Nokia invites developers to take on Series 60

By Alun Williams

Posted on 12 Nov 2002 at 11:34

Nokia opens a competition for developers to build Series 60 applications.

Series 60 is the widely adopted platform for powerful mobile phones. Nokia is now encouraging developers to improve on the applications that are available on the handsets.

The competition is open to European, African and Asian entrants and applications can be Java based or feature the capabilities of the Symbian OS, which underlies Nokia's Series 60 platform.

There are three categories for judging applications - Messaging, Productivity and Entertainment - and there will be three winners in each category. Prizes include a Nokia 3650 phone, free Nokia support services and the demoing of the applications on Nokia stands at European or Asian trade shows.

For those developers among you itching to take up the coding challenge, further info can be found at forum.Nokia.com/series60contest/. You can read case stories of previous winners here.

The closing date for the competition is 6 January 2003 with the winners being announced in February. Entrants will be judged on 'innovation, quality and usability' by a jury made up of representative of Nokia and various Series 60 licensees, such as Siemens.

Programming systems supporting J2ME (the Micro Edition of Java 2) - such as the recently released JBuilder 8 - will support the development of device-based applications.

Back in March Nokia ran a similar competition, only specifically for Java-based apps (Nokia hails winning Java applications). Winning applications included a clearBUGS program (for reporting back to base by engineers out in the field) and Popstar, which allows you to manage the career of your very own virtual pop star.