Nokia announces S60 challenge winners

The platform formally known as Series 60

Posted in Mobile, 17th October 2006 16:18 GMT

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Nokia has announced the winners of its annual developer's challenge competition.

Only open to applications running on version 3 of S60, the challenge does carry €25K prizes for the four winners as well as a year’s free membership of Forum Nokia Pro and marketing assistance.

In the Enterprise Applications QuickOffice won for its Premier suite of applications which can read and write files from Microsoft Office (though not change the order of PowerPoint sides for some reason). We prefer OfficeSuite as it underlines our spelling mistakes in red, even though it makes no attempt to work with PowerPoint.

The Best Flash category looked entertaining until it became clear that it was for the best application written in Macromedia Flash, not the flashiest one. It was won by Foreca for its Nordic weather service.

Best Mobile Music application was won by InfoTalk’s Music Finder: a voice-driven music browsing application. We would have gone for OggPlay; a free application for playing back files in Ogg format, but we’ve not had a chance to try out Music Finder so it’s hard to be sure.

Best Location-Aware Application went to Augmentra for its ViewRanger handheld mapping application which shows OS maps, links to GPS and even does Panoramic Viewpoints: a 3D view of what you can see on the horizon from your current location, or what you could see if the mist wasn't in the way.

Even more interesting than the winners is the choice of categories: Enterprise, Flash, Music and Location. No Best Consumer application, or Best Game, as Symbian and S60 already dominate in those areas, the inclusion of Flash is easily linked to Adobe's sponsorship of the competition. There is also a clear impetus towards version 3 of S60, with developers discouraged from creating applications for older versions of the OS®.

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