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"There will be no distinction between a Nokia developer or third-party developer." becomes "Develop it yourselves you lazy bastards, but dont forget to put our name on it too"

Very wrong. Look at the list of maturity and status of Qt modules. Nokia still is ready to maintain a huge percentage of Qt. They simply deprecated stuff because they think that other alternatives are better (eg. ditch Phonon because there is QtMultimedia). The only piece that Nokia is not interested in maintaining and that the comunity is worried about, is QtSVG, because the alternative, the SVG support in Webkit, is considered too big/slow, or unsuitable for being LGPL only.

This is Qt development frameworks (aka "old Trolltech") being honest in what they are interested about.

Oh, and being even more open in how they develop (they already have public BTS and reports).

As a Nokia N900 owner, I'm really impressed with the front facing video camera and skype integration. Skype is pre-installed, and Firefox mobile 3 is the default browser too. (Firefox 4 mobile is has officially been released for 1 month now for Maemo & Android and seems nice and faster too). Yesterday I did a 3.5 g skype video call that went really well between Europe and the USA, in the middle of a national holiday in the capital; the folks back home were impressed.

I digress. I like how the N900 profile feature lets me set availability to groups of apps like Skype, Jabber, SIP, etc. paired with my common net-connections like home wifi & mobile 3g. The contact book shows me who is online and available options to contact them, (Skype w/ status, SIP, cell, IM etc.) Also notifications is pretty sweet. It is a very nice linux PIM piece o' hardware. I for one, am looking forward to the next Meego device, the N950; to be most-likely announced next month at the Meego conference. (Where Meego 1.2 will also become available for N900 devices as well).

http://maemo.nokia.com/features/contacts/

http://sf2011.meego.com/

The GP's correct. There's a poison pill clause from Nokia's purchase of Trolltech. Basically it says that if Qt ever stops getting released as open source, the KDE Free Qt Foundation gets to release the last version of Qt under the BSD license. I don't think we need to be worried about Qt if such a contingency exists.

Qt creator looked pretty snazz last time I played with it. Cross platform is a nice bonus too...

Qt

Is this what you're looking for?

Qt's container classes (and many others) are implicitly shared, which is just what you want. See the Qt documentation on implicit sharing for more information.

If you're interested, there's a book available online describing the EKA2 internals. It starts by going through some of the changes that they made in the design.

If you read it, you'll wonder why they ever looked at Linux - they already had a much more modern kernel in house, but they got side tracked trying to port stuff to Linux. What they should have done is simply ship the POSIX compatibility layer as standard with newer Symbian devices, making it easy to port apps from *NIX.

This reminds me of stuff like the nokia morph concept. It took 10 years for me to be able to properly view a webpage on my phone. The monopolized 'slow roll' of our technology wont allow this stuff to happen in our life time.

I just bought a Nokia 1800. Not a smartphone, but I don't need one; I have a computer for all that stuff. Battery life: currently around 2.5 weeks with moderate text/call usage. Very simple, does all the basic stuff excellently though. Cost me £16 with £10 credit, so basically £6 for the phone.

This has a very similar interface to older Nokia phones I've used. I'm basically a happy Nokia customer. Am I at all interested in Windows Phone 7? No, and never will be. I was interested in the potential of the N900, but was far too expensive to justify actually buying. Shame we probably won't see what it's successors could offer.

I'm kind of sad the 1800 is likely the last Nokia product I'll buy, since prior to Elop it looked like they had a superb long-term strategy--they just needed a little longer to get it all together in the short-medium term, and they would have continued to be the best.

(Sheesh, Slashdot can't even handle a simple UTF-8 £ sign without mangling it.)

Well, basically because MS didn't want that.

The current Qt copyright holder is none other than ... Nokia.

TFA and the original source (press release from Forum Nokia, http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/03/25/open-letter-to-developer-community ) reveal that:

Over the past weeks we have been evaluating our Symbian roadmap and now feel confident we will have a strong portfolio of new products during our transition period - i.e. 2011 and 2012.

And further ..

