newsletters and more. The top app in each of the four categories will also receive a free user experience (UX) consultation from Nokia; and support from a top design agency to create Spotlight banners featuring the winning apps.

Special prizes were awarded to apps showcasing the best touch feature; the best location-aware app; and the best overall Series 40 web app. Those winners are as follows:

• Best Series 40 Location-based App: Locago, submitted by Patric Nordström from Sweden.
• Best Series 40 Touch-based App: Sandbox, submitted by Alexander Fürgut from Germany.     
• Best Series 40 Web App (Tie - prize money will be split): AroundMe by James Mwai from Kenya; and HeatMap by David Bello from Colombia.

Additionally, there were 10 regional contests held at the same time as the global contest. Details about regional contest winners will be available soon.

Apps were submitted by developers from 61 countries around the world. The majority of the submissions came from the APAC region (61%), followed by EMEA (33%) and the Americas (6%). Here are the top 10 countries for contest submissions:

• India = 353 apps
• Indonesia = 149 apps
• Kenya = 70 apps
• Vietnam = 56 apps
• Germany = 54 apps
• Philippines = 47 apps
• Denmark = 47 apps
• Malaysia = 46 apps
• Singapore = 37 apps
• Brazil = 34 apps

These results point strongly to Nokia’s strategy to identify locally relevant content for use by consumers.

It is also worth noting that Nokia Series 40 phones now account for more than 30 per cent of overall downloads from Nokia Store, and with improved business model support for In-App Purchases and In-App Advertising, the opportunity for developers continues to grow.   

Nokia congratulates all of the contest winners, and thanks all of the developers who made Create for Millions such a tremendous success.

We want to show off your Windows Phone app at SXSW.  If you have a unique, cool, or downright amazing app – and are headed to SXSW – you could land a chance to demo it inside the Nokia Lab, a one-of-a-kind, free-standing structure Nokia will erect near the convention center for SXSW Interactive.

It’s simple to take part. Just tell us about your Windows Phone app, and you may get to show it off to hundreds of people during Nokia’s Developer Day at SXSW on 12 March 2012 at your own demo station inside the Nokia Lab.

Visitors to the Nokia Lab at SXSW will experience Nokia’s newest Windows Phone devices, including the Nokia Lumia 900, as well as getting a first-hand experience with your app. The app demos inside the Nokia Lab will run from 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. that day. Up to 10 apps will be selected for this special opportunity.

Here’s what you need to do to have your app considered for a spot in the exclusive demo section at Nokia’s Developer Day:

- Have an app that works on a Nokia Lumia Windows Phone device
- Send the following brief details via e-mail to nokiadeveloper@thelucidway.com:

* Your name, company and contact information (include email and phone)
* A link to your app in Windows Phone Marketplace, or link to the private beta of your app in Windows Phone Marketplace
* A brief description and any screenshots of your app
* Why your app is amazing, cool, or unique

That’s it.

We will contact all developers who are chosen to participate.  

The Windows Phone Marketplace currently has nearly 65,000 apps and publishes about 300 apps every day. Come build an experience – not just another app – and bring smartphones to life for brands and consumers. Come be amazing everyday with Nokia Developer.

See you at SXSW. Ready.Set {Code}.

Congratulations to Jack Franklin, Neil Lock, and Adam North, winners of free tickets to the jQuery conference in Oxford, UK courtesy Nokia Developer. This was the first ever European conference dedicated to the popular jQuery JavaScript library, and judging by the quality of the conference and the enthusiasm of the attendees, it's not likely to be the last. Nokia Developer was proud to be the spotlight sponsor at the event.

Jack Franklin at jQuery UK

Neil Lock at jQuery UK

Adam North at jQuery UK

If you did not get a chance to attend the sold-out conference, check out Jack’s notes which he published 'On Github, in Markdown, like a proper geek should, live blogged by committing & pushing changes to Github.'  

He notes that coming in jQuery mobile v1.1 ( available for testing now) you will be able to set data-enhance="false" or data-ajax="false" attributes to tell jQuery mobile to keep its hands off your DOM.

The Nokia Lumia rollout is giving developers and smartphone fans everywhere what our marketing folk call ‘the amazing everyday’.

