back to article Nokia plays strong Linux hand withTrolltech buy

Nokia may be strengthening its ties with major internet brands to boost its Ovi web services portal, but for a company of this scale, there must also be an agenda to set its own standards in the evolving mobile internet market on which it has staked its future. The Finnish giant's latest software acquisition, of Norwegian Linux …

COMMENTS

This topic is closed for new posts.
  1. Richard Fletcher

    Just so as you know

    This article implies Trolltech=linux guys. This is not strictly true.

    Trolltech's QT is not a linux product only. It works cross-platform. While I have no argument that Nokia would be more likely to build a QT on linux (or QTopia) based OS for their phones they could conceivably still stick QT on top of Windows. Perhaps Nokia see their phones as needing to communicate more effectively across all platforms, due to the miserable failure that is Vista, and see that with QT they can write the application once and provide binaries for Linux, Windows and if I remember correctly Mac as well.

  2. Mage Silver badge
    Boffin

    QT and Qtopia

    QT is a toolset like GTK. You can even do Windows or Linux Desktop programs with it.

    Qtopia is a GUI for SMALL screens of PDAs, MP3 players, Satnav or Phones. It is not so great for bigger screens.

    Maemo does not work for small screens. Needs the Tablet N8xx series 800x480 display or bigger. So Nokia could logically support both.

    Android is for phones only. Not PMPs, Satnavs, PDAs or VOIP handsets. (No VOIP in Android, VOIP and phone stack are both options in Qtopia.

    QT is for building GUI apps. It isn't a GUI.

    Now then.

  3. John Vaudin
    Thumb Down

    Irrelevant

    Nokia don't care about Trolltech's cross-platform technology - they're just after a quick and cheap way to get their own Linux platform. Why? Because Apple has one and Google has one - so Nokia has to have one - simple as that.

    Not that they aren't in need of a next-generation platform. Symbian really is ready for the knackers yard, and I guess it can't have been much fun being shown up so badly by an upstart like Apple, but I can't really see Trolltech bringing anything very valuable to the table.

    Their technology might be very clever, if you want to write something that runs cross-platform, but like I say - that's not Nokia's problem. They want a platform to compete with iPhone and Android, and that means they need something which is highly optimised to get the very best out the hardware they have. Compare the fluidity of the UI on the iPhone to clunky, slow S6O UI on the N95, and remember they share very similar hardware, and you'll see that they need something a bit special to catch up.

    Also - I can't help feeling that Android's approach of exposing all the low-level functionality of the OS as Java callable libraries, so that the high-level apps can be written in Java, is likely to produce a far more productive development environment than insisting everything's written in C++. It would also allow for some sort security environment to be implemented if that was required.

    So - Nokia and Trolltech. The wrong aquisition of the wrong technology, by a company that has lost the will or the balls to develop any decent technology of it's own.

    Let the flame war commense!

  4. Kim Rasmussen
    Linux

    Internet Tablet important?

    "... its important Internet Tablet range, its answer to Intel's Ultra-Mobile PC"

    Hmm. I've got one.

    I think it's a great little box, no doubt about that. But I honestly don't see Nokia treating it as if it was an important product to them. Particularly after the shoddy way they handled the roll-out of OS2008, with horribly overloaded and misconfigured servers.

    But it would be nice if they were to ditch Gnome/GTK in favour Qt on the Tablets. I never could stand writing code for GTK, and Gnome is the stuff of nightmares.

This topic is closed for new posts.

Other stories you might like