April this year we started a new project here in Oslo called “Qt for S60″ and I’ve been wanting to blog about it ever since. Now I finally can! Basically we’re porting Qt to yet another platform: S60, which roughly gives us around 80 million new devices Qt can run on. Our vision of Qt Everywhere is becoming more and more of a reality. And it feels good.
Let’s get to the important stuff. Click here to:
- download the pre-release packages
- see the video of Qt running on 3 different phones
- see the webcast to learn how to get Qt running on your phone
- download our fluidlauncher demo to try it out on your phone
About the tech-preview and the demos
The Qt for S60 pre-release packages comes in two license flavours, either download the opensource (GPL2 or GPL3) package or the preview-commercial package. Content wise there is no real difference between them. However, the opensource package contains pre-compiled binaries which the preview commercial package does not. The reason for this is that the compiler (GCCE) opensource developers have access too, at the moment, cannot build Qt libraries. RVCT however can - but you most likely don’t have access to that one as it’s not freely available. So basically, for the opensource package you’ll be building Qt applications with GCCE, but linking with RVCT built Qt libraries we provide for you. For the preview-commercial package we assume you’ve got access to RVCT, and we let you do all the stuff yourself. I’m sure we’ll sort out the GCCE issue for the next tech-preview.
The Qt modules available in this package are:
- QtCore - all the non-Gui classes
- QtGui - painting and widgets
- QtNetwork - TCP, HTTP and all that
- QtTest - unit testing
We support S60 3.1 and higher, even the 5.0 stuff that was just released 
Btw. if you try to install the demo above on your phone, and you’ve got a 3.1 device, you have to install Pips/Open C as well for it to work. We’ve got a package conveniently here for you.
Feedback
Our policy here in Qt Software is: release often, release early. We want feedback from developers trying out our software. Now keep in mind, this first relase is a technology preview. It is not supported, it is not complete, it is not production quality - basically it’s for you to play with. We have set up a special mailinglist for feedback on the S60 port. The address of the mailinglist is:
please join if you want to provide technical feedback, bug reports, suggestions or comments. In order to join the mailing list send a mail to:
qts60-feedback-request@trolltech.com
with the subject set to: subscribe. In order to leave the list send a mail with the subject set to: unsubscribe. This will be an open list so make sure not to share sensitive information.
Let the hacking begin
We’re at the Symbian Smartphone show in London this week answering questions and showing of Qt on some phones. Drop by if you’re in the area But even more important, start making cool and crazy apps for your phones! I’m sure a lot of you already have an S60 bouncing around in your pockets, and it’s just waiting to be played with.
We also just announced the Pimp my widgets! contest, why not do a double-combo and try out Qt for S60 pimpin style 
Anyways, (sorry for the long blog) here is a picture of Qt running on all the S60 devices I got my hands on - just showing you I’m not lying.
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| Qt on lots of S60 devices - can you name them all? |
44 Responses to “We’re porting Qt to S60!”
What a shock! I’m surprised!
Yay, just what I wanted to be able to tell my boss! But… Will other modules, like webkit, be supported in the release, or is that still an unknown (or an impossible)?
Sweet 
This means some KDE apps and libs coming to S60 in the near future?
This is totally awesome and completely not unexpected!
Next step - PyQt on S60!
Seriously though, I am very impressed that you guys managed to do this so quickly despite the oddness of Symbian. I assumed that Nokia would dump Symbian and adopt an easier-to-develop OS before putting Qt on their phones. I guess the legacy requirement is too strong.
Absolutely awesome. I love it how Qt is runing on so many devices and how easy and enjoyable it makes programming with such a great API. I guess all this porting also helps improve Qt to also work bettwr on the desktop and helps KDE also in the end. And on the other hand I also can’t wait to se KDE 4 runing os phones. Keep up the excellent work guys and girsl!
Woot Woot! Nice work, and congratulations!
Where is the OpenGL support? that would be lot of fun!!
>> Seriously though, I am very impressed that you guys managed to do this so quickly despite the oddness of Symbian
- Symbian is not odd anymore.. Check out P.I.P.S. (https://developer.symbian.com/wiki/display/pub/P.I.P.S.)
