i raised the question of the development life-span of the n910 in two separate threads, principally because of the Intel/Nokia agreement to shift to the 32nm x86 platform due at the end of 2010.

i speculated that this would leave the Omap3 class of devices as development orphans, unattractive as they have neither the long lineage of previous NIT's, nor compatibility with the x86 NITS of the future, and thus would be uninteresting to the 3rd party maemo development community which breathes life into this ecosystem.

the possibility that n900/n910 devices will not have support for Harmatton would be a double blow, as I want to support this new QT/maemo future.

with the greatest of respect to the poster above, i am not interested in n770/n800/n810 devices, as i didn't join the maemo party in their prime, I am looking at the exciting Omap3 platform and wanting the exciting QT/maemo.

if i am left to speculate that the combination of Intel/QT means that the n900/n910 devices will be a development dead-end, then I will persuade myself to skip these devices and hope for a more succesful device class in future, but i do not want to do this because i want to buy an Omap3 NIT as soon as they are available.

it would be very useful if Nokia clarified whether or not Harmattan will come to the n900/n910, as i suspect that many here would happily settle for that at least.

Even if they told you that Harmattan will come to the Maemo 5 lead device.... Would it help? By the time Harmattan will be released, many things may have changed so Nokia needs to adapt their plans accordingly. What then?

You may start developing for Qt under Fremantle (hey, who's that typing on my keyboard? Did I just recommend using Qt???) so you'll have a smoother transition to Harmattan... Or you can rely on the community-provided GTK in Harmattan and use this native toolkit for Fremantle.

Anyway, take what you have and don't expect any information about what will be in 6 months time to be reliable.

It's just too early to discuss about compatibility across Fremantle, Harmattan and corresponding hardware. Some elements for discussion are not public and some elements are not even known by anybody today.

These elements include the state of Maemo 5 Qt bindings compared with the Harmattan API, the existence of a community initiative to maintain GTK+ / Hildon beyond Fremantle, the characteristics of the hardware to be released during the Fremantle and Harmattan releases...

There is even another element, which are the alternatives to the Hildon/Qt native environments. From the announcement this week you can see that OpenGL ES is there, and someone might be interested going that path. Note that we haven't given any details yet about that Maemo API on top of the generic Qt / Qt Mobility API, nor about those supported runtimes mentioned in one of the slides.

The announcement helps developers planning their work for Fremantle having a bit more of knowledge about Harmattan. Let's release Maemo 5 and its related hardware, let's enjoy Fremantle and then let's discuss Harmattan further.

Yes, let's do that! When can I start enjoying Fremantle on its related hardware?

Quim, will Harmattan run on a Maemo 5 device or not?

This story gives me the impression that Fremantle, from a developer's point of view, is already obsolete even before it was released.

Any work I'm doing now is already obsolete if GTK+ is not at least included in the release in Harmattan. I don't give a damn if it is the lead framework, I just don't want to force any user to install 30-40 MB libs (as is the case with QT now.

Not exactly. This "community" are mostly employees of Qt Software so there will be no official support, bugs will be marked "fixed in Harmattan", etc.

One could discuss the meaning of "obsolete" in this context. Diablo is dead as can be (and has been for quite a while now), and still there are new or updated packages. It's out there, so people develop for it, no matter if it's "obsolete".
Fremantle will be out on real hardware, and people will develop for it. The success of the platform in terms of 3rd party applications will be determined by the number of units sold rather than by the fact that Fremantle is known to be the last GTK-based Maemo version.

One could also discuss, of course, the wisdom of Nokia's decision to drop GTK in favor of Qt, but then again... why? It's one of those moments in life where suit and tie beats reason. Sure it's not a wise thing to do, but how could they not do it once they spent all this money on acquiring former trolltech?

Within all these constraints, announcing the move now was the only sane thing to do. They could have chosen not to say anything in order to make developers feel more confident about the future of their GTK-based Fremantle projects.... But in the long run, it's moves like these that earn Nokia trust. (At least I hope so. I really do.)

You should not consider Qt and OpenGL-ES as alternatives,
they are rather than supporting each other. OpenGL-ES is used
accelerating lo of the new animated UI effects and if you would like make OpenGL-ES application, Qt can act as wrapper and provide
lot of supporting API's.

I handled this issue in my presentation GCDS but due very poor
network connections here, i have not yet been able to upload my presentation.

One thing is sure, if Nokia moves to x86, they've lost me as a customer and supporter.