Nokia is known to be the best phone maker when it comes to mid-range devices and stand in top smartphone producers. The company with around 130,000 employees in 120 countries is renowned for manufacturing devices related to communications. Of course, there’s a lot to write about this company but tonight, we have something else to share with you guys.

The mobile giant has a lot of care for the people who are contributing to its platform especially developers. Nokia Developers have got a very vast domain. There are varieties of developers who are working on themes design and their development where as some are busy in creating the coolest apps while others are focusing on games and so on.
Nokia’s engineers, trainers and ecosystem managers are smartly managing workshops, training and meet-up around the globe to bring up the boom in Mobile Industry.

Today, Nokia managed the Developer Workshop in Karachi (Pakistan) and we had a chance to attend that. So in this post, we will try to recap the important part of today’s workshop so that you guys can also update yourself regarding a bunch of stuff.

It started off with the informative analysis of Rabia Azfar Nizami, Business Development Manager EDX (Near East) from Nokia. She mentioned that Nokia enjoys 70% of the current market share of Mobile Industry in Pakistan. Nokia is working to bring up Carrier Billing in Pakistan by the end of 2012, she told. We reckon that this will be time when Nokia Lumia is going to be launched in Pakistan.

Rabia A. Nizami also told the audience that S40 (supposedly the Next Billion) has the largest installed base in Pakistan followed by S60. Developers should concentrate more on targeting these platforms as they will not only give them a chance to make their apps famous but will also allow them to monetize the apps in a smart way. These days, try & buy strategy of apps are a way better than directly buy. So developers should also notice this point and incorporate the appropriate techniques to achieve it.

Later on, she also uncovered the trends of how many and what types of apps have been downloading from our country. There were around 5.9 million downloads last month in Pakistan. Following are the top 10 devices over all used for downloading stuff from Nokia Store with the list of devices from lower to mid ranged prices.

Themes, Apps, Games and Audio Video content are the most downloaded categories. From the applications; Facebook Chat, Skype, Nimbuzz, Youtube, and Nokia Store were the top apps from International Market. However, Geo News, Katrina Kaif (HD Photos), Cricket Companion, Duniya TV are the most downloaded apps from Pakistani market.

Let us also share one more important thing with you- Nokia Pakistan is very actively promoting local developers’ creativity. Whether they are apps, themes, games or audio video content. Developers must start building the creative apps, there’s still a lot of space to be covered. If you develop something creative using best practices and later on if it gets famous, you would also have a chance to get your apps preloaded in Nokia phones so it is a WIN-WIN situation for all those friends who are interested in developing for Nokia platform.

Right after Rabia Azfar’s presentation, Tony Torp joined. Tony Torp is a Nokia Certified Trainer, Professor at University of Tempere for Applied Sciences, Finland. He has also secured the Nokia Champions Awards from 2009 to 2011. Tony kicked off with the brief introduction of Qt (pronounced as cute), a framework used for the developing coolest apps for mostly all kinds of Nokia devices except for Windows Phone (you can port your Qt app to Windows Phone, quite easily though). Qt is actually compatible with cross-platform so you can also develop anything on Qt using Mac OS, Windows, Linux or other. If you know, Google Earth, Skype, KDE (Linux GUI), VLC Player and much more is developed over Qt. So it is indeed a great platform to work with. Nokia has improved it a lot and now you could also develop your apps in couple of hours (and Hello World in seconds, I hope. :))

Moving on, he discussed the life cycle which was although not very detailed but concise. He also mentioned that C++ will no longer be used after the launch of Qt 5 (Qt 4.7.4 is new version currently). You can easily develop the apps using QML (Qt Modeling Language). QML is a JavaScript based declarative language for designing user interface–centric applications. After the life cycle discussion, Tony showed us some demo and we had some hands on experience on it.

Tomorrow, I will ask Tony if I can share the material he provided us during the training with slides he used so we would definitely share that with you guys.

Until tomorrow, have a great time. 🙂