Nokia Connection 2011

30 Jun 2011Career5 min read

Back from Nokia Connection in Singapore. The N9 is MeeGo, Windows Phone is still the plan, and we're a Qt shop standing in the middle of it.

June’s almost over and I haven’t written a thing about Singapore. Nokia Connection was inside CommunicAsia this year, and for the first time it was at Marina Bay Sands, the hotel that looks like an intergalactic spaceship. Same as last year, Nokia gave us a booth in their showcase … so for four days it was Sophie Cam on our screen.

A blue Nokia Connection 2011 sign reading Unveiling the Next Chapter, with the conference on June 21 in the Hibiscus Room, Level 3, and the showcase on June 21 to 24 at BR4-01, Hall F, Basement 2 — Nokia Connection 2011, Marina Bay Sands.

“The start of something new”

Elop opened the conference on the 21st and said today is the start of something new for Nokia. Then he showed the N9, and it runs MeeGo, which is not what most people were expecting.

Back in February Nokia told everyone it’s going with Windows Phone, and a lot of developers took it badly. In the same keynote Elop said Windows Phone is still the main plan and the first one comes out later this year. So the N9 is MeeGo, the future is Windows Phone, and Symbian gets up to ten more phones over the next year, the Anna update for the N8, and support until 2016.

The N9 is a breath of fresh air. It feels nice to hold, one piece of polycarbonate with curved glass on the front, and MeeGo runs smooth. There’s no home button at all, you swipe in from the edge of the screen to go home. Nokia’s head of design said the design and the focus on Qt will carry on into their future phones.

A pink Nokia N9 held in one hand, its screen showing the MeeGo app grid with Phone, Contacts, Search, Web, Messages, Mail, Calendar, Clock, Camera, Gallery, Music, Videos, Maps, Drive, Ovi Music, Store, Accounts, Facebook, Twitter and Settings — Hands on with the N9.

There’s also a developer version, the N950. Same MeeGo inside, but it’s bigger, made of aluminium, and has a slide-out keyboard. It’s not for sale, Nokia is giving them out to developers so there are apps ready before the N9 comes out.

A dark grey Nokia N950 held in one hand with its QWERTY keyboard slid out under the screen — The Nokia N950. Photo: rsuplido, CC BY 2.0.

Not for sale. Photo: rsuplido, CC BY 2.0.

A man in a white polo shirt and a developer lanyard pointing at a Nokia Connection 2011 Conference sign with a big arrow — Outside the conference, 21 June.

Where that leaves us

Sophie Cam is built with Qt and runs on Symbian, and the N9 runs Qt apps, so the N9 is the obvious next stop for it. Windows Phone doesn’t run Qt at all, so going there means building the app again from scratch. I had a Windows Phone myself for about a month earlier this year, and swapped it for an Android phone because it kept rebooting.

That’s why Sophie Cam was on our booth. Nokia wants more developers building with Qt, and Sophie Cam was there to show what you can make with it.

Oh, and Forum Nokia is now called Nokia Developer, with a new site at developer.nokia.com.

Three Nerd Attack staff in white Nokia Connection polo shirts at the booth, under a sign reading nerd attack! NOKIA, with a Powered by Qt slide on the screen behind them — At the Nerd Attack booth.

The neighbours

Scalado had the booth right next to ours. They’re a Swedish company that does the imaging software inside a lot of phone cameras, the stuff you never see. One of them showed us a demo on an iPad … a photo that you keep zooming into, hundreds of times, and things that were far away in the shot are still sharp when you get there, which had us quite amazed.

Three people at the Nerd Attack booth, with the Sophie Cam slideshow on the screen behind them and the Scalado booth sign on the right — Our booth, with Scalado next door.

Angry Birds is everywhere this month. They had a stand near us at the showcase, and back home Nokia Malaysia set a Guinness record in KL on the 11th, 2,030 people in one Angry Birds relay. Then we ended up on a panel with Rovio in KL as well.

The Angry Birds stand.

Six people standing together after the panel, Ville from Rovio in the middle holding a red Angry Birds plush toy — Ville the Bird Whisperer from Rovio, after the panel in KL, June 2011, with our two interns.