Vine Is Coming To Windows Phone 8 As Nokia Looks To Attract More Big-Name Apps

Perhaps the most understated announcement at Nokia’s Lumia 1020 release event today was the promise of Vine for Windows Phone 8 within the year.

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced onstage from Pier 92 in New York City that apps from CNN, Vyclone, Yelp, Foursquare, Path, Flipboard, and Hipstamatic would all become available in the near future. The partnership with Vine, however, went unspoken except in the press release.

Twitter confirmed to us that Vine will be coming to Windows Phone 8, but would not share further details about when this is happening or what will differentiate it from the iPhone version, which has been around since January.

Others had taken notice of this hole in Windows Phone 8’s app offerings, among them the third-party Vine app 6Sec, which developed a private beta version for Windows Phone 8 users in June.

Nokia could have played this up more today, and they undoubtedly will in the coming months. Hipstamatic’s Oggl PRO, their application for the Lumia 1020, will work beautifully with the phone’s 41-megapixel camera, but it’s no Instagram in terms of traction. The addition of Vine could be a step toward convincing higher profile apps to join the Windows Phone 8 roster. An Instagram partnership, however, would seem unlikely as both Vine and Hipstamatic are direct competitors.

“That disparity between our platform and other platforms that folks write about is going away,” Nokia Global Vice President and General Manager Bryan Biniak said in a small presentation this afternoon.

According to Biniak, the partnerships with video and photo apps like Vyclone, Hipstamatic, and Flipboard resulted from developing the Lumia 1020 into a photographic powerhouse. For visually oriented apps, providing a great raw image is incredibly motivating. And it probably is.

Biniak himself acknowledged that once developers see other well-known names invest in a partnership with Nokia, others are likely to follow. Vine is certainly a step in the right direction, and it seems they’ll be pushing to corner bigger apps in the coming year, perhaps even beyond the photo realm.