The Nokia N900 is creating quite a bit of excitement in the days leading up to its delivery in Europe. Today it has announced an official port of something called QT for the N900, and its operating system Maemo 5.
What that means in real terms is that Maemo, Nokia’s tablet, and increasingly its phone based Linux, now supports both the old established order of the GTK toolkit from the influential Gnome open source movement, as well as QT, one that Nokia acquired in January last year when it bought Trolltech, a Norwegian Linux development platform.
Both sets of applications will run on the N900 when delivered, but more importantly, this will make applications common between the N900 which runs Maemo and the mainstream Symbian phones from Nokia such as the N97.
It sets the scene for more application developers everywhere to target the N900 with new apps, and it also sets the scene for Nokia to make all the major Ovi platform announcements available on both Symbian and Maemo phones, at virtually the same time, where it addresses them through QT.
The official Qt port is published in a Technology Preview release which can be downloaded now for free. This port means that developers can use Qt to target the upcoming Nokia N900 device and ensures applications can be easily ported to all Qt’s supported platforms including the next Maemo 6 release as well as Symbian and Windows Mobile. The port itself will be based on Qt’s upcoming version 4.6 and is scheduled for final release in Q1 of 2010.
There are fundamental differences between the existing Maemo and Trolltech’s QT. The main difference is that Maemo uses the GTK toolkit from the influential Gnome open source movement, while Trolltech uses its own Qt, now being pushed as a de facto standard within Nokia. Maemo developers worried when Trolltech was acquired that their platform, would be sidelined within Nokia, but it looks like Nokia will let the two co-exist, for a while at least.
“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. 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,” said Sebastian Nystr’m, Vice President of Application Services and Frameworks at Nokia. “Qt’s support for Maemo 5, Maemo 6, Symbian, as well as Windows Mobile makes Qt the most sensible choice for developers looking to target multiple devices and achieve the broadest reach with their innovations.”
The Qt development platform is based on C++ code, will now allow applications to be created and deployed for Symbian OS as well as Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows CE, Windows Mobile and embedded Linux.
Qt is very good at allowing an application to be defined even when the developer is unsure of what the final handset hardware will be, because it abstracts and the screens, sensors and input technologies, so they can be separately defined. All of this means that more and more apps will run on the N900, and they will come closer and closer in feel to existing Symbian apps.