03 February 2008

What does Nokia's Trolltech buy
mean for Symbian?

Symbian, Sony Ericsson and Motorola claim they are confident Nokia's acquisition of Trolltech will leave them unscathed, despite analyst suggestions to the contrary.

Nokia announced it was buying Trolltech on Monday, with a view to making it easier for developers to design applications that work across all mobile and desktop operating systems.

Norwegian firm Trolltech makes Qt, a graphical user interface (GUI) toolkit.

Qt is used on the Linux desktop environment, KDE, as well as a multitude of applications such as Skype and Google Earth. Qt's mobile offshoot, Qtopia, has also been used on many handsets made by Motorola.

However, Nokia is also the major shareholder in Symbian, whose operating system it uses for its Series 60 mobile platform. Another part-owner of Symbian is Sony Ericsson, which is also half-owner -- along with Motorola -- of the Symbian-based UIQ platform. Nokia also owns the Carbide set of development tools, which are used for UIQ.

Following the acquisition, Ovum analyst Adam Leach wrote on his firm's Web site that the acquisition reflected well on Nokia and Trolltech, but was "bad news" for Symbian and "even worse news" for Motorola.

"The support of Qt by S60 will be the first environment that will allow developers to write full applications (including UI) without using the native Symbian-based application framework," wrote Leach. "With this in place, Nokia has the option to migrate its S60 application to Qt and benefit from increased portability and less dependency on Symbian OS. This increases the likelihood that in the long term Symbian will have to compete against Linux-based platforms within its existing customer base."

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