Nokia's N9 handset launched

Posted Jun 21, 2011 14:15 UTC (Tue) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750)
In reply to: Nokia's N9 handset launched by bronson
Parent article: Nokia's N9 handset launched

No, they do not want to be 100% Windows Mobile shop - they've just announced also that Qt will be in the next billion devices, ie. the whatever mass-market ("non-smartphone") phones there will be:

http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Blogs/blog/nokia...

So Qt is for those, Symbian^3 devices and the N9 flagship product. However I guess the future flagship products and other higher end / enterprise products are planned to be based on Windows Phone.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

Posted Jun 21, 2011 15:31 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (4 responses)

Nokia spokespeople say the "darndest" things, and that blog post is pretty vague stuff. Somehow Qt will get onto the next billion Nokia devices, but not via MeeGo or Symbian (which will be dropped) or Windows Phone (for which Microsoft have probably forbidden stuff like Qt).

I don't doubt that Qt could run on some low-end phone platform - it runs on a bunch of embedded platforms already, some of which have probably been on phones - but that won't offer developers the fancy high-end opportunities that, say, Android is offering. Not that this (or more likely, the message) won't change, however: Nokia changes its messages more often than any executive chosen at random changes their tie.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

Posted Jun 21, 2011 16:05 UTC (Tue) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (3 responses)

Well the logical deduction would be that Series 40 (S40) would get Qt. Of course one communication problem there also is that many people confuse Series 40 OS with Symbian OS.

But you're right, companies say all kinds of stuff and change direction all the time. Interesting, nevertheless, that it is now being touted out loud and on intention (to remind that Qt has a future also at Nokia, not just via new MeeGo companies, desktop stuff like KDE and so on).

Developers are interested (or should be interested, but of course prefer their own fancy toys) in where money opportunities lie. That theoretical billion consumers should surely be interesting, even though you wouldn't do your fancy 3D shader bling bling animations but actually just something that people need.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

Posted Jun 21, 2011 22:49 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (2 responses)

Agreed on the animations and the high-end GPU obsessions. From observation of the various smartphones and even tablets my fellow public transport users seem unable to tear themselves away from, such intensively graphical things are hardly needed, unless Facebook adopts the tired "cover flow" paradigm for everything.

Animations are VITAL

Posted Jun 25, 2011 6:52 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

This just shows that "you don't exist" :-)

Joel said it best: Don't, for a minute, think that you can get away with asking anybody to imagine how cool this would be. Don't think that they're looking at the functionality. They're not. They want to see pretty pixels.

People don't need pretty animations. But they want to see them - and that means companies who sell phones (Nokia in particular) absolutely, positively, need them. Yes, they are useless. Yes, they waste power and screen space. But without them you can sell your phones (except to few geeks who are not affected by "pretty pixels") and if you don't sell phones your company will go bankrupt.

It took me a long time to understand this. Epiphany was achieved when I've "solved" problem of my niece's slow computer. I found out that ICQ sometimes use all four cores to do what knows what and offered to replace it with Miranda IM (very lightweight messenger). The first question was: "how to download skins or at least make it less ugly". The second one was: "how to install better smiles". Only after that questions about what the thing can actually do and how to do that followed.

Animations are VITAL

Posted Jun 25, 2011 13:54 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

People don't need pretty animations. But they want to see them

Animations can give important visual clues, but the best ones do not involve "bling" which is what I and the other commenter were referring to. I admit that some special effects can be quite nice - KDE 3's icon-bar tooltips are nicer than the overused yellow tooltips that used to appear (and which can still be enabled by changing the settings) - but for many users, busy user interfaces and things rushing around all over the screen can add to their confusion.

Some of these observations can be "generational": young people whose experiences have been formed by playing with GUI-based technology from infancy are perhaps a lot better equipped to deal with busy user interfaces because they're probably accustomed to filtering things out, but observe older people and you will see how confusing even a small dose of "bling" can be.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

Posted Jun 22, 2011 8:39 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (6 responses)

> No, they do not want to be 100% Windows Mobile shop - they've just announced also that Qt will be in the next billion devices

You have to admit that you get a different idea when you listen to the announcements of the Nokia CEO, so we might be forgiven for remaining sceptical :-). Top Management committment to QT/Meego looks different.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

Posted Jun 22, 2011 10:37 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (5 responses)

Yes, I admit, and it is definitely annoying when he talks about "completely moving to" Windows Phone and the "winning" ecosystem around it. But it's also that western medias tend to focus on smartphones reporting only and forget about the hundreds of millions of Series 40 phones on the market and any discussion related to those at the same press events. Technology press is simply interested in smartphones mostly, and the mass media don't understand there is a difference when they source their ideas from the technology press.

From the talks it looks like there would be no commitment directly to MeeGo, but there would be a strong commitment to Qt.

So far in each of these launch events it has been officially said that a) N9 is a product to be on sale for a long time b) Qt will be brought to the "next billion" phone consumers ie. non-highend phones. At least the SVP of developer and marketplace Marco Argenti and SEA area smart devices head Andrej Sonkin have said that Qt is in core of their future strategy. Even Mary McDowell and Elop himself talk about the same "next billion strategy", though of course not mentioning technologies directly.

And I hope it will be so simply because that would be great for Qt's future in general - which in turn is good for MeeGo as well and FLOSS in the long term to have a long term supporter. And I hope some other company would now look what Nokia made possible with Qt and make the next winning Qt/Linux smartphone ;)

Nokia's N9 handset launched

Posted Jun 22, 2011 20:34 UTC (Wed) by mvaar (guest, #75742) [Link] (4 responses)

doesn't webOS use QT for rendering the UI ?

Nokia's N9 handset launched

Posted Jun 23, 2011 14:29 UTC (Thu) by ebassi (subscriber, #54855) [Link] (3 responses)

no, they don't. webos uses webkit and html5+javascript for the whole UX.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

Posted Jun 23, 2011 14:48 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

There is Qt on the devices by default, though.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

Posted Jun 23, 2011 15:46 UTC (Thu) by mvaar (guest, #75742) [Link] (1 responses)

what does webkit use for rendering ? In other words, what is the rendering API, one level above the graphical primitives such as openGL or X or whatever ?

It's switchable...

Posted Jun 25, 2011 6:54 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Well, WebKit embedded in recent versions of Qt obviously uses Qt. Chrome for Linux uses Cairo (and may be GTK but AFAIK they try to minimize GTK use). I don't know what webOS is using.