The open source Maemo platform, which is used on Nokia's Internet Tablet devices, will soon support Trolltech's Qt development toolkit.

After a delay of several weeks, Nokia is finally shipping its Maemo Linux-based N900 smartphone for 500 Euros ($750), says eWEEK. Meanwhile, a research note supports rumors of an upcoming Maemo-based, mass-market smartphone designed to compete directly with the iPhone, says an industry report, and LWN.net reports on last month's Maemo Summit.

KDE people @ MaemoLast weekend Amsterdam was visited by hackers from various Free Software communities and companies from around the world. Brought together by the Maemo Summit in the WesterGasFabriek, they gave and attended talks about topics like the Maemo applications, user interface components, the underlying infrastructure and of course the future of Maemo.

At the Maemo Conference in Amsterdam Suresh Chande announced that Nokia has contracted KO GmbH to write a mobile office viewer using the KOffice libraries. The presentation by Suresh was given with the Nokia N900 smartphone, using the new Office Viewer. The improvements in KOffice have largely been in the libraries, on top of which a Maemo-specific GUI was written.

Nokia will introduce Qt to the maemo platform in addition to GTK+. The plan is in the earliest stage and recruitment offers for Qt/C++ developers will pop up soon. Don't expect any Qt application developed by Nokia for the tablets anytime soon, though. The first actual step will be the distribution of the Qt libraries for application development in maemo.org during 4Q2008.

According to a newspaper report, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia plans to equip future high-performance phones with the Maemo operating system. The report (German language link) in the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD), says the company is expected to launch its first Maemo smartphone within the next few weeks.

NOKIA HAS CREATED a port for the Qt cross-platform framework to Maemo 5 in a bid to help developers create applications for the N900.

At the Maemo Summit Conference in Amsterdam, Nokia gave out over 300 N900 phones running Maemo 5. The N900 is the successor to the N810, over a hundred of which were handed out at Akademy a year ago. Read on for some opinions about the N900 and the results of 3 days of hacking.

Users who have bought Nokia's flagship smartphone, the Maemo-based N900, won't be able to upgrade the device to MeeGo, Nokia said in a blog post. The MeeGo OS, merges Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo Linux-based operating systems.