Five apps on the N8, and a talk at Nokia's conference
Nokia announced the N8 yesterday, so we can finally say it: five of our apps will be preloaded on it in Malaysia. Earlier this month we also spoke at Nokia's conference.
Nokia announced the N8 yesterday, so now we can talk about it. We’ve been building five apps that will come preloaded on the N8 in Malaysia when it goes on sale … TV3 and 8TV catch-up apps for Media Prima, KLTraffic, MY Headlines and Gameneus, our game news reader.
If you missed it, the N8 is Nokia’s new flagship and the first phone on Symbian^3. It has a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and a xenon flash, records HD video, has HDMI out to your TV, and it’s the first Nokia with Qt built in. It’s coming in the third quarter, around EUR 370 before tax, which is about RM1,600 at today’s rate. It’s awesome to have our apps loaded on a phone like that, and potentially used by hundreds of thousands of people.
TV3 and 8TV
The two TV apps are catch-up TV for Media Prima’s channels. You get the most viewed shows, then the episodes for each show, and you can watch them on the phone. TV3 also has today’s TV schedule, and both have Twitter built in, so you can follow the channel, read its tweets and post your own.
KLTraffic, MY Headlines and Gameneus
KLTraffic has a list of the main roads in KL. Pick one and you get the traffic camera pictures for it, with arrows showing which way each side is going, and there’s a #kltraffic tab to read what people are tweeting about the jams, or post your own.
MY Headlines is the Malaysian papers in one app, The Star, the NST, Bernama, The Daily Chilli, Business Times, The Malaysian Insider and Malaysiakini.
Gameneus is daily gaming news from GameSpot, sorted by platform.
Five apps for one phone launch is a lot for us, and the project management side of it is something we’re still learning. There’s one more … an app we designed, which another company built, went out worldwide last week.
Speaking at Nokia’s conference
Last year we went to Nokia’s conference as part of the crowd, One Connected World, and I remember sitting there wondering what it would be like to be up there presenting. Early this month we were invited to speak at their conference, as a Nokia success story, to show other developers that they can work with Nokia too.
I’m not someone who talks much in front of a crowd, so I had jitters, but this wasn’t something to turn down. When you have less to say, you do it with nice PowerPoint slides … I think my slides looked better than what I had to say. The developer crowd here isn’t very responsive, so when you’re up there alone, you’re really alone. Some of the Nokia people thought we did well, which helps. I also got a speaker gift, a leather wallet, a keychain and a pen. The wallet smells nice.
Limkokwing
This afternoon Ow and I drove to Limkokwing to meet two heads of department, an introduction from Nokia, to talk about taking some of their students as interns. We need more hands, and interns are a good way to get them. We came away with more than that … they’ve asked us to coach their students every fortnight starting next semester.
Next Tuesday there’s an MoU signing, and some of the students will be presenting mockups of the apps they plan to build. That’ll show us the quality of their work.