February MoMo London: Trolltech
I was curious as to whether Karsten Homann from Trolltech would pursue cross platform development or mobile Linux in his presentation and hence give a clue as to Nokia’s intentions in acquiring Trolltech. In the event, Karsten gave equal precedence to each.
Karsten described how Qt tools can be used to reuse UI models and functionality across different hardware. He described how it could be used by S40 and S60 to provide, for example, a consistent interface for operator services. Higher level APIs would allow for cross-platform development.
On the mobile Linux side he gave his view that OS doesn’t fit all - otherwise it becomes complex and ugly to manage. Also he said that a monopoly OS is bad thing and multiple OSs provide required market competition.
He described mobile Linux’s strengths as having no rules on branding or user experience, being open source and ability to scale within and beyond phones.
Karsten thinks that mobile Linux’s success will depend on scaling to mid-range phones. He also thinks WebKit will be a significant contributor to the next generation of mobile.
I think the idea of extending Trolltech’s Qt products to s60 and s40 is certainly compelling. It would allow for easier development (internally and externally to Nokia) and with the existing mobile Linux support could ultimately allow some parallel development on a Linux based platform. However, I am initially sceptical whether this can be done in such a way as to provide significant Symbian/S60 functionality especially as this is a moving target that’s growing daily. I suspect the result will be something with much less capability than the target platforms. It will also be interesting to see how the Qt tools will allow access to the more security sensitive APIs. We will have to wait and see.
Related Articles: