Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia has acquired Norwegian platform application development provider Trolltech for $153 million.
Trolltech is the developer of Qt, the cross-platform application development framework used for the development of GUI programs and for developing non-GUI programs such as console tools and servers. Qt is used in by Opera, Google Earth and Skype among others.
The acquisition is still subject to regulatory approval and final closure, with 66.43% of shareholders having already accepted the bid.
Nokia said that the acquisition will allow it “to accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and develop its Internet services business.” The interesting part (did someone say Android?):
With Trolltech, Nokia and third party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia’s device portfolio and on PCs. Nokia’s software strategy for devices is based on cross-platform development environments, layers of software that run across operating systems, enabling the development of applications across the Nokia device range. Examples of current cross-platform layers are Web runtime, Flash, Java and Open C.
The acquisition is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2008.
(via Engadget)
My take on this is that it is a significant acknowledgment that there is trouble in Nokia land. Despite having now 40% marketshare, motorola has proved that that can go away overnight. Nokia is in better shape but their Symbian software sucks, particularly compared to apple and android. And the market is becoming all about software.
I discuss this in more detail here:
http://whydoese...t-shifting.html
Too many interesting acts from Nokia…
Qt is certainly good stuff, though the windows dev people who like windows-native models normally feel that to have Qt for a windows gui would be too much overhead, for porting something in from other platforms…
I have no idea what trolltech is, but thats good money
Check out http://www.yupnup.com
Oh dear God, please let this be the end of Nokia OS and Series 60.
Did they came out from the battery problem?
Nice move Nokia, but what is this really about ?
They could port the QT interface toolkit on Symbian and make it somewhat crossplatform, as their statement seems to suggest, but what that will really add to the bad Symbian development experience ?
A bolder (and smarter, to me at least) move would be to release a Linux mobile platform based on Qtopia so to compete with Android in the quest of getting the attention of the Linux and opensource development community.
Ah, and don’t forget to add a developers edition phone ! It seems incredible they didn’t release one yet in so many years (Qtopia Greenphone or OpenMoko anyone?).
As a member of the PyQt community I’m just afraid Nokia might put an end to the community version, let’s hope they won’t do something so stupid. Good for the shareholders of Trolltech.
oh, now I read from Engadget this is a move of Nokia also to be part of the Linux Mobile foundation, so it’s basically to go open, take that Android.
I’m so there with QTopia now.
Nokia remains always at the forefront of cellular technology that will advance to the competition alive in the event sees 2005 6230 to the best comparison with motorola v3 that was more expensive and had no memory expandable or sony ericson that it was much more expensive and bigger in size.
Will my dream now come true? My N95 running Linux instead of symbian?
Nokia has been playing with Linux for a while now with their tablets, it would be a wonderful step to have Linux running on my phone. If I could run my network admin tools from my phone that would be a dream come true. The n810 does this, but the price makes the purchase a bit more difficult.
They have had their hands on the new KDE 4.0 too.
http://en.wikip...rg/wiki/KDE_4.0