Does anyone know Nokia's strategy on Qt, Symbian, Maemo, MeeGo?

Question

I don't know this question should or shouldn't be here but I wonder so much. What will Nokia do with Qt, Symbian (3rd, 5th, 1, 2, 3 ...) and MeeGo (Meego will be with symbian or will replace Symbian) and Maemo?

Do you think it is good to learn Nokia tools? Symbian will live forever or die in the next X years?

I really need your suggestions because I want to learn one more new programming language to develop mobile applications and I think I lost my way on these tons of way.

Colbert

This question is rather subjective and argumentative. Even though I answered, I'm also voting to close it. – Multiplicate

Answer 1

Qt has great cross-platform promise. It's not quite there yet, writing cross-platform mobile apps is "write once, #ifdef everywhere" at the moment. But if you're targeting mobile app development for Nokia devices, learning Qt is certainly the place to start. Qt with e.g. Qt Mobility additions is the greatest common denominator between the platforms.

If you're planning to do simpler widget applications, go to HTML5 instead. It's even more cross-platform. (Noticed the nokia-wrt tag: Forget about WRT. It's been discontinued.)

As for the platform lifecycles, it's just normal evolution. New platforms will replace older ones in high-end devices. Older platforms don't die but just end up being used in cheaper lower end devices. Thus Symbian won't die any time soon. In the foreseeable future, there will still be huge numbers of Symbian-based devices in the market, capable of running Qt apps compiled for Symbian. Heck. even the older Series 40 and Series 30 platforms are still around and doing well in their segments, though Qt doesn't run on them.

In the case of Maemo and MeeGo, MeeGo will replace Maemo (technically MeeGo is sort of Maemo 6).

In the case of Symbian evolution, Nokia has ditched the Symbian^n model as of Symbian^4 and moved to a continuous, rolling updates model. So there will just be the Symbian platform, not many of them.

Multiplicate

The beauty of this approach using Qt is that (for the most part) writing Qt apps will just work on Meego AND Symbian allowing develops to target hundreds of millions of end users with the same code. – Expiatory

Answer 2

The answers to this question really have changed a lot since Nokia's announcement that they are going to move to Windows Phone 7 for their smart phone platform. While they claim theywill keep working on MeeGo as a research and development platform, it seems clear that they are largely going to abandon many of their plans for Maemo, MeeGo, and even Qt since that is a non-starter on WP7. Symbian is officially dead for new smart phones from Nokia.

But Nokia is just one company, albeit the largest mobile telephone vendor in the world. Still, Samsung is nipping at their heels and there are lots of companies taking market share from Nokia in the smart phone market place, many of those run Android. So if you're looking for a future platform for development that will be used by big companies, you could do worse than learning how to develop in Qt for Linux.

Scilla

I quit the nokia and symbian. Now learning android and maybe later iphone (because of market share). Thank you for your answer and I think Nokia will be back to the wheel world in the near future... – Colbert

Answer 3

Nokia has a great strategy planned. The strategy becomes evidently clear in qt The devlopers can instead of targeting one platform with their code they can target multiple platforms like for egzample have an app developed for solitere and then have it run in windows linux and mac as well as symbian and windows mobile.Hence reducing number of coding hours and efforts of the platform As for symbian and meego Symbian:-will have continous updates regardless of phone make Meego:-will come out with a new parallel UI wich could be integrated as well in symbian

Overall:-no platform binary break and easy deployment for developer

Metronome

There are still binary breaks between platforms - unless you're within the same platform family such as Symbian. Ideally, you can compile the same source to different targets but the same binary won't run everywhere. – Multiplicate

Answer 4

I hope Symbian will die sooner rather than later, but it should be safe for you to learn the Nokia tools. They are now based on QT, which opens up a whole range of UI development skills to you. QT is cross-platform, applicable to any system (whether Linux, Windows, whatever), not just the Nokia systems. Gives you the chance to hone your C++ experience too.

Moreover the Nokia QT toolkit (QT tuned for the Nokia phones) is common to both Symbian and Meego, so you're all set for the future. When Symbian dies (soon, please), you'll be still using the same toolkit for Meego.

Frodina

Please keep your anti-Symbian bias to yourself. Its still the most used smart phone OS on the planet. That, Combined with the cross-platform Qt makes it a fantastic opportunity to target hundreds of millions of end users. – Expiatory