It’s the end of the Nokia Symbian world as we know it, and I feel fine | November 19th, 2009
So, after hearing the news that Nokia will be dropping Symbian from their High-End N-Series phones by 2012, and adopting Maemo, I decided that I would do a bit more research into the platform. I heard good things about it being open and it having an actual mature Linux stack (as opposed to what is running on Android and Palm), and I wanted to see how much effort it would take to get a PhoneGap prototype to run on it. At around 4 PM, I have this to show for it:
I used QtWebView to implement this, and it took more time to get the SDK started and working than it took to actually write the app and run it. I think getting the SDK for Maemo was the biggest hurdle for developing for the device so far. Of course, this is ONLY for Nokia phones, and not for many other phones, but the fact that the N900 was a device that I was considering until I found out it couldn’t support Canadian HSPA frequencies, I figure it was worth messing with. Also, QtWebKit is a part of Qt, and in theory can run on Windows Mobile with mostly the same codebase. With the uncertainty of whether Maemo would get Symbian WRT running on the device in some way, this may be an option.
At the end of the day, I’ll probably stick with my Android Phone, but this was rather interesting.
November 20th, 2009 at 9:30 am
Can you give any hints where you have read about this: “So, after hearing the news that Nokia will be dropping Symbian from their High-End N-Series phones by 2012, and adopting Maemo,” Thanks!
November 20th, 2009 at 12:37 pm
http://thereallymobileproject.com/2009/11/nokia-dropping-symbian-from-n-series-by-2012/
November 22nd, 2009 at 4:48 pm
It actually got denied by Nokia. I guess the rumor mill is still very active.
As for the N900 and lack of support for 850-1900 UMTS, try connecting to “store DOT nokia DOT ca” and you’ll see how much Nokia care about Canada. For the longest time their N800 was not even available in Canada (not that it is a useful device…) and Nokia official answer for developers is “find a friend in the US to order it for you… and that will actually advance you the money because the credit card address has to match the delivery address”. Looks like a pattern.
Also why would you want to develop for a platform that is already dead-end as the next release will change toolkit ? (rethorical question) :-)