Iâ(TM)ve been asked many times how long we will support Symbian and Iâ(TM)m sure for many of you it feels we have been avoiding the question. The truth is, it is very difficult to provide a single answer. We hope to bring devices based on Windows Phone to market as quickly as possible, but Windows Phone will not have all language and all localization capabilities from day one. [...] That is why we cannot give you the date when Symbian will no longer be supported.

Finally it is stated:

What I can promise you is that we will not just abandon Symbian users or developers. As a very minimum, we have a legal obligation, varying in length between countries, to support users for a period of time after the last product has been sold.

So there's nothing saying that Nokia will suddenly stop supporting Symbian in 2012. It'll just fade out gradually, and even they don't admit knowing when it will fade out completely.

So are people actually doing this? It makes sense that they should, although it would be more useful if a standard encoding scheme is used.

QR-codes are so standard that pretty much any modern smartphone can read them, although some may need a free application. ZXing Barcode Reader is a very good one for Android.

Where I work all employees have one. I generate the qr-images from vcard-formatted text with qrencode, but you can try it out quickly on the Nokia website. Make sure to choose QR-code at the bottom. It's quite handy :)

I don't know how well this would actually work, but it would be nice to develop a web frontend using tools like glade or QtDesigner rather than what I do now with Haml and jQuery.

Then you want aspx with Visual Studio.

Or using traditional application development tools to build a web app?

I like the Web, but I have to admit, GUI toolkits tend to be quite a bit better. I don't know how well this would actually work, but it would be nice to develop a web frontend using tools like glade or QtDesigner rather than what I do now with Haml and jQuery.

I'm very skeptical, though -- there are ways the Web is currently better than many desktop apps. Even ignoring issues like bandwidth and performance, would this give me an app which properly supports things like bookmarking, tabbed browsing, and the back button? Is it just drawing to canvas, or does it take advantage of native stuff?

From the video, the answer seems to be "no, and it's just drawing to canvas." If that's the case, I take back everything I just said, and I hope this is never deliberately used to build a web app. Still a cool idea, though.

Meanwhile Nokia effectively (?) sell QT (to Digia):
http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/03/07/nokia-to-sell-qt-commercial-licensing-and-services-to-digia

I don't know what would be needed to be sold to call it a "sell" but whatever.

Also that doesn't necessary mean they won't use it themselves but whatever.

I guess in the spirit of fairness you should also link to the qt blog post detailing this sale: Nokia and Digia working together to grow the Qt community

According to this blog entry by Christophe Joyau, "Head of Services Sales, Nordic and Baltic countries"

So I guess when Nokia stated on their official blog that Qt would remain to play an important role in Nokia they actually forgot to add "...for about three weeks".

(For those of you who don’t know what it is, the KDE Free Qt Foundation is what we call a “poison pill” for Trolltech: should we ever stop releasing open source versions of Qt, the foundation is given the right to unilaterally release the last version of Qt under the BSD license.

So, why not get some $$$ while you can, right?

I saw the article and Nokia Bubbles came to mind - a bubble driven UI that lets you perform certain functions like viewing SMSes, using the screen as a torch, responding to missed calls etc without having to unlock the phone, released for their Symbian^3 devices recently.

Looking at their netbook, a fine fanless piece and pretty much the MiniMacBook that never was, from http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Mini-Laptops/bd-p/minilaptops it seems they ruined that by (besides a debatable display) shipping with Windows 7 Starter (of all OSes) on a mere Gig of non-upgradable RAM - neither their own nor any other Linux (all of which, and even MacOS someone made work), nor even XP.

I think Nokia's Elop now has what is known as buyer's remorse.

Here's the most troubling starememt from Nokia's Inverstors page

"Nokia and Microsoft have entered into a non-binding term sheet. The planned partnership remains subject to negotiations and execution of the definitive agreements by the parties and there can be no assurances that the definitive agreements would be entered into".

(Emphasis mine).

On the whole, Microsoft has a probable benefit. For Nokia on the other hand, I am not so sure given Microsoft's past.

Should Nokia fail to dance to Microsoft's tune, Microsoft will drop it like a plague leaving Nokia holding the bag. At that point, it will be 'over' for Nokia in the smart-phone space. Sad indeed.

It's more powerful than you think - have a look at this blog post. With a little QScript you can include any logic you want with no messy PyQt binding or C++ needing compilation.

