Nokia has agreed to purchase Trolltech (creators of the QT cross platform GUI Toolkit that KDE is based on, as well as the Qtopia cell phone platform) for $150 million.
This is an interesting move as all the hub-bub surrounding Google’s announcement of the Open Handset Alliance and the new cell platform, Android, was surprisingly devoid of Nokia’s name anywhere on it (along with Apple, AT&T, Microsoft, Palm, RIM, Symbian, and Verizon).
It seems that Nokia has other plans for the cellular device market and those plans are firmly planted around their own proprietary platform based on Qtopia.
How will Nokia compete with the attractiveness of the unified Android platform to software developers? The idea being that an app written for a Motorola Android-based phone will also work just fine on a HTC Android-based phone and again on an LG Android-based phone. While a Qtopia app (a native platform) will only run on other Qtopia devices, which looks like Nokia will be the only major hardware player in? Of course you have Apple out in left field with their own sandbox that is doing quite well also.
I’ll be curious to see if Android takes off, if Nokia will either join the OHA or run the Android platform on top of Qtopia to offer compatability for some of the more popular apps out there? Either way, it doesn’t look like we’ll see Nokia joining the OHA anytime soon as they just spent $150 million to draw their own line in the cell-platform-market sand.
(BTW, Congratulations to Trolltech! That’s a lot of hard years of engineering paying off)
yay for trolltech and the kde guys
the other good news is (other than having a good amount of money on their pockets lol), is that they will keep working on KDE, QT based software and release everything under GPL
i hope nokia helps em make some big steps onn their platforms.
Manny I think you are right, I think QT is about to get a huge kick in the pants as Trolltech expands Qtopia for Nokia’s unified cell and portable platforms (like their hand held computers) and then back ports that stuff into QT proper, which means KDE is likely to see some of that stuff too.
Either way, the TT guys were already doing awesome tech in QT, now I think it’s going to become even more robust and unified.