Moving to QT Quick, Nokia has won the developers battle? | Hacker News Reader

Moving to QT Quick, Nokia has won the developers battle?

paniccode.com

57 pointsbrkumar48 comments

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.

?? You talk like the 731 million people in Europe are homogenous.

In my social group there are more Android phones than iPhones. Perhaps you are talking bollocks.

>>And in Europe a lot of people are holding off from expensive phones just as I'm doing

"a lot of people" != "everyone"

Let me re-iterate, he's speaking for 731 million people in 50 territories. So what constitiutes "a lot", plucked from bad_user's thin air.

Lets have a look at some actual figures

"Android's share of the UK mobile contract market has grown from 3% in Q1 2010 to reach 13.2% in Q2 2010, GfK Retail and Technology's latest figures have revealed."

http://www.gfkrt.com/news_events/market_news/single_sites/00...

UK Android Sales Up 350 Percent This Quarter

http://www.eweekeurope.co.uk/news/uk-android-sales-up-350-pe...

Holding back ?

First of all, you're comparing the growth rate of Android in the UK with the actual market share Nokia has which is over 40% in the UK.

I know, Android will be #1 if Nokia doesn't do something to stop its growth, but that also means Nokia has currently a huge costumers base which it can leverage.

Secondly, you're first arguing that I'm speaking in the name of 731 million people, but then you're exemplifying with UK which is like #6 among Europe's richest countries and probably number #1 when it comes to adoption of new technology.

I mean, WTF?!?

No, I'm highlighting that saying "a lot of people in Europe" is hearsay.

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.

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.

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)

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

Social networking is almost irrelevant for me, but I've heard good things about an app called Gravity.

Gravity is superb - better than most desktop Twitter clients I've used. And it does a decent Twitpic upload. Not to mention also supporting Facebook, Google Reader and Foursquare (if that's your thing).

>Its only problem is that the UI is not as polished as on iPhone or Android

Agreed. The phone itself is solid, but the UI made me think of early versions of Android, and not in a good way (as in, "this is even worse than early versions of Android"). It often seems like a layer of shiny paint on top of a ton of older cruft - inconsistent or nonsensical menu structures, "back"/"exit" are all over the place and hard to predict, etc. It feels like a feature phone trying to be a smartphone. This might not be an issue for people used to Nokia phones, but coming from iPhone/Android it's quite jarring.

>but it's good enough.

That remains to be seen. It IS a solid phone, and Nokia keeps crowing about how they'll sell 50 million of this phone over the next year. I can see it doing well in markets where Nokia is traditionally strong (maybe? I don't know much about smartphone usage trends in those markets). But in North America, where Nokia is already behind iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry on the smartphone front, they are not going to catch up by releasing something LESS polished.

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?

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...

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

+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.

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.)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

A number of Qt hackers out there already have it running on iOS and Android. Nokia doesn't control where people use the open-source code (and the commercial code either, I guess).

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

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.

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

Ah, cool - Javascript is a very plausible language for mobile development.

Actually, it seems a bit crazy that Android and iPhone don't provide 'rapid prototyping' or 'script apps' using the Javascript interpreters they already have on board.

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

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.

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.

Yeah, this is a step in the right direction but it's not winning by a long shot.

You might want to look at HTML + JS for developing on Nokia. They have a web runtime toolkit that allows you to build an installable app that has access to some of the platform services (location, contacts, sensors, messages, etc).

You don't really need to do memory allocation when using Qt. All classes have implicit reference counting. Look at a random example (http://doc.trolltech.com/4.7/phonon-qmusicplayer.html) and count the number of times you see a "delete" operator there (). I found the code I wrote in Qt/C++ more elegant than Java code.

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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.

"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.

Can't Qt run on Android and W7?

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

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.

It would be more useful to say what country you're in and what kind of clients you work with.

You're already working on WP7 projects?

Even thought nobody uses it yet and even though you can already target millions of phones with Qt?

Wow!

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