If you look at Maemo 6 UI framework technical preview, you can notice that widgets in this framework are built on top of Qt's QGraphicsView technology. If you look at Qt Labs blogs, QGraphicsView has biggest amount of blog articles published among all categories (http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/cate...graphics_view/). Note that QGraphicsView is rather old -- it first came as Qt API in 2006, way before Nokia has considered anything regarding Qt.

QGraphicsView is used as basis for KDE4 Plasma. This is currently major user of QGraphicsView API among released software. And common trend in Qt circles is to move interfaces to something QGraphicsView based.

So if you look through this perspective, Maemo 6 UI based on QGraphicsView is not really something radically departing from what "mainstream" Qt development is geared towards. Of course, it has its own quirks and design decisions but that is something you would need to look at with real facts and circumstances considered.

Interestingly enough, there is no widget set in Qt API based on QGraphicsView itself. So If you are going to use QGraphicsView, you are building widget set yourself.

I know almost nothing about Symbian^4 design decisions but to me it looks like they are going a similar direction with QGraphicsView being a basis for their widgets.

Now, this is interesting: what are differences in operating systems *behind* UI that can influence UI to be substantially different? You may hide certain portable things behind a common facade, however, is there anything that is really so different in Symbian/Unix designs that is hard to unify/represent in the same way?