Despite Nokia’s resolute commitment to the Symbain platform, it seems that Maemo might be the future operating for its N-Series.
In a Q&A with bloggers during the official N90 meet-up recently, it was revealed that by 2012 Maemo will replace Symbian in their N-Series mobiles. In a roundabout manner, Nokia has neither confirmed nor denied this.
While it is certainly less of a leap than an official Android-based Nokia phone, considering that both Maemo and Symbain are Nokia technologies, this is still a pretty big deal. Nokia has on many occasions reaffirmed its commitment to Symbian, and continues to develop it. Both Maemo and Symbian will hold a place in Nokia’s court, and Maemo’s is steadily increasing.
Nokia will continue to create tools for developing for both platforms, and in fact the upcoming versions of its Qt multi-platform GUI development toolkit will add support for both devices. While Qt 4.6 supports developing applications for Symbian, a technical preview of Qt for Maemo 5 is available. This stand to hugely simplify development for mobile platforms, as applications developed for Maemo can also be deployed to Symbian.
Nokia N900 has now be acknowledged to be ‘bridge’ device connecting its current Symbian-based N-Series devices to the Maemo powered ones to come.