But it’s not EVERY day you get over 800 developers converging for a 24 hour Nokia Lumia code-fest in the Record Museum of Indonesia. The largest developer collaboration ever staged in Indonesia (according to the Record Museum), the day resulted in 173 locally relevant apps for Nokia Lumia being created and submitted for publishing.

The developers of eight of the apps were awarded new Nokia Lumia 800 smartphones by the judging panel.

The event included the launch of some landmark local applications such as Kompas TV, an on-demand mobile streaming app delivered by Indonesia’s  biggest media network.

The Nokia Lumia 710 and Nokia Lumia 800 are now available for pre-order in Indonesia, and both phones will ship pre-loaded with locally sourced and focussed apps such as Movreak, PlaneTix and Daily Social. The creators of these apps were at the event, and shared stories about their success building applications for Nokia Lumia.

On top of this, Nokia Developer Champions including Firstman Marpaung, Erick Kurniawan, and Andri Yadi took to the stage to show detail on the code behind their own Windows Phone apps.

The event was an amazing start to the Nokia Lumia journey in Indonesia, and the feedback at the show and in social media showed that it captured the imagination of the local developer community.

Congratulations and thanks to everyone who participated in this record breaking event.

The final version of the Nokia SDK 1.1 for Java is now available. This SDK allows you to incorporate In-App Purchasing into apps for phones running Java Runtime 1.1.0 for Series 40, such as the Nokia Asha 303. The SDK features a new emulator based on this phone.

To support development with the In-App Purchase APIs, the emulator has a new version of the in-app purchase simulation tool. This tool lets you define purchase items for use in testing. The testing can then be performed against a production simulation server or locally. 

The simulated purchase items include features to define product and purchase details, including success and failure scenarios for both. In addition, you can define and test purchase items that you will allow a user to restore to their phone. Handling for DRM protected content is also included. These updated features now enable you to run a full set of in-app purchase test cases in the emulator and ensure an optimal in-app purchase experience.

Apps you build today using the Nokia SDK 1.1 for Java and In-App Purchase APIs can be submitted to Nokia Store, but be aware that the In-App Purchasing infrastructure is still in beta.

For more information on In-App Purchasing, and the other new business models you can use in apps for Series 40 phones, jump over to the dedicated revenue models page.

While In-App purchasing is a key feature of this release, it not the only new feature offered in the SDK. A significant number of new switches and settings have been added to the emulator, which will help you test more comprehensively on your PC. You will now, for example, be able to simulate the battery level, set operator details, and preview landscape video.

Of course, the SDK also includes all those great features introduced with Java Runtime 1.0, such as those for enhancing the UX on touch screen phones with the Frame Animator and Gesture APIs. Don’t forget you have great features to add location awareness to your apps too.

These and other new features are highlighted in a video hosted by Mike Arvela of Futurice, which you can watch here

The SDK is available in both online and offline versions, which you can download here.

Nokia is on tour with Mobile Monday Americas, and we want to meet you. We are bringing our developer program, apps, smartphones and experts to your U.S. city. Get exclusive, hands-on time with Nokia’s latest Windows Phones – the Nokia Lumia range. You will hear about plans for the U.S. market, and learn about Nokia’s continuing commitment to mobile apps and developers, including seeding thousands of new phones to developers, along with access to the best tools, support and training.

“We want developers to unleash their creative forces and build an experience – not just an app – to bring smartphones to life for brands and consumers,” said Chanse Arrington, Nokia’s Head of Developer Marketing, North America.

As the winner of the Best Smartphone of CES with the forthcoming Nokia Lumia 900 for AT&T, Nokia is back in the smartphone business and investing heavily in the U.S. market. With our new phones, carrier partners, and the WP7 platform, Nokia has opened vast new opportunities for developers.

Come see us in your city and bring your questions, suggestions, and app ideas. Here’s where you will find the Nokia Developer Mobile Monday Americas over next few months:

- Chicago: March 19
- New York City: March 26
- Silicon Valley: April 16
- Boston: April 23
- Austin: April 30

We look forward to seeing you at one of these exciting Mobile Monday events, and we will update this calendar as more events are scheduled.

