14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia is throwing in prizes of USD 20,000 for developers who will use their Open C Plug-In for building or port-opening source applications for S60 smartphones. For this to happen, Nokia also provides for the contestants of this competition webinars, training sessions and peer-to-peer discussions.
Forum Nokia has collaborated with Orange and the Symbian Developer Network in order to develop the "Open C challenge" competition. Their solutions will be judged on account of the Innovation, Quality, Usability, Creativity and Degree of Middleware Difficulty that they manage to prove.
"Identifying and rewarding the latest and greatest applications being built or ported with Open C will showcase the exciting growth in developer productivity that Open C is already driving in S60 smartphone application development worldwide", said Lee Epting, vice president, Forum Nokia, Nokia's global developer program. Moreover, this initiative comes as a result of the growing number of open source and Symbian smartphones which are being used by people everywhere.
"The Open C Challenge offers a fantastic opportunity for the 55,000 members of the Orange Partner programme to get involved in creating mobile applications for the Nokia open source platform", commented Steve Glagow, VP Marketing Operations from Orange. On the same theme, Bruce Carney, director, developer program and services at Symbian has observed the fact that "Symbian and our worldwide ecosystem continue to make mobile development easier and more attractive for developers migrating existing desktop and server based applications to Symbian OS. The introduction of P.I.P.S. and Open C POSIX libraries, earlier this year will greatly assist competition entrants to mobilize their applications".
The deadline for submitting in the "Open C Challenge" is set for the 14th of September, this year at 11:59 PM. That is quite a tight limit for the contestants to respect. The finalists will present their applications to a select panel of industry judges at the Symbian Smartphone Show in London on October 16th and 17th.