Thankfully Nokia has killed Orbit. Qt world was under the threat of fragmentation with the Meego team developing Meego Touch while Symbian focusing on Orbit. If you used either, it was not clear how you would port apps from one to the other and would have killed Qt’s cross-platform advantages. The future of Meego Touch is still not clear and its not clear whether it will be available on Symbian. I guess I will focus on just the core Qt and Qt Quick which are guaranteed to be available on all platforms.
Have been learning Qt and the more I learn, the more impressed I am with it. Recent changes such as Qt Quick look extremely impressive. Learning Qt means that i can reuse my knowledge for writing desktop applications. Great job (formerly) Trolltech and Nokia. More posts on Qt soon.
Well nowadays Nokia bashing is in fashion so I figured I might also add some views. I think Symbian is lagging behind in some critical areas:
1. Default web browser needs to be improved. Whether its rendering speed, javascript execution or support for features such as HTML5, WebGL or Flash 10.1, it needs to be improved. Opera Mobile is a workable 3rd party solution for now but Nokia need to step-up their game here.
2. Phones with better CPUs than an ARM11 680MHz is required. This is not a problem with Symbian but rather with Nokia.
3. Some sort of notification API is required for applications. Qt also needs a good widget API so that an application can have a “display as widget” mode.
4. Symbian^4 is a critical point for Symbian due to breakage of backwards compatibility. Nokia need to work with big-name developers actively so that well known apps such as google maps, skype, opera mobile etc remain available. If these apps were to disappear from Symbian, Symbian^4 will be as good as dead.
