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Nokia: your favorite apps are coming to Windows Phone 8, it's simply a matter of when
Bryan Biniak, VP and General Manager of Global Partner and App Development at Nokia, was in London today for the UK launch of JobLens, so we took the opportunity to sit down with him and talk Windows Phone 8, the basket in which Nokia has entrusted all its eggs. Being Microsoft's brother-in-arms, Nokia's heavily involved in building out the platform and, despite an increasing number of high-profile apps making the jump, the general health of the WP8 store was the main topic of discussion. Unsurprisingly, Biniak was keen to report the app catalogue and with it, competitiveness, is growing fast. There are still gaps to be filled, however, and if Biniak's claims are to be trusted, all the apps most common to iOS and Android home screens are headed to WP8 in the near future: We're not having a single conversation with anybody, of any material application that's out there, that isn't going to be coming to the platform. It's not a matter of if -- I had those conversations, the "if" conversations, before -- all of our conversations now are "when."
Nokia brings Augmented Reality to the employment market with JobLens
Once Sesame Street starts using Augmented Reality, you know the tech is no longer considered a niche affair. Strangely enough, however, we haven't actually seen an AR app that caters to job seekers, but Nokia's got that covered with JobLens -- an app we've tested at Nokia's UK-based Lumia 925 launch event last month. The program arrives on Lumia devices in the US and Canada today, utilizing the same LiveSight sight recognition tech previously seen in Here, and involving collaborative efforts with LinkedIn, Indeed, Zillow and Salary.com. In addition to gaining the benefit of visualizing exactly where you can find open positions around you, the app will help you create and submit resumes to push you in the right direction. There's still no word on when we can expect to see JobLens outside of North America, though we imagine it won't be too long. As a gentle reminder of how it all works, we've added our hands-on video after the break.
Hands-on with Nokia JobLens on the Lumia 925: what a way to make a living (video)
We're hoping we won't need to use Nokia's JobLens app for real any time soon, but at the Lumia 925 launch event, we thought we'd at least explore our options. It's essentially a proximity-based job searching tool that, in the lens mode, is much like the CityLens AR app for Lumias, and points you in the direction of your next potential employer using icons on top of the realtime camera view. In another mode, JobLens uses the Here Maps platform to show you a top-down view of openings in your vicinity, and can subsequently direct you to your interview on time. From either views, you can poke at vacancies to see more about the job and share it, email it to yourself, or respond directly with a CV -- various sites populate the in-app listings. The software also integrates with Facebook and LinkedIn so you can hit up your contacts for the inside track. No word on a release date yet, but we imagine it'll coincide with the Lumia 925 launch. As they say, it's who you know that counts, and now we know Matt from Nokia, who treated us to a quick tour of the app in the video after the break. Update: we've been having trouble with the video -- it works on some devices and not others. It may work for you right now, but if not -- we're working on a fix. Update #2: This should now be working for everybody. Apologies for the delay!
