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 their increased focus on Qt as Nokia’s 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 Nokia 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 they can use to customize the experience depending on the device and the latest capabilities. On Nokia’s latest Symbian devices, they 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 they take that decision they not only stopped all Nokia development in other frameworks, they 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. They are also confident that by focusing on Qt and Qt Quick as their sole application development strategy, they 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 Nokia being able to take greater control over the innovation of the Symbian platform is good news and complementary to the strategy they are executing.”
Updates via Email: Get Nokia-news.com updates delivered directly to your email account or mobile device. Subscribe to Nokia-News.com Feed by Email
