Nokia has announced a widespread re-fresh of its device platform activities, promising “greater clarification and simplicity in its developer offering [which] will empower the development community to create applications to reach users across both the Symbian and MeeGo platforms.” It trumpeted its sole focus on Qt as the application development platform to deliver apps which can be supported by both its Symbian OS platform and devices powered by the anticipated MeeGo, while also announcing its “intent to support HTML5 for development of web content and applications for both Symbian and MeeGo platforms.”

During the company’s conference call, Stephen Elop, CEO of Nokia, highlighted that the changes will affect Nokia’s internal operations as well as its work with the third party app community. “Any particular application or capability can be developed once and used across multiple devices and platforms, instead of it being developed multiple times in multiple places,” he says. “It really has required some common vision here at the company, and some decision making quite frankly, to say “this is what we are going to do.” And we need to unambiguously state that internally, and unambiguously state that externally, so that there is no ambiguity as to what the development direction is.”

The company also announced a shift to a “continuous evolution” model for Symbian OS, away from the “release-based” model it has previously used; specifically, it says it will no longer refer to Symbian^3 or Symbian^4. The obvious benefit of this is that it will mean that it can reduce the industry focus on the next-generation of the platform which makes the current version look outdated – potentially providing a deterrent for developers looking to write Symbian apps. The company says that customers will benefit from a “constant improvement in the experience of their Symbian-based Nokia products.”

Nokia’s change in strategy for its Symbian evolution has been modified in order to remove a “break” in continuity between Symbian^3 and Symbian^4, stating that “from a development perspective and a software platform perspective, [this] is not a recommended strategy.” This contrasts markedly with the approach taken by Microsoft with the launch of Windows Phone 7, which is a clean break from the earlier Windows Mobile platforms, and has garnered much praise – although currently the application catalogue is somewhat lacking. Elop says that the change has also enabled Nokia to speed the introduction of some new features to the platform, which would otherwise have been held for the Symbian^4 release.

In a statement, Rich Green, CTO of Nokia, said: “We’re making strategic technology decisions that will accelerate our ability to offer the strongest possible opportunity for developers and the richest possible experience for consumers. For developers, it will open up a huge installed customer base for their applications. For consumers, it means a more compelling engagement with their Nokia product in terms of access to the best applications in the marketplace and a constantly improving product experience. We firmly believe that the choices we have made will not only mean significant opportunity and success for our developer partners, but for Nokia as well.”