

Moving to QT Quick, Nokia has won the developers battle? - brkumar
http://www.paniccode.com/2010/10/nokia-has-already-won-the-developers-battle/

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bad_user
In theory it is great, but I'm waiting to see if they deliver. If Symbian 4 /
MeeGo suck for end-users, it doesn't matter how good the SDK is.

On the other hand Nokia is dominating the low-end phone market by an order of
magnitude. And personally I haven't bought an Android phone already because
they are so damn expensive and I don't want 2-year contracts. And in Europe a
lot of people are holding off from expensive phones just as I'm doing,
preferring to go cheap with 1-year contracts or with PrePay options.

So it's not like they don't have what it takes to be winners.

~~~
knotty66
You can get decent Android phones like the T-Mobile Pulse Mini for £79 now
here in the UK, on PAYG.

Or you can spend a little more - £99 - and get an Orange San Francisco with an
OLED display and capacitive touchscreen.

The prices have really come down over the last few months.

~~~
bad_user
Well, yeah I know, I think I'm going to buy a HTC Wildfire next week.

But these cheaper phones are cutting down on processing power / memory and
Android 3 will require good hardware to receive an update, which kind of turns
me off.

Still, that wasn't my point: Nokia still has over 34% of the global mobile
phones marketshare (and this includes everyone selling phones, like Motorola,
Samsung, Sony-Erricsson, Sagem, etc...), and while it has had declined in
recent quarters they have a talent for coming back. All I'm saying is that
they can leverage their huge customers base with phones that are cheaper than
the iPhone or high-end Android phones.

I would also prefer to develop for MeGoo rather than the alternatives, but the
SDK quality matters less than everything else: like having a good marketplace
for developers or having customers that are paying for apps.

~~~
blub
Indeed, processing power is the issue: "What's odd is that there's a decent
amount of RAM on offer here, and a 600MHz Qualcomm processor - but this phone
is juddery, slow and prone to freezing so often you'll want to throw it in a
canal."

"Simple things like opening the contacts menu or trying to shuffle between
home screens can take an age, and if you leave the phone asleep for too long
it will simply freeze at times, meaning no alarms, texts or phone calls."

(from Techradar).

"Unfortunately, the Mini's anaemic processor often struggles to keep pace with
the software. If you have several apps running at once, as well as the
animated wallpapers, the handset will be reduced to a pitiful crawl."

(CNET)

~~~
stcredzero
Is it processing power or too much code bloat? The device in this video is an
8 bit AVR:

[http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/11/8-bit_touch-
sensiti...](http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/11/8-bit_touch-
sensitive_handheld.html)

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yesbabyyes
We're currently evaluating a Nokia N8 for a contract. I know that the article
is about the next step for Nokia, but the fact that they are releasing this
phone tells me that Nokia is not winning.

The phone is barely usable.

~~~
blub
You are exaggerating. The N8 is Nokia's best touch screen phone and a good all
around phone.

Its only problem is that the UI is not as polished as on iPhone or Android,
but it's good enough.

~~~
yesbabyyes
The fact that it's Nokia's best touch screen phone is what makes me reluctant
to believe they are on the verge of winning anything when it comes to smart
phones.

From <http://events.nokia.com/NokiaN8/>: _Take amazing photos and videos,
connect to your favourite social networks and be entertained with the latest
Web TV programs and Ovi Store apps._

They market this as a phone with a good camera (HD video recording) and
integrated with social networks. Yet, the only way to send an image or a video
is "via messaging" or "via Bluetooth". "Messaging" in this case, is MMS.

Googling for a way to get the HD videos off the phone some other way than
mounting it over USB, I find PixelPipe: <http://pixelpipe.com/>

The only thing that's outstanding with PixelPipe is that it's UI is even worse
than the one on Nokia N8.

If I want to connect my new N8 with my Facebook profile, I have to register
for the Ovi Store first. This is a process which takes me through three
dialogs: I have to enter my e-mail address, my phone number, pick a username
and a password, and enter a _CAPTCHA_.

Below the CAPTCHA is a text input field. When I click the input field, the
text input widget and the keyboard appears, covering the CAPTCHA I'm supposed
to read.

This is one of a long list of similar experiences from using the phone for one
hour. Nobody used this phone before it went to market.

~~~
samstokes
I haven't used an N8, but with my much older (and less consumer-focused) E71
it's pretty easy to send photos by email as well, which covers 90% of my use
cases. You can upload photos to Facebook and Tumblr (and others) via email, so
that pretty much covers social media integration as well.

Are you sure this isn't merely a confusing UI (something Nokia definitely
suffers from), rather than missing functionality?

~~~
yesbabyyes
Well, I'm trying to send HD video. The bitrate is around 1 MB/s. I'd rather
not do that via e-mail.

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dtf
QT Quick (Nokia), Clutter (Intel) and Core Animation (Apple). Would it be fair
to say these are modern toolkits with similar goals? Does anyone in the know
have an opinion on which one's doing it the most right?

~~~
gregschlom
Haven't tried Core Animation or Clutter, but one thing that is absolutely
awesome with Qt Quick is that it runs on Windows, Mac OS, Linux, and Nokia
smartphones...

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Seth_Kriticos
I don't care much about Symbian or MeGoo, nor do I for KDE. Qt is wonderful
though. I can develop applications on my Linux machine and just compile them
on Windows without having to have to run it. Also, it's quite mature with a
good feature set, reasonably fast, reasonably integrated in various platforms
and has an adequate SDK (though I don't use that). The doc's are quite good
too.

------
soro
Hmmm no. Nokia has definitely not won. One of the big problems with cross
platform toolkits in general is that the platforms are ... different! They
have different capabilities and completely different user interface paradigms.
A good Android interface is not a good iPhone interface and these days people
are coming to expect a polish that you will just not achieve with cross
platform tools. The only cross platform technology that ever really succeeded
is the web.

That they have abandoned MeeGo was probably a good idea, but in my opinion it
just shows how desperately they need something new and good. They don't even
have what Microsoft now has and I doubt they will be able to regain any
significant market share after Google, Apple and Microsoft have split the
mobile market between themselves by the time Nokia finally releases something
that doesn't suck.

Nokia is in big trouble and I really don't understand how people can not see
this.

