QBurst Technologies - Blog » phone http://www.qburst.com/blog Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:50:42 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 The Battle of the Touch Phones http://www.qburst.com/blog/2010/07/the-battle-of-the-touch-phones/ http://www.qburst.com/blog/2010/07/the-battle-of-the-touch-phones/#comments Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:42:16 +0000 Prasad Cholakkottil http://www.qburst.com/blog/?p=927 Touch phones from iPhone, HTCs and other brands have been around for a while, where as Nokia had not come up with their smart phones until recently. Nokia offers most of the latest technologies, but they have had a typical vintage ‘phone’ look. During February 2010, the buzz for open sources for mobile software and OS grew stronger with the merger of moblin (mobile linux from Intel) and maemo (FOSS initiative for mobiles and other handhelds from Nokia) and which gave birth to the Meego operating system. Both maemo and moblin could be installed on mobile phones and applications on...

]]> Touch phones from iPhone, HTCs and other brands have been around for a while, where as Nokia had not come up with their smart phones until recently. Nokia offers most of the latest technologies, but they have had a typical vintage ‘phone’ look. During February 2010, the buzz for open sources for mobile software and OS grew stronger with the merger of moblin (mobile linux from Intel) and maemo (FOSS initiative for mobiles and other handhelds from Nokia) and which gave birth to the Meego operating system. Both maemo and moblin could be installed on mobile phones and applications on these platforms could be developed in C/C++.

During the fall of 2008, Nokia also acquired Qt that was initially developed by Troltech as a proprietary software. Nokia released the source code of Qt under LGPL after the acquisition. Nobody understood what Nokia was upto, because Qt ES (formerly known as Qtopia Core) wasn’t so popular at that point of time. Later, when Meamo development community created a support for Qt framework, it got clear that MeeGo applications can be developed with Qt! With Qt, it is possible to develop applications for a range of devices like netbooks, notebooks, palmtops, smart phones, PDAs, tablet PCs and other handhelds. Qt applications are very rich in GUI and have proved to be solid. Opera browser and Skype are popular examples. This makes MeeGo a serious competitor for Android and iPhone. MeeGo can be downloaded and byte-copied to a thumb drive for testing. It has got a pleasing appearance, vibrant colors and a nice interface and nice big icons designed for touch environment.

If we look at the new Windows mobiles, without skype they are rated ‘poor’ for user experiences. Skype has already announced its support to iPhone, Android, Symbian and BlackBerry and has ditched Microsoft again. In such circumstances, Microsoft is not left with many choices, they should either go open source with Windows Mobile or come up with their own hardware to compete with iPhone and android powered HTCs.

There is no clear winner in the battle of these premium touch phones, but the competition is getting tougher by the day.

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