If you have a great idea for an app that plays with images in fun and useful ways, there's a hackathon coming up that is built for you. Our good friends at Aviary are hosting the Photo Hack Day 2 in New York City 25-26 February, and we’re excited to be the headline sponsor. Aviary is the company behind the incredibly powerful but simple photo editor which can be embedded in any web or mobile app for a beautiful, seamless editing experience wherever you are. If you can join us in New York, you'll be among the first developers to use a pre-release version of the new Aviary SDK for Windows Phone 7.

Almost all the ingredients for some great hacks await you in New York.

• Our award-winning Nokia Windows Phone 7 smartphones, like the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Nokia Lumia 900 which won 13 awards at the International Consumer Electronics Show last month, feature Carl Zeiss optics to produce some of the best photo and video images.
• The Aviary APIs allow you to build world-class image editing right into the experience of your mobile app.
• The Aviary SDK for Windows Phone 7 makes its preview at the hack day, bringing the power of the Aviary APIs to the productivity of Visual Studio.

The combination of this SDK, the great user experience that Windows Phone 7 OS provides and the best in class hardware from Nokia should result in some amazing apps. All that's missing is you, your skills, and your creativity. We’re looking to you to hack together some kick-ass apps that make your friends and family go “wow”!  We’ll provide Nokia Lumia 800 smartphones as prizes to the top two teams who create Windows Phone 7 apps using the Aviary SDK for Windows Phone 7.

The hacking is happening at General Assembly, a great location for hosting events in New York City.  Bill Perry from Nokia and an expert team from Microsoft will be there to answer questions about Nokia’s latest smartphones, imaging, and designing apps using the Metro UI.

Need inspiration? How about these starter ideas:

• Integrate device sensors with the APIs to manipulate photos and create unique images.
• Create a game where players manipulate a shared image.
• Give a pic special meaning by adding signposts, weather effects, or something else derived from the time and place where the user snapped it.

If you need more inspiration, take a look at the other great APIs with expert support at the event. We look forward to seeing what you hack together during this 24 hour event.

• It’s free to participate, so make sure you register on the Photo Hack Day 2 site.

How would you like a fast, easy, and free way to create online advertising banners for your app that you can use on the Windows Phone Marketplace and Nokia Store? Nokia’s updated Online Marketing Tool can do just that.

To create your own professional-looking online advertising banners, all you do is provide your app’s URL in either the Nokia Store or Windows Phone Marketplace, and then the online tool will take you through the remaining steps, including auto-filling in details like the app name, category and price.

You will have the opportunity to select from several options to customize the look of your banners, including banner size, application icon, compatible phones (including the new Nokia Asha and Nokia Lumia series), copy text and screenshots. Then the Online Marketing Tool does the rest. It first displays a preview of your banner. Then, once you’re ready, the tool quickly creates your banners for easy downloading and can produce banners in standard formats and sizes for placement on the web or mobile.

Also, because the Online Marketing Tool supports applications from around the globe, it also supports multiple language variations.

It is also worth noting that you can use the Online Marketing Tool to update your older Ovi-branded banners. As you are probably aware, Nokia no longer supports the old Ovi Store brand; instead, the company now supports the Nokia Store brand. So if your advertising banners still read ‘Ovi Store’, now is the time to use the Online Marketing Tool to update your banners.

Start creating -- and updating -- your own online advertising banners to promote your apps now.

Your creative use of Qt Quick components could win a nice new smartphone, get your app promoted, and have your skills noticed by the community. We are looking for the best examples of Qt Quick components for Symbian Belle with our new Qt Quick components competition.

Qt Quick components fast-forward your UI creation by providing ready-made elements like buttons, sliders, lists and toolbars. The components have native UI style for Symbian Belle (or other targets like MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan), and allow you to spend more time working on the UI elements that matter most.

If your Belle app shows nice use of Qt Quick components you could win.

To enter, you need an application that uses Symbian Qt Quick Components. It should demonstrate UI design flair and style while remaining faithful to the core Symbian platform style (as captured by the design and iconography guidelines). You are free to mix standard and custom components, and winning entries will demonstrate innovative approaches to branding and other design elements.

To make sure we understand the true elegance of your work, write a wiki article that points out the key elements of your application design. The article should also point to a binary version of your app so we can install it and be amazed.

• For more details and to enter, see Symbian Qt Quick Components Competition 2012Q1