FriendCaller Blog

According to a testimony, US have finally declared that Nokia will pay developers so that they can create Windows Phone 7 Mango applications.

The information  is thought to be extracted from a popular news channel CNN which averts that, ‘Nokia is attempting to woo app developers with such incentives as pre-installing their software on the forthcoming phone, prominent promotion for their products and funding development of an app, according to three people involved in the negotiations.’

Microsoft’s remark  on the claim is yet to come.However if the company’s track record is taken into consideration, then its more likely that the report CNN broke out is definitely true.

Evidently nothing is wrong with incentivising app growth for one of your platforms, infact it’s a great way to take the initiative.But one thing that will be a question mark for everyone is, What made Nokia do this? I mean there are numerous applications already serving the Windows Marketplace. As a matter of fact, it is propagating even faster than the Google’s Android Market for now.

When CNN encountered with one of spokeswoman from Nokia, this is what she had to say:

‘the company offers app developers a variety of incentives, some in partnership with Microsoft, which include coding assistance and marketing.’

She added more by saying: ‘We do not disclose these arrangements, as each is different.’

One of the presumptions could be that Nokia is trying to get its Symbian developers to swap over to Windows Phone 7, making the deal less pungent. Now that surely makes some sense since, its a matter of time when Symbian would be amongst least favourites.

Nokia’s very first batch of Windows Phone 7 Mango handsets are thought to emerge in Q4 of 2011. Rumors are buzzing around that the very first handset, significantly the Sea Ray, could be arriving as early as next week.

As mentioned in one of our previous blogs, Microsoft is offering free phones, developer tools and training to all those stranded developers who have been affected by WebOS burial by HP? Pretty generous isn’t it?

Similarly Nokia is following on the same lines but in a different way. So let’s have our fingers crossed and wait what this brings for Nokia in future.

Though Nokia do have to declare a verified release date but as ZTE, HTC and Samsung have announced their respective handsets publicly, we look forward as to when Nokia would soon join in with them.

A valid question! We did not develop a WebOS version, avoided Nokia Symbian, Maevo, Intel’s Moblin, MeeGo etc and did not start working on Windows Mobile yet as well. Why WebOS was excluded despite being a popular operating system worldwide? As a professional team of developers, we have to aim our focus on the most promising targets and Palm WebOS failed to impress us much.

No doubt, many of you might be waiting for the next and more enhanced version of Windows Mobile. Has it been 10 years when Pocket PC was launched based on Windows CE?. But the future of Windows Mobile looks shady so we didn’t proceed ahead with it.

As far as RIM and BlackBerry are concerned, we have noticed some very encouraging and progressive trends. A great line up of hardware, a very smooth and steady development towards more reliable and accessible features for developers and essentials for any mobile ecosystem are some of the attributes that have made us go for creating a FriendCaller App for Blackberry. Moreover, an online store and an InApp payment mechanism seem very appealing too. Check out all these exciting BlackBerry features and apps here.

We are hoping to deliver the same unique experience for our users with mobile VoIP, Video Call, Text messaging and phone number support features as our FriendCaller versions for iPhone and Android. Stay posted to our FriendCaller blog, Facebook and Twitter pages for more updates about the progress of our FriendCaller BlackBerry version.

Recently we announced it, now it’s available: FriendCaller on Nokia Series 40 devices.

Finally, also Nokia users benefit from inexpensive and worldwide VoIP calls with FriendCaller.

So, VoIP on Symbian, does it make sense? Even if you think, that the most mobile web users are surfing with iOS (iPhone) or Android, in fact, in some parts of the world, in case Africa, Asia and South America, Nokia’s Symbian is still the leader. For deeper media coverage check out Pingdoms article about mobile OS usage in the world.

Back to topic, the usage of a VoIP service on your Nokia S40 device seems to be a bit difficult, so we give you a short “how-to”:

Follow these steps to use FriendCaller on your Nokia Series 40 Device:

1. Open Menu
2. Go to Settings
3. Choose Connectivity
4. Click on Internet phone
5. Then on Accounts
6. Add new
7. Connect and you are getting guided by the setup wizard
8. Now you can choose FriendCaller from the list.
9. Login with your existing FriendCaller Account or create a new one
10. Next time you make a call, choose Internet call and you are calling via FriendCaller.

Some time ago, Nokia has asked us if we are interested to create a service to simplify configuring Nokia Series 40 devices with FriendCaller. So we started developing a service that makes it much easier for users to get S40 devices ready for Internet telephony.

And hopefully next week, also Nokia users will be able to make inexpensive internet calls to landlines and mobiles using FriendCaller.

So check out our pricing list, be pleasantly surprised and stop being a slave of the high call costs of your provider.