Nokia’s Chief Technical Officer Rich Green commented on the importance of mobile applications at the Qt Developer Days event in San Francisco. He also stressed the Qt toolkit’s role in the mobile platforms. Qt will speed up the development of mobile applications by Nokia. It will also provide a unique solution to the developers to work in both the Nokia platforms.

Green said that mobiles having a diverse platform are not sufficient for meeting the new demands. He stressed the importance to develop mobile applications. Once the excitement of smart phone applications dies down, users tend to seek additional applications that keep them hooked to the set. For accommodating these third party mobile applications, it is necessary to keep the platform more homogenous.

The Symbian mobile sets were manufactures in large numbers, but failed to support the mobile applications due to the defective fragmented platform. Nokia is taking precautions to avoid such situations. The company is committed to accommodate the past and future applications. The company is also keen to retain and improve the developer base for these applications

He also hoped that Qt will have an important role in narrowing down the difference in the open source Operating Systems MeeGo and Symbian of Nokia. Once this is done with the Qt applications, the developers will find it easier to develop the software for both platforms in a single shot. However, the present applications do not expect the single software program to run on both platforms once written. The software may need further compilations and alterations to make it compatible to the individual platforms. Also it does not mean that the Symbian and MeeGo operating systems are similar. The present developments just aim to make the portability of applications between the two systems to be less.

Nokia is expecting to create better tools for the compilation of the software to combat the two OS. The company has developed a remote service for developers to test Symbian applications. This helps them to upload the software codes for compilation when needed. It is also developing the Qt Creator to simplify the programming of Qt applications. The company is aiming to secure the leadership in the industry with the best tools for developing both mobile and desktop applications.

Nokia is the final major smart phone having the Symbian OS and the Qt development is a strategy to retain the market. The recent layoffs have cut down the Symbian expertise of the company significantly shifting the focus towards the MeeGo Operating system based on Linux.

There were some rumors about the shut down of the Symbian Foundation. A grant of 22 million euros was provided by the European Commission, some of the countries of Europe and the like minded for the survival of the technology.

Nokia’s dedicated approach to Qt development coupled with the efforts of the Symbian Foundation to modernize the OS provides a ray of hope for the striving platform. The company has a safer stand with its promotions for high end smart phones relying on the MeeGo OS for the applications thus not being entirely dependent on the either.