Symbian, the OS used on a majority of the world’s mobile phones, is getting some new support in the latest version of Qt. That’s a move that could benefit both Symbian and Nokia, Qt’s owner and the OS’s chief backer. LinuxPlanet has the story.
Nokia is ramping up development of its Qt open source user interface and application framework with a new release this week.
Among the big new additions to Qt 4.6 is support for the widespread Symbian mobile phone operating system.
The move comes at a critical time for both Nokia and Symbian as each faces increasing pressure from developers building apps for Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), whose iPhone continues to gain traction among developers and end users. They’re also facing competition from rivals like the Google-backed open source mobile OS, Android.
As a result, for Nokia, Qt is a key way to keep its hand in the development game. The C++ application development framework for GUIs enables developers to write
applications for deployment across multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux/UNIX, Mac OS X — and now Symbian — along with preview support for Nokia’s Maemo mobile operating system. Qt also is well-known as the framework behind the open source KDE Linux desktop.