Nokia acquires Trolltech, what it means for user and developers.

The news is rife with Microsoft's acquisition attempt of Yahoo!, probably the biggest acquisition bid of all times. While this is huge news in itself, it has dwarfed an equally important but less glamorous deal of Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech. For the uninitiated it is the company behind Qt, an open source and multi-platform UI designer. Though primarily for Desktop application development, Qt also has a smart-phone / PDA cousin called Qtopia which runs on Linux based smart-phones.

So, why would Nokia be interested in Qt all of a sudden. Is Nokia finally ready to adopt Linux as a standard operating system for its devices ? I don't think so. Nokia might have been thinking of Linux for its devices but I do not think they would phase-out or even start phasing out Symbian platform sometime soon.

I think the reason behind this is that they plan on providing a standard UI designer to the already discussed Open C platform. So, the developers would be able to port existing open source unix/linux based applications to Symbian in totality, unlike Open C, which allows porting only the business logic and requires Symbain C++ module to provide even the basic UI.

In addition, this would also give developers an alternative to the existing Symbian C++ development environment, which is not exactly the easiest platform to develop in. And in the long term, it would not only provide loads of applications ported from Linux to Symbian but an army of open source developers.

Plenty of applications being available for its devices has always been the USP for Symbian and Nokia phones, but with open source platforms such as Android and OpenMoko ready to hit the market very soon, this may not continue to be the case. Nokia knows it has to inevitably move towards open source. In fact, Nokia has already shown cautious enthusiasm towards open source. Nokia's standard browser is based on Webkit, the open source browser engine.

So, what can we expect to see in the future. Most definitely a lot of great open source application running your Nokia S60 3rd edition mobile phones. Personally, I would be really interested in porting VLC to Symbian S60, now that VLC has announced that from 0.9.0 build onwards the UI would be QT4 based. So, its a very good news for Nokia phone users.

My personal advice to Nokia developers, starting looking at Qt4. You might find yourself using it for S60 development sooner than you expect.