Products & Services

S60 application storm forecasted for summer 2009

By Mike on 21 October 2008

GLOBAL - Crack out the umbrella, we’re soon going to be caught in a torrential shower of fresh-faced S60 applications eager to be soaked up. This is as a result of QT Software (formely Trolltech, bought by Nokia back in June) porting its QT cross-platform application framework to S60, which in real-world speak means it’s now going to be dead easy for developers to port existing applications available on other devices and platforms to S60 Nokia devices with little fuss, fast.

QT on S60 is going to launch in the second quarter of 2009, so it’s next summer that we’ll truly see the effects of this significant development tool.

We know this prospect is something many of you have been excited to see, highlighted in comments you made when we ran the story about Nokia buying Trolltech back in June. One regular reader Marc commented:

“When I look at the software I use most often for work and play these days I find that it’s the cross-platform applications that I keep coming back to - Skype, the last.fm player (both of these use Trolltech’s Qt by the way), Eclipse, Firefox, Thunderbird, Emacs, OpenOffice … I use all of these regularly on computers running Windows XP, Linux, and MacOS (I don’t use Thunderbird on the Mac), and for the most part the functionality is essentially the same on each platform. I’ve been looking forward to the day that I could do the same with applications from Nokia. I’m hopeful that the Trolltech acquisition will make this a reality.”

Echoed by another Conversations reader Mike Macias:

“I really think cross platforum sofware is essential, especially with how complex these phones are becoming.”

How significant do you think this tool will be for Nokia devices? Do you believe the range and diversity of apps for S60 will increase massively as a result? Scribble down your thoughts below.

Photo from Noli

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