‘Expect more rapid innovations for Symbian platform’ says Nokia CTO Rich Green

jasonblack | 08 November, 2010 16:55

Changes to the Symbian Foundation were announced earlier today, and at the same time, Nokia reaffirmed its commitment to Symbian, the world’s most widely used smartphone platform.

“Nokia will continue to invest in the development of the Symbian platform; and we plan to make the software available to the Symbian ecosystem via an alternative, direct and open model.  Developers can expect more rapid innovations for the Symbian platform, occurring in a timely and iterative manner,” said Nokia CTO Rich Green. “And rest assured, we will deliver an exciting portfolio of Symbian-based smartphones to consumers worldwide,” he added. 

Nokia’s recent decision to focus on Qt as its sole application development framework is expected to bring greater efficiency and speed of evolution to the Symbian platform. This will help to ensure app compatibility with future Symbian platform versions, and enable more frequent updates and upgrades for Nokia smartphones.

To offer more insight about these changes, and to answer questions about the announcement from last month, Nokia’s Green had some further statements on our commitment to innovating the Symbian operating system and about our increased focus on Qt as our sole development platform:

“Anyone who heard the things Nokia said about Symbian at Nokia World 2010 in London, can have no doubts about our commitment to this development platform. We believe that Symbian is the best development platform to cover a range of mobile devices. Symbian was built for mobile; and has the capacity to be a highly tuned and rich environment for our customers and developers.”

On top of that core platform, developers use frameworks to develop things like the user interface, applications, and services. It’s the framework that we can use to customize the experience depending on the device and the latest capabilities. On our latest Symbian devices, we had multiple development frameworks. A developer doesn’t want to try and work out which framework to use. They want to know they can develop an application and it will work on your device. Ideally, they want it to work on more than one device. They want it to reach the largest possible global audience and to continue to work in the future.

For most of 2010 Nokia has been encouraging developers to use Qt. To show how seriously we take that decision we not only stopped all Nokia development in other frameworks, we committed to redeveloping key Nokia applications and services that weren’t already in Qt.

Nokia has been working hard on developing in Qt, as evidenced by the introduction of Qt Quick, which makes rich, visual applications and services even easier to develop. We are confident that by focusing on Qt and Qt Quick as our sole application development strategy, we will increase the opportunity for developers, constantly improve the experience for users and extend the joy that people get from a single device.

The news today about our being able to take greater control over the innovation of the Symbian platform is good news and complementary to the strategy we are executing.”

Update (9 November 2010): In response to comments about this blog post regarding MeeGo, and the status of Web Runtime, please note the following:

MeeGo is the platform we announced together with Intel for products that go beyond the capabilities of today’s smartphones. It is intended to work across not just a range of mobile handsets but also to other domains, including in-vehicle infotainment systems, netbooks and tablets. As MeeGo already supports Qt, our strategy announcement did not represent a departure. It should be a great encouragement for developers who can start writing in Qt for Symbian and the Nokia N900 today, and then easily bring their applications to MeeGo in the future. You’ll hear more from us about MeeGo next year.

Symbian continues to support the Symbian Web Runtime, however we will not be making further investments. We are now focused on offering a leading application development platform with Qt and Qt Quick. Qt does of course include support for HTML5 with Qt Quick, bringing - amongst many things - a JavaScript-like declarative language. Our browser will also support HTML5.

Qt , S60 , Symbian C++ | Next | Previous | Comments (9) | Trackbacks (0)

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"we not only stopped all Nokia development in other frameworks"

lorion84 | 08/11/2010, 23:43

How does this affect WRT?

Good, but what about the other open source platforms of yours

vivmak | 09/11/2010, 12:11

Do you have equally crystal clear strategy for Maemo/Meego , N900 platforms to share with us, I know we are small community but quite frustrated right now.

re: "we not only stopped all Nokia development in other frameworks"

mikolas | 09/11/2010, 14:19

AFAIK current WRT will be replaced by QT Web Runtime. Have no idea about compatibility, though.

Update to this blog post

jasonblack | 09/11/2010, 23:18

jasonblack

@vivmak and @mikolas - please see the "update" to this blog post, noted above.

services in Qt

assayag | 10/11/2010, 13:26

Please Nokia if you can remove the FEP architecture and instead allow third party develop in Qt alternative input methods services like Android allows, it will be a a great progress for customizable user interface. The keyboard on Nokia touchscreen devices is NOT user friendly and if you plan only to access the keyboard functionalities using some Qt mobility API, you will miss the point.

good go no

nokialova | 16/11/2010, 08:08

GOod god no!!!!!!!!!! stick with S40 S60 plz no Symbian Yuk

S40 S60 FTW!!!

nokialova | 16/11/2010, 08:10

NO SYmbian horrible!!!!!!!!!!!! S40 and 60 is wicked.....

Good news

IPhoneHome | 13/01/2011, 00:04

I love Symbian, so this is good news. I'm definitely looking forward to these changes! Too bad Rich Green didn't go more into details.

I'll say S40 symbian WP7 together

shpe11 | 19/02/2011, 00:09

one cool feature:

being able to put widgets as wallpaper, this will be the next level in personalization... you can create homescreens UIs - just think about a WRT with a flash in it... with rich cool experience... can turn nokia's in iOS androids and wp7 and much more!!!

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