It’s not that often that large companies open up their R&D departments for an open doors event thus I couldn’t pass up the chance to attend the Nokia Open IT presentations & demos that took place today at their offices in downtown Cluj-Napoca.

Understandably I’ve met some of the greatest local programmers and young brilliant minds at this event. Some of them looking for a career change, some of them just looking around. I think it’s fair to say that this event was a pretty good way to motivate young programmers, designers and IT people to send in their resumes to Nokia.

Overall the center-stage was taken by OVI and the apps that supposedly make it so great. And I say supposedly because until today the only OVI app I’ve heard of was Maps which is quite amazing by itself and even more so with the premium services. Did you know that the app is updated every two weeks and by now it has the largest database of POIs (over 1m) in the world? Neither did I.

Which brings me to the first problem I’ve noticed: awareness. It’s been quite some time since I’ve purchased my last Nokia terminal but I know quite a few people that did get latest generation phones in the past year. Very few of them actually know what OVI is about and how it can help them get the most out of their phones. Remember, these are top of the line phones with such great hardware that it would make a netbook jealous. Look at Apple and their efforts to publicize apps and whatever you need your iPhone to do, there’s an app for that.

After presentations I’ve been invited to a couple of private demos. It’s hard not to biased, since I’ve tested a very cool social app and I’m on a constant quest to find the ideal social mobile client – and I love Nokia’s Communities. This is quite a smart little app that integrates with pretty much every network out there and even more so, depending on your location (country, continent etc) suggests the most popular networks in your region. So for example if you’re in Romania you’re pretty much using Facebook, Hi5 and Twitter and if you’re in China you’re most likely a regular on QQ.

I’ve tested the app on both Facebook & Twitter and my first impression was that it’s blazing fast. I’ve been told that it’s going to be even faster (if that’s even possible) and it will have loads of extra features in the very near future. And all that without compromising on the UI, which is one of the best I’ve seen in a mobile app. The app is integrated with pretty much with everything OVI – which brings me to the second issue that Nokia needs to take care of: tighter integration between apps. It works great but it somehow doesn’t feel that right, mostly from the consistency point of view.

From a user’s perspective it’s quite weird to have different interfaces for various applications made by Nokia itself that are integrated with each other yet have a radical look & feel.

But all these two aside (which are fixable in a very short time frame)  I think Nokia is on its way to something big. And that’s quite an understatement.

I’m looking forward to a new open doors event soon, this time at their production facilities nearby Cluj-Napoca. After all, that’s their core business at the moment.