I am concerned, not panicking ;-) And I certainly would like to hear the Qt specialists on this matter.

Compared to the differences between a desktop PC and a smartphone, the differences between Maemo and Symbian ^4 are minute. Small enough to be abstracted away.

Besides, last monday Nokia announced that their Nseries devices will start using Maemo 6/Qt beginning in 2012. Currently Nseries devices are smartphones, and if they stay with the Nseries brand these devices will still be seen as the same device category, but with greatly enhanced software capabilities.

Is this good or bad? What's a post troll?

I am talking about policy here, not about engineering. Engineering comes after policy, not before. What I am seeing as a commercial developer is that Nokia is publicly stating one policy, which is single source/multiple deployment. In practice however Nokia has a completely different policy which is different sources for different platforms. At the StackOverflow devday in Amsterdam two weeks ago Nokia was giving a presentation about how easy it was with Qt to have a single source (and one #ifdef) and build live binaries for both WinXP and Symbian/Qt.

At the Maemo conference I voiced my concerns about Maemo 6/Qt and Symbian^4/Qt not having the same UI toolkit after I found out that there was going to be a difference. At that time I was still under the impression that the bulk of an app was still plain Qt, but with extra widgets.
But after examining the Maemo 6 examples and looking at the source, I saw that everything was changed. Oops, that's not what Nokia is publicly stating what their policy is.

[QUOTE]
Another intersting contact is Ville Lavonius, product manager of the Maemo development platform. He also had a presentation in the Maemo Summit about Qt application development on Harmattan.

Actually I decided to start with the Miniature pet project having plain Qt 4.6 as a main requirement precisely to check "in real time" that Nokia's Qt cross-platform promise is real and attractive. So far looks good and we have already binaries for Maemo 5 and Ubuntu compiled from the same source.

I invite you to do the same: come up with plain Qt 4.6 applications running on Maemo 5 or Symbian, try to run them in different platforms (e.g. Harmattan as soon as we have an SDK out) and then complain if you are unhappy about the results.
[QUOTE]

Sigh. How much spare time do I have, you think? Besides, seeing that a framework, that is supposed to be abstracting away system differences, and that is know to be capable of this feat, is going to be subclassed for the main application objects is enough to raise all kinds of alarm bells. Been there, seen that. Symbian had at some point four slightly different app frameworks, and Nokia itself has publicly stated that S80 was to be discontinued because it was too expensive for Nokia to maintain two frameworks (S90 was dead already at that time). And what do i see now: Nokia again having multiple frameworks that are (slightly) different. And that was too expensive?

I am sorry, but your priorities are wrong. I am here to be convinced by Nokia that developing for their single Qt platform is a good value proposition for commercial developers. But after coming here I find they have two platforms, three if you count plain Qt as a different platform, which is not what they are telling to developers. I am not going to invest time and money in producing code until that matter is cleared.

Excellent, I'll await their comments.