Huge potential in mobile apps: Nokia

Last week, in London, Nokia launched its new smartphone series from the Lumina family, 800 and 710, on Windows 7.5 OS (known as Mango) and these phones are to be launched in India before the end of 2011.

“Consumer demand for relevant and creative mobile phone apps is increasing rapidly with more and more users downloading apps,” said Nokia India Managing Director D Shivakumar addressing the developers at the Annual Nokia Developers Conference in City.

“Nokia’s focus is on nurturing a culture of innovation in the mobile app industry and support Indian mobile app developers with world class tools and insights to help them develop rewarding mobile applications for the global mobile market place,” he said.

Themed ‘Nokia Blue-Re-volution’ this years conference, third in a row, saw participation from 800 developers. The conference focused on discovery of the latest developments in the mobile technology sector and highlighted the need for the apps to simplify life, help people connect, communicate and access information in an experiential manner.

 The conference also covered interesting sessions on Symbian platform and Java and Web Apps on S40. Shivakumar assured developers that Nokia is not abandoning Symbian and promised many exciting new handsets in the near future.

Talking about the dominant features for handsets in future from a customer’s point of view, Shivakumar urged that mobile manufacturers must keep in mind that users want to listen to music on their phones so it must have high capacity and battery life, they also want to send email so full Qwerty keyboards are a desired feature.

Since phones have overtaken the computer as the window to the world and it represents our virtual world and life, users want apps that can add value to their usage. Nokia thinks that apps will grow exponentially in India because of 3G & advent of smartphones and also because the entire ecosystem is growing fast to make it happen.