Nokia & AT&T Team Up For Calling All Innovators Contest

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Smartphone come in all shapes an sizes some with large touch screens others with slide-out QWERTY keyboards. However, while the design varies from smartphone to smartphone, there are only a select number of mobile operating systems to power these devices. Popular platforms include Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS, Palm’s webOS, and RIM’s BlackBerry OS.

This is not to say that these are the only platforms on the market as Nokia has both Symbian and MeeGo while Microsoft has the forthcoming Windows Phone 7.

While all of these mobile platforms feature basically the same underlying features in one form or another, it’s the third party mobile applications that really set them apart. Apple is the clear leader in this sector as their App Store has been available for the longest giving app developers a large time frame to saturate the market.

However, Google’s Android is gaining hard hitting mobile apps at a steady pace and is looking to give Apple’s App Store a run for its money quite soon. On the Nokia side of things, big name apps like Angry Birds has been available for their flagship N900 smart phone for some time but in order to gain a respectible market share, they’re going to need to do much better.

Today, Nokia has announced that they will be teaming up with AT&T to hold a contest for mobile app developers. This contest dubbed Calling All Innovators will offer a first place prize of $250,000 to the team that creates the most note worthy application for the Nokia N8 smartphone. However, they are also pitting 17 runner ups against one another for a $150,000 prize along with a whole slew of other prizes you can check out at the event’s official website.

Obviously, the goal of this contest is to get the best possible mobile applications onto the market in anticipation of the N8′s release. However, it’s quite strange to see AT&T dipping their foot into this contest considering they have yet to announce any plans to carry forthcoming flagship devices from Nokia like the N8.

Perhaps an announcement is just over the horizon, we’ll have to wait and see.