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Both Nokia and Google have been much criticized for their dual-OS strategies, which many observers seem to find confusing, or a sign of indecision. A better question might be whether companies of such scale and ambition could realistically put all their eggs in a single OS basket - and that was certainly the view Nokia was presenting at its recent developers' conference, Over The Air, where it continued to push its cross-platform software tools, Qt, towards center stage.

Qt is one of the most underestimated of Nokia's technologies, in terms of its strategic significance to the giant Finn. It was acquired with Trolltech in January 2008 and the Linux-based development platform was ported to Symbian Series 60 late last year. This gave Nokia the ability to offer its development community a write-once, run-anywhere system - one of the key points of control for vendors looking for a strong position in the mobile value chain, like Adobe or Google, and making sense of the strategy to support Maemo Linux as well as Symbian.

It also made life somewhat easier for the Symbian programmers themselves - the aim now is for Qt to take over the application layer on S60 devices, reducing actual Symbian development to "under the hood core programming at best", as The Register explains. This preserves the decade of experience and development that has gone into Symbian, particularly its optimization for the characteristics of a mobile phone, while shielding developers from some of its more difficult features, such as its odd implementation of C++. Part of the point of the Over The Air event was to calm developer complaints about such aspects of Symbian/S60 and promise a simpler, more flexible and standard environment to work in from 2010 - one that Nokia hopes will overtake Android in terms of usability and breadth of reach, as Google faces up to its own programmer discontent.

However, the All About Symbian blog still thinks 20% of developers, even for the upcoming open source release ^4, will have to drill down into native APIs, though that means 80% will be able to stay at the higher Qt level, creating Qt apps that can run over Symbian, Maemo and desktop PCs, as well as Windows Mobile and CE (in theory). Qt also provides more advanced support for widgets, and integrates easily with web components, thanks to its WebKit based engine for rendering online content. Nokia claims this offers an optimal combination of native and web-based development - and after all, that balance lies at the heart of how the mobile web experience will be defined, and which vendors' visions will dominate.

Qt also supports "abstractions to a variety of screens, sensors and input technologies", so that developers can prepare software for "unknown" technologies, as Nokia puts it. This promises greater cross-platform and cross-device flexibility than other architectures, protecting programmers from the dangers of fragmentation. Nokia is not in the school of thought that believes fragmentation is all bad - it is necessary for differentiation for devices and software platforms, but developers must be cushioned from its effects by multi-platform tools.

According to a bullish forecast by Juniper Research last week, shipments of Symbian handsets will double over the next five years, from 87m this year to 180m by 2014. With Android and LiMO also growing, the total mobile open source market will reach 220m units at that point.

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COMMENTS

Posted by riya189 on Monday 9th August, 2010

Qt is a cross-platform application framework. Using Qt, you can develop applications and user interfaces, and deploy them across many desktop and embedded operating systems without needing to rewrite the source code. The vision is to have Qt Everywhere and enable developers to create advanced applications with innovative user experiences while getting the applications to market quickly. Qt allows you to code once and deploy across major device and desktop operating systems. The Qt for Symbian Developer's Library is the main source of information for Qt for Symbian, including details about how Qt relates to S60 and Symbian OS.

For more information about installing Qt for Symbian, see the Qt for Symbian installation guide in the Qt for Symbian Developer's Library.

Riya from Symbian Application Development

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