Symbian^3 to Symbian^4 Upgrade Possibility with Qt Platform

GLOBAL – Today, on October 21st 2010, Nokia is making moves to streamline its development environments across device platforms, focusing squarely on Qt. Although Nokia has long been a Qt (pronounced “cute”) advocate, today, the company is making Qt its sole application development framework – meaning, that if a developer creates their application in Qt, they’ll be able to easily deploy it to Nokia devices on Symbian and MeeGo platforms. Nokia is taking this approach seriously, making the commitment to create its own applications and UI on Qt as well.

For Nokia smartphone users out there, this is great news as the move will lead to a more compelling and engaging experience, with more apps available for your device. Even more importantly, you can buy a Nokia smartphone confident that any improvements introduced later to the Symbian platform, such as the user interface, can be made available to download on your device as well. No need to wait for Symbian^4 — the improvements we were planning for Symbian^4 will be introduced as and when they become available. In fact, we will no longer be talking about Symbian^3 or Symbian^4 at all – it will be one constantly evolving and constantly improving platform.

Also part of the announcement, Nokia will embrace the emerging HTML5 standard for Web content and applications for Symbian and MeeGo platforms, both through in-built support in Qt and through the browser.

Rich Green, CTO of Nokia:

“We’re making strategic technology decisions that will accelerate our ability to offer the strongest possible opportunity for developers and the richest possible experience for consumers. For developers, it will open up a huge installed customer base for their applications. For consumers, it means a more compelling engagement with their Nokia product in terms of access to the best applications in the marketplace and a constantly improving product experience. We firmly believe that the choices we have made will not only mean significant opportunity and success for our developer partners, but for Nokia as well.”

Check out the video with Rich below to learn more:



Many of Nokia’s developers are already working in Qt and have great things to say about it. Pixelpipe’s Brett Butterfield shared, “We’re now in the process of re-creating our Symbian native UIs in Qt so will have a good story to tell. Elements of our UI that were previously taking us hours of painstaking hand coding in Symbian are now re-created in minutes with the Qt Creator. It’s not just the ease of porting our existing functionality to Qt, however the ability of adding capabilities and features beyond Symbian that has us excited.”