Java and C#, like C++, are usually the least suited for GUI code - more expressive languages are much less aggravating for the task.

That's why they made Qt's QML

It's GPLv3 and LGPLv2. See http://qt.nokia.com/products/licensing

The bullocks or horses you call are unlikely to do research for you. Let me try

http://www.askageek.com/2009/08/04/nokia-n79-cellphone-reboots-randomly/
http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Nseries-and-S60-Smartphones/Reboot-problem-with-N8/td-p/925737
http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/Nokia-E71-Shutdown-and-restarts-automatically/td-p/325797

I have personally seen this on my friend's 5230 : http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Nseries-and-S60-Smartphones/Nokia-5230-RESTARTING-DEFECT/td-p/635260

HTC - yeah, they have problems. But they release relatively few models so it is easier to figure out.

The bullocks or horses you call are unlikely to do research for you. Let me try

http://www.askageek.com/2009/08/04/nokia-n79-cellphone-reboots-randomly/
http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Nseries-and-S60-Smartphones/Reboot-problem-with-N8/td-p/925737
http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/Nokia-E71-Shutdown-and-restarts-automatically/td-p/325797

I have personally seen this on my friend's 5230 : http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Nseries-and-S60-Smartphones/Nokia-5230-RESTARTING-DEFECT/td-p/635260

HTC - yeah, they have problems. But they release relatively few models so it is easier to figure out.

The bullocks or horses you call are unlikely to do research for you. Let me try

http://www.askageek.com/2009/08/04/nokia-n79-cellphone-reboots-randomly/
http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Nseries-and-S60-Smartphones/Reboot-problem-with-N8/td-p/925737
http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/Nokia-E71-Shutdown-and-restarts-automatically/td-p/325797

I have personally seen this on my friend's 5230 : http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Nseries-and-S60-Smartphones/Nokia-5230-RESTARTING-DEFECT/td-p/635260

HTC - yeah, they have problems. But they release relatively few models so it is easier to figure out.

"MS plant?"

I can guarantee a strategic decision of this magnitude was made with the full knowledge and consent of Nokia's board of directors: http://www.nokia.com/about-nokia/corporate-governance/board-of-directors

Certainly none of them come from Microsoft.

Yes: http://research.nokia.com/page/231 http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_iphone_becomes_a_web_server.php https://market.android.com/details?id=org.xeustechnologies.android.kws http://windowsphone7central.com/news/webserver_for_windows_phone_7_brings_homebrew_file_exploration-12-23-10.php

This takeover(?) by foreign corporate culture seems to have been in the making for some time - the (apparently) upcoming / new head of Nokia smartphone division ... is a long past veteran of Compaq and then HP. The (apparently) new head of mobile phone division ... a marketer, gaining experience selling sport clothes and cleaning products, already for some time with Nokia as the head of N. American division (WTF? Somebody from the only geographic division where Nokia doesn't dominate?)

Or maybe it's even simpler, maybe just some short term stock or financial machinations (just one I've heard somewhere: a way to bring home the "overseas" cash of MS while avoiding tax, by introducing "losses": foregone in the spirit of close cooperation Winmob7 license fees)

At least Qt should be fine, too much heavyweight software uses it, and in worst case scenario - it's LGPL, ex-Trolltech people could pick it up.

And who knows... at the very least, this deal means a lot of Winmob7 phones pretty soon. With Nokia most likely dominating - other phone makers brought, what, just ~2 million of them onto the market till now? Now they might even shun the platform, they don't depend on it & so it's easy for them, if it appears like Nokia might be getting a preferential treatment (at the least keeping Ovi Maps to themselves, and certainly deals with carriers / mobile payments). Last year Nokia sold over 100 million Symbian phones, and growing... and since now they say there are plans for just ~150 million more, that means a pretty quick overhaul. With, all things said, a pretty decent OS, and which will certainly have all the "required" apps - plus IMHO a very real chance to rapidly pick up steam in mobile gaming. Then there are hundreds of millions of people still loyal to Nokia, many will want to upgrade from their "feature phones", and since Winmob7 is supposed to be now spread across a spectrum of handsets at different price points...
The "leaked" handset (yeah, "who knows?") doesn't look half bad, too...

