I'm far from a Symbian fan(Yes I'm a Maemo fan ), but a lot of people are mistaken about Symbian. The platform is far from dead, I agree that it has some problems, one of them is Symbian C++ (horrible), but Symbian is a very robust, complete and stable OS, at the moment, the major problem is the outdated UI.
With Qt's help I bet it will have a new life, we'll see who's wrong .

Anyway Maemo will rock.

Symbian is probably the best mobile OS out there, capable of running on multiple types of devices with very little hassle and excellent hardware management.

UI though, needs re-work. I am actually not sure that for my particular use cases, Maemo 6 is going to be better than Symbian^4.

In any case, since both Maemo 6 and Symbian^4 devices are supposed to be released this year, a side by side comparison will be interesting.

"The Future Contest", definitely not for developers. If you are a serious Maemo developer I invite you to think seriously on "The Future Collaboration". Symbian and Maemo will power different devices and will address different markets, but in terms of APIs the trend is to converge.

You are seeing the Qt releases, which are the backbone of this strategy. Be prepared for a cross-platform Web Runtime running on top of Qt's WebKit (probably with a straightforward porting path to the rest of similar Web runtimes out there).

Yes, we know that Symbian and Maemo are bulding different layers on top of Qt but expect common sense for developers there as well. Wait for the SDK releases and you will see.

I can imagine most of you (and many more to come) selecting Maemo as primary platform for development thanks to its openness, flexibility and the cool powerful devices. But as much as you love Maemo it would be a mistake (or your own personal choice) to restrict your audience to Maemo users when you will have millions of API compatible terminals out there.

From what I see in Qt, developers will also be able to further "embellish" their apps with special APIs that exploit the particular qualities of the platform they are running on, I am right?

Edit: I think that froma geek point of view, it would be interesting to compare the performance of S4 with M6 running on similar OMAP3 HW. How they address memory, CPU, battery, etc

That's strange, because I made one on the Dui versus plain Qt thread. Symbian has the mass market, and that is a compliment.

Symbian C++ as a programming language, well, it has some quirks, but those were perfectly understandable at the time it was created. The only language quirk I really hate is their daft idea of indenting { and }.

Yes I know I was bit rude and you're right about the market share that symbian has. My apologies if I hurt someone's feelings.

My point was that I really haven't heard any positive comments about symbian, ever. I know plenty of people that have been developing on symbian platform but they all have been really happy after the those sym bian related projects have been finished.

Well, the good thing about Symbian OS is that there is an enormous amount of functionally complete middleware you can use in your apps. The stuff that is part of apps in other systems, is reusable in Symbian OS.

And that became one of its major pain points too, because without good docs and examples it is very hard to find and use these API's.