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Here is an pick from my blog in the making on the recent events of last 1 year.
It talks about Nokia's over all strategy and how Qt fits in.
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1. This one is one of the most interesting but almost overlooked by
everybody. Its getting WiFI on the cellphone and Nokia in the past one
year has got it on more than half of its cellphone range. Others
players have taken notice but they havent delivered as aggressive as
Nokia. Now why is it important? 802.11g the WiFi protocol gives you
speeds of 54Mbps, EDGE/GPRS gives 144Kbps. 802.11 has become the
backbone of the network and no other network gives the versitality and
reach that the ethernet gives today. But isnt Nokia a cellphone
player? Why should it even care beyond WiFi just being another feature
on the already feature rich cellphones of today? Because to my mind
Nokia is not even thinking cellphones. THE CELLPHONE IS DEAD! Its
place is going to be taken in by the "Internet Device" (Whats your ID
number, Hah! That sounds cool.), a device that that connects you to
the world and also makes a phone call. But, isnt that what Smartphones
are today. Yes, and no. Smartphones get you connected but only for the
emails and documents and schedules, they havent exposed a bit of the
richness of internet and PC to the phone user. Even the applications
available on the smartphone are really miniature versions of the same
applications that are on the PC and just enough in number to keep the
smart people busy. Smartphones right now are only smart enough for the
smart people (read, business people on the move), they are not even
sold to the mere mortals like me who don't talk business ï. But WiFi
is just one piece of the puzzle. How do you get the richness of the
content that works well for the size of the "Internet Device". Simple
you do the WiFi again. Just like you picked the biggest and most open
connectivity protocol available at this time, you pick an operating
system that's as common and as open ;-). Enter Linux. Are you
surprised? Well, shoudnt be as Linux is another silent mover that
nobody is talking about still and is making inroads as the OS of
choice for the device on the move. Well, you got the hardware (WiFi)
and the operating system (Linux Mobile), the only missing link in the
puzzle is the content. Enters the marriage of Nokia with Trolltech.
Trolltech is a pretty small company that creates a C++ cross-platform
toolkit called Qt for software development for the PC. Qt has a little
cousin by the name Qtopia and a Java version called Qt Jambi. The trio
together have created ripples in the cross platform development market
in last few years and people working with these technologies can go on
and on about its simplicity and robustness as an application
development platform. And just like WiFi and Linux, Qt is today
widespread with most of KDE (the User Interface shell for Linux on PC)
and applications on it have roots in Qt. And just like WiFi and Linux,
Qt is also as open as it can be (It has an open source license). The
final icing of the cake that the married couple (Nokia and Trolltech)
are going to cut and eat is that all three pieces of the strategy are
established solid platforms, have years of development behind them and
more importantly talk the common language of the common developer;
Linux with C++ and Java development on a small platform with the reach
of WiFi, can it get any better? You just opened the Mobile platform to
every developer on this planet who was developing for the PC and guess
what, he doesn't need to learn a new API or a development langaue. It
can do what Windows OS and Visual Studio did to Windows platform on
PC. Will Nokia kill me for exposing their strategy or hire me, time
will tell ;-)
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Thanks
Pankaj
On 2/12/08, Thiago Macieira <thiago.macieira@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Constantin Makshin wrote:
> >Intersesting article, but I haven't found anything about Qt there...
> >
> >And "cross-platform phones" -- what's that? Does that mean Nokia will
> >develop phones which can be "equipped" with any OS (Symbian, Windows
> >Mobile, Linux, etc.) or what?
>
> I'm guessing here just as much as you guys are. (This is not an official
> Nokia position mainly because I have no idea what that would be)
>
> Cross-platform phone must mean the phone stack and application suite is
> cross-platform. That is, the same suite would run on Symbian-, Linux- or
> Windows Mobile-equipped devices. Note that they
> said "operator-independent cross-platform software stacks".
>
> That's where I see where Qt would fit in.
>
> Better yet, you'd develop the same application on the desktop and reuse it
> entirely or almost fully on smaller devices (form factor and lack of
> keyboard would require some rethinking). Laptops get smaller and smaller,
> phones and PDAs get larger and more capable -- the lines between a laptop
> and a PDA and a phone will be blurry (if they are not already).
>
> --
> Thiago Josà Macieira - thiago.macieira AT trolltech.com
> Trolltech ASA - Sandakerveien 116, NO-0402 Oslo, Norway
>
>
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