Only the Windows logo is a bit disturbing / it's still MS... ;/

This takeover(?) by foreign corporate culture seems to have been in the making for some time - the (apparently) upcoming / new head of Nokia smartphone division ... is a long past veteran of Compaq and then HP. The (apparently) new head of mobile phone division ... a marketer, gaining experience selling sport clothes and cleaning products, already for some time with Nokia as the head of N. American division (WTF? Somebody from the only geographic division where Nokia doesn't dominate?)

Or maybe it's even simpler, maybe just some short term stock or financial machinations (just one I've heard somewhere: a way to bring home the "overseas" cash of MS while avoiding tax, by introducing "losses": foregone in the spirit of close cooperation Winmob7 license fees)

At least Qt should be fine, too much heavyweight software uses it, and in worst case scenario - it's LGPL, ex-Trolltech people could pick it up.

And who knows... at the very least, this deal means a lot of Winmob7 phones pretty soon. With Nokia most likely dominating - other phone makers brought, what, just ~2 million of them onto the market till now? Now they might even shun the platform, they don't depend on it & so it's easy for them, if it appears like Nokia might be getting a preferential treatment (at the least keeping Ovi Maps to themselves, and certainly deals with carriers / mobile payments). Last year Nokia sold over 100 million Symbian phones, and growing... and since now they say there are plans for just ~150 million more, that means a pretty quick overhaul. With, all things said, a pretty decent OS, and which will certainly have all the "required" apps - plus IMHO a very real chance to rapidly pick up steam in mobile gaming. Then there are hundreds of millions of people still loyal to Nokia, many will want to upgrade from their "feature phones", and since Winmob7 is supposed to be now spread across a spectrum of handsets at different price points...
The "leaked" handset (yeah, "who knows?") doesn't look half bad, too...

Only the Windows logo is a bit disturbing / it's still MS... ;/

QTDEv sums it up in the comments of this page:

FULLY Open Source Qt under the GPL if you plan to throw all us devs under the bus. We no longer trust you.

When Elop came in he said that Qt will be the main framework. Symbian and MeeGo would be unified through Qt. We all stopped working on Symbian C++ and started learning Qt. We have now wasted 6 motnhs of our family’s lives on a dead end. If I knew this was going to happen, I would have started learning Java instead!

Nobody will make apps for a dead platform! Don’t you get it!?!?!?! All those people who were bamboozled into buying Symbian^3 phones will have no app future. People expected an ecosystem to grow around Qt. By not allowing Qt on Windows Phone, you have killed all hope for them. Don’t give us the bull about fragmentation because there is no fragmentation with Qt. Qt already runs on WinCE. Microsoft just wants total control that’s why they don’t want Qt.

They did this out of spite to kill desktop Linux since Qt apps would also work on desktop Linux.

There was no “burning platform”. Qt was gaining momentum and was warming up the developer world with it’s cross-platform capabilities. Elop poured gasoline on the Qt platform and set it on fire. Elop is an arsonist or better yet, an economic hitman.

I already returned my brand new E7 that I paid 580 euro for after yesterday’s announcement. Don’t expect anyone to be dumb enough to buy any Symbian phones for the rest of this year.

Qt is not just used by open source software, but by many commercial software that probably payed a license too before it was lgpled, some of these are big softwares like google earth or autodesk maya, you can see some of these here http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/target/desktop and here http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use

Qt is not just used by open source software, but by many commercial software that probably payed a license too before it was lgpled, some of these are big softwares like google earth or autodesk maya, you can see some of these here http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use/target/desktop and here http://qt.nokia.com/qt-in-use

I think it just sums up the situation succinctly:

"Nokia got trapped by that win32.elop.trojan."

Has look and feel of a Zero Day exploit, and is creating that sort of confusion as well.

One could easily say it's not Zero Day, but then all ZD's are developed quietly over time and simply 'sprung' on the unsuspecting and unprepared innocent victims one day. Pretty much what happened.

QT has merit, and if the merit is good enough, and I think it is, it will have a strong future... just probably not with Nokia. (and yes I am a GNU/OSS/FLOSS fan boy, just not a zealot about it).

Anyway much credit to "eMPee584" for such a fine summation (assuming he was not quoting some one else, without attribution).

