Nokia announces official Qt port to Maemo 5

Nokia's Maemo 5 powered N900 Internet Tablet and Smartphone. Nokia has announced the official port of the community-driven Qt for Maemo project. The announcement means that developers will be able to use Qt to create applications for future Maemo 5 devices, including Nokia's upcoming N900 Internet Tablet, and easily port them to other supported platforms such as Symbian, Windows Mobile and the next Maemo 6 release. "Developers will be able to use Qt as a framework to create powerful native applications and with Qt's Webkit integration, it also provides them with a platform for creating web applications and services," said Sebastian Nyström, Vice President of Application Services and Frameworks at Nokia.

Nokia's press release says that the change to an official port was necessary to make sure that applications created with Qt would be compatible with future versions of Qt on Maemo, Symbian and other platforms which Qt supports. According to Nokia, the Qt for Maemo project which Nokia's port is based on "provided a strong foundation for building the official port, and because of the open nature of the project, Nokia was able to base the official port on this code".

In a post on the Qt Labs Blog, Qt software engineer Harald Fernengel says that there are "still some rough edges" in the current release. The technology preview features include hardware acceleration with OpenGL ES 2, hardware and software keyboard input support, global menu integration and multimedia playback via Phonon. Fernengel notes that currently Qt for Maemo 5 can only be built inside of the Maemo scratchbox-based SDK, however, official packages should be available "in a few more days".

More details about the Qt Technology Preview for Maemo developers can be found on the project's web page and a demonstration video of Qt running on Nokia's N900 is also provided. The source for the technology preview is available to download and is released under a "special technology preview license". The project's site currently states .deb packages are "coming soon". A final release based on Qt 4.6 is expected to be available in the first quarter of 2010.

See also:

• Nokia announces N900 mobile computer, a report from The H.

(crve)