Application Development in Symbian C++ and Qt

The smartphone business landscape has shifted considerably ever since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. The ensuing years have seen Nokia, the world leader in the smart-phone industry at the time, loose grip on market share. Consequently, Nokia has set a new road map to revamp the Symbian operating system and regain lost market shares. The road map is headlined by two important entries: the adoption of the Qt framework and partnership with Microsoft on Windows Phone 7. This thesis is concerned with the adoption of the Qt framework into the Nokia smartphone family. More precisely, the thesis discusses how the programming paradigms of Qt differ from the archaically well-established Symbian operating system. The architectural differences of Qt and Symbian OS have been thoroughly examined using code snippets as supplement to demonstrate implementations. The findings of this thesis show that not only does Qt make the life of a developer much easier than traditional Symbian OS, but also, and more importantly, Qt delivers industry standard user interfaces and fluid user interactions at par with the competition