Nice work! Any chance we’ll see Qt on UIQ - based phones?
Woah, thats very good news, i’m starting to like symbian OS right now will this tools ever be able to compile on linux?
Wooooow!! can’t wait to port my app the the S60 phones…
The demos are really nice on my phone, I *love* the work
Couple of questions: is QtScript going to be ported soon?
and.. are you planning to merge the changes for the S60 platform in Qt’s ‘master’ branch? (sooner or later, I mean)
Btw: thanks, I felt this will happen but didn’t know it already had
OMG !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I was worried about the Qt future, and this MAKE THE QT the big winner !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Not news actually, since Nokia bought Trolltech. I will be amused if S60 was not supported. I doubt Trolltech would support UIQ anytime soon…
UIQ is almost dead. SE fired better than half of UIQ team.
>>> will this tools ever be able to compile on linux?
Yes, if you go to the Smartphone Show Espen mentions then you’ll find some people talking about the new Symbian Build System that works on Linux and Windows.
Very nice
Too bad that the FP1 Demo crashes (shutdowns) my E71. But well it is a preview release.
Great news, As Symbian is very new to QT and Linux users, are there any Symbial tutorials on line, or even books. Roughly what does the Symabial OS look like - Unix, DOS ? Is it posix compliant
One more thing, I hope plan on porting QT’s SQL module over so the SQ so we can utlize QT interface to SQLite.
Congratulations on this port.
WOW!
I hope we will se more usefull applications for symbian now
Great news. Been waiting since Nokia bought Trolltech to hear this. Now just eager to get the Linux build so I can give my app a quick run over
Great news guys, keep up the good work
Is there a reason why your URL for the page with the S60 downloads contains a username and password? Firefox tells me the site doesn’t need authentication, and I managed to “curl” the page without it.
Also, what’s your stand number at the Smartphone Show?
Looks great! Are you planning to port the phonon?
Great work so far. Are there any efforts to port Qt to the S40 platform? Or is this (technically) not feasible?
suprise suprise!
/me tries running psi on his e51 right away.
i wonder if we get low level access through a Qtish interface. i’d really love to hack some voip on my phone (the built in nokia software is crashy)
Interesting, but I’m not so interested in cute graphics - lots of that about already. What really interests me is a decent encapsulation of the symbian API - accessing dial events, network access, the phone logs, sms, mms - all the low level stuff. Anything that lets me avoid the horror that is the Symbian C++ SDK.
Wow, that’s great! Can’t wait to try out Qt on my N95.
The demo seems to be really promising. A pity that it makes the N95 8GB that I used reboot.
are you sure you support S60 3.1 and higher?
I mean, is Open C required to run Qt on S60??
http://www.s60.com/pics/pdf/S60_3rd_Ed_2007.pdf
it looks like Open C is featured only for FP2 and later or am I missing something?
OpenC can be installed to 3.1 devices. Download the sis package from here http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/resources/technologies/openc_cpp/
We own your Planet!
Be back in 2012!
/annu
works great on my 6110 Navigator !!
Sweet as! How will blue-tooth and GPS functionality be addressed?
How to get Qt running on your S60 phone with linux installed on PC? Instructions are only for sucking Windows!
How do you get any software on your phone from linux? One easy way would be to send it from pc to phone via bluetooth or ir and install the sisx package from inbox. Another solution is to copy the sisx package to memory card/internal memory via usb and then install the sisx via filebrowser(open filebrowser, find the sisx file and click it)
Wow, lots of comments! The new Symbian build system (SBSv2) that will allow you to build for Symbian/S60 from Linux is only available for Symbian Partners on the SDN++ at the moment - it will be rolled out to the public soon but there’s no point at the moment because it only has ARM RVCT support, the GCCE support isn’t finished so there’s no free compiler for the device yet.
The current technology preview only relies on core Symbian stuff and P.I.P.S. so you should be able to build it for the UIQ emulator at least - maybe even a UIQ device if you’ve got the ARM RVCT compiler. I doubt it will ever be officially supported though - as has been said, UIQ is dead, Sony Ericsson are even working on S60 devices now (check their job adds). BTW I’ve already tried this with plain S60 3rd Edition (not FP1 or FP2) and it builds and runs fine in the emulator.
