Q: What's an iPhone developer doing at the Nokia Developers Briefing?

A: Learning :)

And it was quite an interesting experience too. Not going to go into platform debates -- won't work here. But I did observe some really interesting points to learn:

  • Make display booths really, really nice: Each booth had at least 1 LCD TV, showing demos and videos. The main booths were extravagant affairs, with eye-candy models, full color printed booth setups. They really spent on it.
  • Videos - use them! Every Nokia app on demo had videos. Not just product demo videos, but more lifestyle advertising videos. They also had nice "statistics & facts" videos. Simple, just words and illustrations, but the message got across well.
  • Phone -> TV-out for live demos. I *need* to get a video out cable for the iPhone.

Of course, there were briefing sessions too. Learnt a thing or two there. It's really interesting that Nokia is well aware of the inherent problems of their platform (proprietary software OS -- aka poor API?, product fragmentation, unfamiliar tools). They're working to overcome it. In the mean time, I really appreciate developing on the iPhone OS. It's simpler.

Bonus: @roslanbz gave a talk on funding. Rather, on the potential of mobile apps. Thought the slides really stood out.

What made it really worth the time though, were the people I got to meet. Read somewhere that we should never leave a room full of people until meeting someone new. Totally agree with that. It is a great time to be a developer, entrepreneur and Malaysian.