Developments in Nokia-land

Nokia's been making waves of late. In the last week it has:

• Announced the 6620, an American follow-on to the EMEA/Asia 6600 which among other things adds support for EDGE (significant speed improvement over GPRS) and doubles the onboard memory available for J2ME applications to 12MB
• Spoke of its intent to bring Perl to its Series 60 (Symbian) based devices
• Discussed plans to provide tiered developer support in an upcoming rev of its Forum Nokia developer program

Nokia is clearly attempting to raise the bar for its competitors. Whether the 6620 is "the" device or a precursor to it, I expect to see one or more very successful enterprise application handsets in 2004. I also expect to see scripting (Perl, Python, whatever) and easier to use J2ME tools enable Joe Average application creator to build wireless business apps. Coupled with these trends, we'll see competition between vendors' developer programs ramp up as enterprises finally begin to adopt wireless development in mass.

Thanks to Nokia, PalmOne, and others, 2004 is shaping up to be a very interesting year indeed!