Qt SQL support using SQLite is definitely on the way (SQLite is already ported to Symbian devices).
>> What really interests me is a decent encapsulation of the symbian API - accessing dial events, network access, the phone logs, sms, mms - all the low level stuff.
Network access is already part of Qt - the other stuff is in Qt Extended but there’s no official decision/annoucement to port any of that yet. I expect it’ll get done one day.
>> Looks great! Are you planning to port the phonon?
I’m sure that will come but probably later rather than sooner - it’ll be a lot of (hard) work.
Thanks for all the comments, almost all positive - even the ones where we crash! You’re too nice people!
I’m gonna answer all questions so far as much as I can:
@Boudewijn: All modules will be ported to Qt for S60 (except Qt3Support and the ones that simply can’t or don’t make sense like ActiveQt etc.)
@Anssi: OpenGL ES will be there at some point but no time schedule at this point.
@RokK: There are no plans for UIQ support at the moment
@Enrico Ros: QtScript will be there before X-mas. Maybe even next week? The plan is to merge in the S60 port for Qt 4.6 which is a long time into the future.
@David Boosalis: The Symbian OS is really to hard to summarize in an easy one-line sentence. For example we (ab)use some of our Qt Posix-based code, and also some of our Qt for Windows CE code for our S60 port. It has similarities with both Windows and Linux, and it has lots of quirks We plan to have SQLite support in the next tech-preview.
@Matthew Smith: The password thing for the webpage is no longer needed. Remove the stuff from any url if it brings you problems.
@Milan Svoboda: Yes we plan to port Phonon. We are working together with some multimedia experts in Nokia to write some new backends for Phonon that works for S60.
@Wizard Of: Sorry, no comment at this time.
@aep: What kind of low level access are you talking about? Examples of what you want to do?
@markpersy: No idea if there are plans for Nokia PC Suite for Linux. Would be cool though.
@NokiaDoubt: We _do_ support 3.1, but you have to install PIPS yourself. For 3.2 PIPS is already pre-installed on your phone.
@Scott: We have no Qt api for Bluetooth and GPS at this time, you’ll have to use native Symbian C++. We may at some point make nice APIs for all that kinda stuff, but honestly at the moment we’re drowning in work so we can’t provide any good quality stuff for that at the moment. Patience my friend
@Miha: Sorry about only providing M$ instructions. In order to get the demos installed from Linux, simply connect the phone via USB, copy over the .sis and .sisx files, and then in the file browser on the phone, click on the packages to install them.
Ok - thanks again guys (and girls?). And remember, if the demo crashes on launch you either don’t have PIPS installed, or your PIPS version is too old and crappy Have a nice weekend!
Hi guys,
I’ve stumbled upon this blog as the result of a Google search and I can see your excitement. I’m a long-time Symbian/C++ programmer and although I don’t speak “Qt-ish” (yet) I think I can answer some of the questions above:
- Yes, Qt will be supported on S40, because that’s one of the main targets of Nokia, too: let Qt be THE means to access Nokia’s online services (e.g. Ovi, Mosh, etc.) on as much Nokia phones as possible. That means that Qt apps will run on S60 and S40 phones in the future.
- UIQ-support? Well, you might have already heard it that UIQ is dead. That has something to do with Symbian OS going open source in 2009-2010 (Symbian Foundation): Nokia acquired Symbian (the company - the transaction is not yet over at the time of this writing) from all their shareholders and one of the technical decisions they’ve already made at such an early stage is to keep as strict source-compatibility with existing S60 code as possible whilst merging as much useful feature from UIQ and MOAP(S) as possible. No promise for UIQ-compatibility has been made (and will never be, btw), though. All that means (to me) that Qt-support for UIQ has a very low priority.
- I’ve already seen PyQt being mentioned in one of the comments: although not the same, but still you might be interested in hearing that Python is already supported on S60. It’s called Python for S60, or PyS60 for short, and is a very useful environment for rapid prototyping and even more!
So, is it possible to have Rockbox on S60 fones?
Great news. Given the popularity of Ruby, will we see qtruby support?
Will there be qt for android?