You know that $10 million developer contest that Nokia announced this morning? There just might be a little morsel of unannounced information tucked within that contest’s rules.
You see, Nokia’s main partner in this contest is AT&T — and yet, the entire contest focuses around the Nokia N8, a phone which AT&T doesn’t carry. Yet.
As Matthew Miller of Nokia Experts points out, there are a few choice bits in the contest’s rules:
Nokia will release a new device (“New Device”) in the United States which is compatible with Apps developed for the N8, in early 2011 (“Release Date”).
and
Qualifying Apps must be designed, developed, fully compatible with, and published for the Nokia N8,
Well, those are some pretty certain terms. They’re going out of their way to say it’s a device “compatible with Apps developed for the N8”, rather than outright saying “yeah, it’s the N8”. We can take that two ways: either Nokia’s got a brand spankin’ new Symbian^3 in the works for the US, or the N8 wont be going by that name when it hits the US (on AT&T, presumably.)
Or they’re all just trying to be sneaky.