Calling on web designers Nokia claims to be making headway in luring Web designers -- not just the traditional software developers who write software in native code -- to develop apps for N97.With the company's growing emphasis on Web Runtime (WRT) tools, Nokia hopes to win over Web designers -- who know nothing about mobile phones, let alone S60 -- to join Nokia's developers' community. In Apple's iPhone, web applications are not available when the phone is offline. In contrast, Nokia, with its WRT tools, makes it possible for N97 to offer web data even when offline, because it caches that information locally when it was last connected, explained Michael Bierman, senior product manager for WRT Tools at Nokia. On the software front, Nokia is also making available for developers QT for S60, a C++ application development framework. Its goal is to make it easy for developers to create apps once and then deploy them on any of the Windows, Mac, Linux, Windows CE, Windows Mobile and embedded Linux platforms. It is not clear yet, though, how many developers will embrace QT for S60, which could make a difference in their multi-platform software products. Just like Android, Nokia -- through its acquisition of Symbian and turning it into a non-profit entity -- is definitely planning to leverage the collective power of the open-source community in future software development. But as Lee Williams, executive director of the Symbian Foundation acknowledged, this week, Symbian has to do a lot of "scrubbing of its existing codes" before the Symbian Foundation can completely hand off its software to open-source developers. Symbian needs to untangle copyrights and intellectual property rights attached to a massive collection of third-party commercial software -- originally gathered and implemented by Symbian when it was a for-profit commercial entity, he explained. It won't be until late this year -- at the earliest -- for Symbian to complete this transition. Every move Nokia has made over the last 18 months is smart and strategic. Some have been downright bold. But let's face it. None of these efforts, as outlined by Nokia, is trivial. They are hard to execute. You can't be all things to all people all the time. While executing all of its plans, Nokia must accept this more modest reality and make hard choices -- in its product portfolio, development platform support, and its real focus.
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