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Nokia has announced the award winners for most useful and innovative mobile applications using the Java 2 ME platform. Categories included 'communications', 'entertainment' and 'enhanced productivity'.

For the Communications category, the Canadian company Clearigo Solutions scooped the award for its clearBUGS program. This J2ME client application allows for reporting back to base by engineers out in the filed - as well as keeping a to-do list, you can prioritise, schedule and track tasks while on the move.

In the 'entertainment' section, the Danish company kiloo

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won with Popstar, which allows you to manage the career of your own pop star. Think virtual pet - you've got to meet the basic needs of your fledgling entertainer before sending them on gruelling world tours to gain further fame...

Another winner was the 'QuickShop' application designed by the German company Hartmann-Software. Intended to be an everyday application, it lets you select cooking dishes from a database in the Internet and then imports the required ingredients into a shopping list on the mobile phone. You can even - apparently - enter the location of ingredients within a shop so that, once stored, they can be located again in future.

The prize for each company is a Nokia 9200 Series Communicator and the chance to demonstrate their application with Nokia at CeBIT 2002.

Further info on the awards, including screenshots, can be found here.

The Java 2 Micro Edition was developed by Sun to help build intelligent, networked devices and applications for the consumer and embedded market. You can read more about it here.

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