Nokia and Trolltech ASA announced on Monday that they have entered into an agreement that Nokia will acquire Trolltech, a recognized software provider with world-class software development platforms and frameworks. Nokia will offer NOK 16 per share in cash.
“The technology landscape evolves and, for Nokia, software plays a major role in our growth strategy for devices, PCs and the integration with the Internet. We continue to focus on areas where we can differentiate and add more value. Common cross-platform layers on top of our software platforms attract innovation and enable Web 2.0 technologies in the mobile space,”said Kai Öistämö, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia. “Trolltech’s deep understanding of open source software and its strong technology assets will enable both Nokia and others to innovate on our device platforms while reducing time-to-market. This acquisition will also further increase the competitiveness of S60 and Series 40.”
This is one of the less expected news I’ve read in months. Nokia acquiring TrollTech? Why? What for? For those who don’t know, TrollTech is a Norwegian company famous for developing QT, a cross platform application framework. This library is widely used in Linux, where is a direct competitor of GTK. TrollTech have also been involved in mobile software development with the launch of QTopia Phone Edition, a cross platform application framework and UI focused on mobile phones.
QTopia Phone Edition became famous because of QTopia GreenPhone, the first Linux-based, open mobile phone. This device was a development prototype launched by TrollTech, but it is currently discontinued. Unfortunately for TrollTech, QTopia Phone Edition hasn’t been successfully deployed in commercial devices. Just a pair of models have adopted this Application Framework.
With this information in my hand, several questions arise.
- What about Maemo? This is the Linux distribution used by Nokia in a pair of devices, N800 and N810.
- What about S40 and S60? Are they replacing their top level application frameworks with QT?
- What about Symbian? Do Nokia plans to replace their S60 Operating System with Linux? This is clear, not at all, as long as Symbian is partly owned by Nokia.
- What about eSWT and Nokia efforts of using this UI application framework for JME?
Some people say that Nokia has bought Trolltech because they prefer it to be in its hands than in other competitor’s hands. Probably, but too week explanation in my opinion.
Some people thinks that Nokia plans to use QT technology and knowledge to create cross-platform applications, in a similar flavor than JME and Flash. It could be.
I don’t have an opinion yet. Upcoming events will clear everything eventually.
With a little delay (two days), we finally publish this new. Sorry for this, but we were on holidays.
Link Nokia PressNote
