Im a bit of a noob so sorry

Everyone keeps talking about a "QT release of Maemo 5".

What is QT?

I always thought its a "Quarter" but I guess I am wrong!

What is a QT release of Maemo 5?

Qt, not QT.

http://qt.nokia.com/

e: Q = quarter. Q1 = 1st quarter, Q2 = 2nd quarter, etc

To elaborate, in case you don't feel like reading through the Qt site, Qt is a software toolkit originally designed for building GUIs (Graphical User Interfaces - basically, what gives you pretty pictures to poke at instead of typing text commands at a prompt :P), although it now does a lot more. One of its main advantages is that it works on all major desktop OSes, some mobile OSes (and more on the way), and a whole handful of others, some of which are rather obscure. The upshot of this is that most programs written with Qt are easily portable to any platform Qt supports, so you don't have to deal with problems of program Foo being available for Windows, but not for Linux/Mac (or vice versa).
Nokia bought Qt from a company called Trolltech a while back, and has been busy making it work on lots of new platforms since then, including Maemo. That, (among other reasons) is why it's the New Hotness around here.
Some examples of apps written with Qt:
Open Source: Lots of Maemo apps, the KDE Software Compilation & associated apps (kde.org), lots more that I forget because it's 3am (check qt-apps.org for some others)
Proprietary: Google Earth, Skype (some platforms), Opera
Heck, I've seen pictures of it running on a coffee maker!
I hope that explains things for you.

Thats great, thanks

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qt_(framework)

So does the next Qt release mean the possibility of seeing things like some Symbian apps on the N900?

Ta

Not directly, no. But it means that applications written in Qt can (more or less easily) be ported to both Symbian and Maemo. If existing Symbian developers switch to Qt, it will be easier for them to provide a Maemo version as well.

not yet. but in the distant future: yes.

symbian uses now carbide -stuff for sofware development but It'll be changed to Qt 4.6 and N900 will get Qt 4.6 with os update

As far as I have understood, that is the whole idea with Qt, and that is why Nokia invested in the technology, ie. in the future there won't be Maemo apps or symbian apps, all will be made for the Qt abstraction layer.



I think even that windows mobile supports Qt.

Does anyone know when Symbian will support Qt?

When Nokia has this in place, we will see LOTS of apps