The Future of Qt, MeeGo for Future disruption

With Nokia announcing Windows Phone was Nokia’s new Primary focus, it seemed to have signed the death certificate of Symbian, MeeGo and of course their shared development platform Qt (which has shown so much potential for Nokia and the MeeGo ecosystem).

What is really happening to Qt? This it outlined in the official Qt blog. Some suggested Qt for WP7 but for technicalities I don’t fully understand, it’s apparently not possible.

* The retention of Nokia’s 200 million Symbian-users is vital and Nokia has targeted sales of 150 million more Symbian-devices in years to come (Rafe from AAS suggests this possibly means Symbian lasting until 2013). To achieve that Nokia needs to continue the modernization of Symbian in Qt – to keep existing consumers engaged and to attract new customers, either upgrading from existing Symbian devices to Qt enabled devices or entirely new to Nokia.

* Qt everywhere. Qt continues to make vast inroads into especially low end Linux devices and distro’s. Qt also continues to provide a platform for others to innovate and differentiate upon. For example Dreamworks switching all their internal animation tools to Qt and making cool movies like “MegaMind” and “How to Train Your Dragon”.

* Nokia also announced it will ship its first MeeGo-related device in 2011, which will rely on the Qt ecosystem – and then will continue with MeeGo as an open source project for future disruption (By disruption, they mean, next big thing. Like the TOUCH SCREEN. It appears, my hopeful side says, that MeeGo might still be the inevitable future for Nokia when they LEAD the next big change as opposed to following it). Nokia can’t afford to be behind the next disruption again and Qt can play an important role in making sure it isn’t.

* With Qt Quick and Qt SDK 1.1 releases in the coming months we are expecting the Qt developer community to continue to grow – adding to the 400.000 developers using Qt today. Qt is developed together with the community and we expect the pace of innovation to increase even further as the community grows.

* We in Nokia are one of tens of thousands of companies in multiple industries actively using and contributing to Qt, making Qt relevant forboth mobile, desktop and other embedded developers

* Qt expansion: We have continued to hire Qt developers and we will continue to improve and expand Qt in the future. Qt is great at delivering innovation; we have been doing that for 15 years. With the upcoming release of Qt Quick, we will reach out to new users and make it even easier to create great apps and UIs for many platforms including Symbian and MeeGo.

* The new Qt SDK 1.1 technology preview. We now offer only one SDK for both desktop and mobile developers, which makes it easier to target more platforms by using just one SDK.

Cheers to Jim for the heads up!

Via Qt blog

Tags: QT

Category: Nokia, Windows Phone