Qt Webkit: Big promise for apps for MeeGo and Symbian

I’m sure you guys and in fact the general blogosphere is utterly tired of hearing how awesome Qt is, how much more it brings to the table and specifically how it makes for awesome applications without going through the hassle of native code and quirks (looks at Symbian). Truth be told, I’m tired of seeing proof of concept videos and demos and no real end product.However, there’s now way that anyone in their right mind can overlook or downplay just how much more impressive Qt app demos have been than anything previously seen on Nokia’s mobile devices and especially its Symbian based offerings. Hopefully with Qt being preloaded on S^3 devices, the shift of Nokia’s internal development to Qt and WRT and the upcoming MeeGo platform based almost exclusively on Qt we’ll begin to see some of these ideas implemented.

The most recent video we’ve been sent focuses on a Flickr photo and video viewer built using HTML5 elements. What’s important to note with this implementation is the hardware acceleration of both the UI and video elements. Things that are rather important if one wants to create a fluid and immersive experience while being prudent in terms of hardware resource utilization. This and other web-focused and hardware acceleration focused improvements are expected to be seen in Qt 4.7 which we can expect to see pushed to Nokia’s devices in the coming year. (Current devices ship with Qt 4.6.3).

Well here’s the demo. Mind, we’re not sure whether this is running in real-time or not but if coming apps are even 3/5ths of what is demonstrated here, I’m sure the majority of us would be happy. Hopefully devs are hard at work and the lack of apps is due to the lag between SDK release and actual product release.

Thanks Jim

via

Category: 5th Edition, Applications, MeeGo, Nokia, Symbian, Symbian^3