A break, of sorts

We went to Nokia One Connected World at KL Sentral, thought we could do better than the apps they showed, and sent them one. A few months on we're in Forum Nokia Pro and just shipped two Christmas preloads for SingTel.

It’s been a crazy few months, so this is long overdue. Ow and I started Nerd Attack on 18 March this year, the two of us, to make apps for phones. Just before that I’d entered Nokia’s N97 widget design contest, and the blog I put my designs on still gets visitors looking for the Birthday Reminder.

KL Sentral

Then on 15 September Nokia held One Connected World at the Hilton at KL Sentral. Vlasta Berka, Nokia’s GM for Singapore, Malaysia and Brunei, opened on their “ecosystem”, they talked about how the Ovi Store is doing, and launched the N97 mini, the X3 and the X6. They also showed off apps from developers, mostly from Singapore … two food guides for Singapore and KL, a Flash Lite game and a credit card terminal for S60 phones, and they asked developers here to send in their own ideas. Looking at what they showed, I was pretty confident Ow and I could do a better job. So after the event we spent a week on KLTraffic, an app with the traffic cameras around KL, and sent it over to Nokia to show them what we could do with their phones.

We didn’t expect much back. Instead they replied, and invited us into Forum Nokia Pro. You can’t apply for it, they invite you. It means we get prototype phones to develop on, sent by courier from Finland, and we send them back when we’re done.

The first jobs

The first job was design only. Nokia already had a developer building the app, and we came in to design it.

A few weeks later Nokia asked if we could come to Singapore for a meeting with them and SingTel, with 24 hours’ notice. We flew down the next day and flew back the same night … never again. The meeting went well, and we came home with two apps for SingTel’s Christmas promotion, both preloaded on Nokia phones.

One is IS Mobile, an urban lifestyle guide for IS Singapore, with nightlife, music, theatre and dance, art and sports.

The other is Makansutra, the Singapore food guide … die die must try. Funny enough, it’s a food guide, like two of the apps at One Connected World. Our Picks, listings by dish, offers, Makansutra TV, places around you, and you can shake the phone to get a random listing.

We had two weeks to do both, and it was close to 18 hours a day. We sent them in, there were bugs to fix (there always are), and they were happy with them. Three days later they asked for a version for keypad phones.