Applications created for Nokia's N900 smartphone will be easier to port to future versions of the company's Maemo Linux operating system as well as to Symbian and Windows Mobile, after Nokia officially ported its Qt graphical toolkit to Maemo 5.
The N900, which will be released this month in the UK, runs on Maemo 5 rather than Nokia's usual Symbian operating system. Maemo 5 uses the GTK+ graphical toolkit for its application-development framework, but Nokia said in July that future versions of Maemo would use Qt instead. On Friday, Nokia announced an official Qt port for Maemo 5.
Qt, which Nokia acquired when it bought the developer firm Trolltech in 2008, is already used to create the user interfaces for programs running on Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Windows Mobile. Nokia is currently working on a Symbian port for the graphical toolkit.
The Maemo development community had already started work on an unofficial port of Qt to Maemo 5, and that progress has been merged into Nokia's official port, the manufacturer said.
"With this announcement and our upcoming port of Qt to the Symbian platform, we will quickly see Qt established as a leading framework for mobile application development," Nokia application services and frameworks chief Sebastian Nyström said in a statement.
"Developers will be able to use Qt as a framework to create powerful native applications and, with Qt's Webkit integration, it also provides them with a platform for creating web applications and services."
Talkback
Looks such a nice phone like.
Very uncluttered appearance, but at the same time looks robust.
Be very interested to hear about some trials of it.
Arrg