~~~
DavidMcLaughlin
> That they have abandoned MeeGo was probably a good idea

Nokia didn't abandon MeeGo, they just unified their developer offering because
the feedback was that the current 'developer story' was far too complicated.
As a Nokia employee, I think it was a step in the right direction but we have
not 'won' anything yet.

~~~
soro
Hmm sorry yes, phrased it wrong. I would really like Nokia to come out with
something good, I have nothing against the company and they build nice
hardware. Competition is also never bad and I would like to see a truly open
platform. I just think that at this point it's really not a trivial feat to
regain market share in this very competitive segment with several strong
players with years of a head start and (relatively) mature platforms.

~~~
sn
+1 on nice hardware, -1 on durability. My n900 had to have warranty service so
I used the free nexus one I got from google at a conference. Using the nexus
one, which has no keyboard and an extremely oversensitive touch screen, was
extremely painful. I am thankful to have my keyboard and keyboard shortcuts
again and I hope nokia fixed the design issues they had with the usb
connector.

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greyman
I don't understand, as the article suggest, why it will be good for Nokia if
Qt will be ported to Android, iOS or WP7...(?)

Here in Europe, Nokia is still #1 in dumbphones area, and what I see is that
there is still a large number of people who doesn't need/want smartphone. So
Nokia will probably stay strong in this still-big area. (But they undoubtedly
will have a problem in the smartphone segment.)

~~~
gregschlom
If the ports are really good and functional, it will be good for developpers
because they'll choose to write their app with Qt Quick and have them run on
Android, iPhone, and Nokia smartphones. That's why the article claim they will
"win the developpers battle".

It doesn't mean that it will be good for their smartphones directly (like, it
will not boost Nokia smartphones sales).

~~~
ikujhygtfghyjuk
It will long term though. If apps run everywhere then iPhone is just an
expensive shiny phone then with a level playing field the company that
produces the cheapest simplest phone (that runs the same apps) will make
money.

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kenshi
The promise of "write once, run anywhere". Where have I heard that before?

Somehow I doubt Nokia would be particularly motivated to maintain any
Android/iOS/WebOS versions of Qt - assuming they bother to write them at all.

~~~
Tuna-Fish
Qt is LGPL. It's certainly possible to write and maintain an Android/iOS/WebOS
port of Qt without Nokia's help or approval -- and if you spend a while
thinking about it with a lawyer, it might be possible to write a proprietary
one you can sell to people who have already written an app for Meego.

(edit) I just want to add that write once, run anywhere hasn't ever worked
right, but that hasn't ever stopped it from being an efficient way to market
your platform to developers either.

~~~
joezydeco
Qt is slighly different because the whole "write once run anywhere" isn't done
at the runtime level, it's just at the API level. You still need to cross-
compile the Qt libraries for the target system and rebuild your app for the
new target.

But Trolltech (whoops, I mean Nokia) have a great set of tools to make
regenerating a project for a different platform very easy. I've been able to
take a typical project and build it for Mac, PC, and Linux in a matter of
minutes with no editing. It's not always pretty (like the Mac libraries don't
use the UI elements nicely), but it works well.

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aniket_ray
Seems more like a marketing strategy to me. Even newer and unrelated
technologies would now be sold under the "Qt" banner.

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davidw
Seems like there are lot of "if's" and requirements that things go according
to plan.

Also... C++? I'm not that enthusiastic, really. I'm not a Java fan, but all in
all, I think I'd prefer it at this point, if for nothing else than being a bit
simpler and getting GC built in.

~~~
daliusd
QT Quick is actually javascript not C++. Nokia QT is C++ however.

~~~
joezydeco
It's Javascript...that runs on an engine written with the Qt C++ libraries.

~~~
daliusd
I will not give to cut of my hand for that but I'm pretty sure that all
popular javascript engines are written in C/C++. At least that applies to V8
and SpiderMonkey.

~~~
joezydeco
What I meant is that all of the graphics primitives and interaction handling
is done by the Qt libraries, not the webkit layer. There is no webkit in a QML
runtime...unless you embed a QWebKit element into your design.

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igrekel
Saying "by next year" and "may have already won the developers battle" in the
same paragraph really flags this as wishful marketing.

Plus there is a lot more to wooing developers than just toolkits. But Qt is
still something I enjoy using.

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binaryfinery
"We have no money to support developers so we are going to make you all use
one toolkit"

Yes, we all know that what we need is _another_ platform to target. Get a clue
Nokia. Its all about apps now, and this is the priority for app developers:

* iOS

* Android

* WP7

* The fluff in my navel

* Nokia Qt

Pretend all you want, but this is the order my clients budget for.

~~~
ikujhygtfghyjuk
Can't Qt run on Android and W7?

~~~
blub
Community port on Android, no change on W7, it's C#-only.

~~~
ikujhygtfghyjuk
W7 is locked to .Net ???

That's going to be a success then - all those ground breaking .Net apps on
windows will just port straight over.

