Nokia has announced today that they're intending to acquire Trolltech, the Norwegian company behind the Qt cross-platform widget set and the Qtopia mobile platform.

Ari Jaaksi from Nokia writes:

Both GNOME and KDE are very interesting and active projects. Our strong participation in the Gnome community and the new access to KDE and Trolltech's technology puts us in an unique position to create even more interesting mobile devices, together with the open source communities.

Despite this and some collaborative efforts between the GNOME and KDE projects, the acquisition does cast the deeply GNOME-based maemo platform Nokia has been pushing so far into an interesting light.

In any case, good to see more movement in the mobile Linux space!

Updated 9:24Z: I would guess Nokia intends to use Qt to provide a transition path for developers from legacy Symbian environments to mobile Linux. Qt is already cross-platform and with strong support for independent developers, so it would fit this task quite well.

Technorati Tags: maemo, nokia, trolltech, qt