This is why you can't port Qt to .NET/Silverlight. This is not even pointing out the marshalling issues.

All my thinking was predicated on the fact Nokia had chosen a direction with Microsoft. But now I see they have chosen all directions, which will end in a horrible wreck at some point:

http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/12/nokia-new-strategic-direction-what-is-the-future-for-qt/#comment-2498

So sorry about the excitement, bet is off, you were right to bet the other side.

Despite the fact there's already a Visual Studio Add-in for Qt.

Mexico? ;p

(supposedly closest to most slashdotters, probably uses the same GSM bands; from Part 3 of the reports it's clear they are much closer to world-typical popularity of Nokia S40 handsets ... but obviously & unfortunately those are capable of j2me & web browsing (though "really" robust 3720 is among them...), there's also S30 / 1000-series / 5030 & C1-00 too, I believe ;> )

http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/qt-for-mac/

I was considering qt, now I'm unsure. With MS around to fuck it up, we'll probably have qt.net in the future.

As long as you're not planning on using it with a phone, go for it. It's LGPL. If MSNokia starts to screw around with it, there'll be fork, so I don't see it going stale, and even if it does, it won't be outdated in a few years yet.

http://qt.nokia.com/products/platform/qt-for-mac/

I was considering qt, now I'm unsure. With MS around to fuck it up, we'll probably have qt.net in the future.

About half of that is between Nokia Siemens Networks, who develop network equipment for mobile operators, and Navteq. Nokia also does a lot of GSM-related research and most likely gets a lot of royalty revenue from every GSM-based vendor (other carrier suppliers, mobile device manufacturers).

http://www.nokia.com/results/Nokia_results2010Q4e.pdf

The open letter from CEO to everyone has a *lot* of comments. I can paraphrase for you in case you don't want to read them:

"WTF? Goodbye Nokia".

Its a great pity all round. Microsoft *still* won't sell any more phones, Nokia will just destroy itself. Shares down 8% today and I'm sure will fall further.

According to the German Spiegel, Alberto Torres (responsible board member for MeeGo) just left the board. So yeah, MeeGo is basically left for dead.

Something in my gut tells me without Jobs kick starting this market the way he did we would have been stuck with programs that wouldn't of even loaded, some nasty monochrome screen and a brutal 16MHz chip powering the whole thing.

Ahem. Ever hear of a little company called Nokia?
  The N95 launched a year before the first iPhone, whose 4th iteration is still yet to catch up to its capabilities. And it's wouldn't have not wouldn't of.
Then again, America was staring at the Moto RAZR for the 4 years before the iPhone with dribble leaking out of the side of its chin, so that might explain your 'gut feel'.

http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/t5/Hardware-Codes-and-Operator/Water-damage-used-as-an-excuse-to-avoid-replacing-handset/td-p/29732 Yeah, right. Helsinki Syndrome, they call it.

Hence, they are close too announcing a product. All current Qt apps from Symbian will work on it, so if people are happy with their current Symbian phones, they should be all go.

They are sitting on a nice product, let's just hope they can deliver. Sounds from Intel are such to indicate we can expect phones/tablets Q2 2011 ( http://www.cio.co.uk/news/3258820/intels-meego-os-to-start-shipping-tablets-and-netbooks/ ). Don't forget the first thing the new CEO said was not to communicate about devices before they where actually ready to almost ship. So do things the Apple way when it comes to devices. That is a good strategy.

Nokia shipped 123.7 million phones in 2010 Q4. Out of them smart phones were the quoted 31 million. So the summary should say that Android overtakes Symbian in the smart phone segment, not all mobile phones. Those over 90 million phones are cheaper models running S40 etc. That makes Symbian still the most-shipped mobile platform.
Sources:
http://www.intomobile.com/2011/01/27/nokia-q4-2010-sales-up-profits-down/
http://www.nokia.com/press/press-releases/showpressrelease?newsid=1482864

I wish Nokia would do something like this. The Ovi Store is enemic and Nokia's been providing some paid programs as "free" (ad supported) to make their store more enticing. Nokia's been trying with their "beta labs" http://betalabs.nokia.com/ but some stuff is only compatible with their latest phones, not for their older phones.