Nokia has definitely done some strange and bad things their phone’s operating systems lately. But just when you thought Qt is dead on smartphones, it turns out, it’s not. And neither is Symbian.  Almost.  Maybe.  Kind of.

Imagine that!

So I find myself needing a new phone. My old flip phone was acting up … even more than usual for it, and it was always a bit peculiar.  It was cheap though, so no surprises there. But for someone who actually thinks about security, what was I to do? I don’t particularly trust Apple, as their phones have been pwned to own and their security and privacy questionable at the best of times. Even worse though would be Android, which has become a laughing stock when it comes to security. There’s Microsoft … but frankly I’ve never really trusted Microsoft. Not since I found their XP firewall was allowing traffic while it asked you if you wanted to block some application for suspicious behavior or not. (And frankly, does anyone really take Microsoft seriously for security?  Recent studies of which security is the best for PCs leave Microsoft’s Windows AV and firewall products at the bottom of the lists.)

Gee, if only there were some other smartphone OS than iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. And as a tinker-monkey and Qt programmer, one with Qt support would be even better.

And that’s where I found it. Being punished over in the darkest corner, facing the wall because she’s a bad bad girl, was Nokia’s little ____ stepchild. No, not even that one.  Or that one. The other one. Symbian.

Only Nokia won’t even call her Symbian anymore. First Nokia renamed Symbian^3 as Symbian Anna. But then Nokia went one step further and renamed the next version Nokia Belle. No more Symbian even in name!

And likely due to their deal with the devil Microsoft phones running Symbian … I mean Nokia Belle now make up the Nokia cheap seats, relegated to the unimportant “feature phone” lines now that Windows is here to (allegedly) save Nokia’s smartphone lines.

The only problem is, Belle is a lot smarter than people give her credit for. Symbian always was underrated.

This is how I ended up finding a nice little deal on a shiny new Nokia C6-01. At virtually the same price point as my crappy old flip phone, I picked up a Belle of a deal. 3G and GSM both, 802.11b/g/n wifi for free home internet, GPS, FM radio (strangely, FM radio and not internet radio is a feature of utmost importance to me), 8MP camera with a dual LED flash that actually works, MP3 music player, Microsoft Office Mobile, and yes, even your favorite games like Angry Birds … this little gem basically has it all. Even the option for up to a 32GB memory card like any modern cellphone. (Which, of course, I upgraded mine to.) It’s slimmer than my old flip phone. (Though thanks to the glass screen, a bit heavier.)

It’s everything I need my present phone to be.

(At least for now. Once an x86-based phone running a full version of Windows and a 5” or so 1080P screen comes out, I’ll call that my “laptop” replacement and retire my Viliv S5 and my shiny new Nokia C6-01 to get whatever that phone will be.)

True, the C6-01 came installed with Symbian Anna. And she was nice. But once I upgraded her to Belle, that’s when I fell in love. It sounds goofy, but an amazing six homescreens! With the widgets and shortcuts in place, believe it or not, I already have turned on all six. One for phone, one for music, one for device on/off switches, settings, and handy apps, one for “socialization” (which I don’t actually use yet), one for taking notes, and one for games and goofy apps like timers and flashlights.

Are there any downsides to a Nokia Belle phone? Well, sure. First, they’re never going to be the absolute best hardware. Not because they couldn’t be, but because Nokia is now putting Windows Phone first, and I’m sure Microsoft is paying them for that consideration.  As “feature phones” you’ll never find Symbian … err … Nokia Belle on a truly awesome phone.  But Belle is so good, she doesn’t even remotely need a quadcore processor anyway.  Android lag?  Not on Symbian!

Second, obviously, there won’t be as many apps. This doesn’t even remotely worry me any because I don’t give a fig about apps, but you might care. Obviously if Angry Birds can be ported to Symbian, the platform can’t be all that bad. It’s just a matter of convincing the third party developer to bother.  It can be done.  Just will they?  You can always ask.  And there certainly are apps on Symbian.

Third, and maybe I’m crazy on this one, but Symbian Anna had a better screen saver than Nokia Belle. And weirder than that is Nokia Belle doesn’t even come with Anna’s screensaver. Eh? Obviously Nokia has the sourcecode for it. In fact I’d be surprised if Anna’s screensaver binary wouldn’t run on Belle. This may very well be my first project, to get the Anna screensaver back on my phone.  Or maybe to make one of my own.

Anyway, for my needs, this Nokia C6-01 does everything I need and then some. It’s exactly what I needed to replace my old phone. I can set it up to completely avoid downloading anything over the cell network. I can set it up to continue connecting over GSM. And yet, if I decide I want to “upgrade” to a modern phone + data plan, I can.  Easily. The hardware is all there and the software is a simple change in settings to switch. So as far as phone features go, it’s all the phone I wanted and I’m not forced into it being more than I want. Plus I have my FM radio. I have an MP3 player. I even have “apps” to goof around with. The touchscreen is nice and modern and very sensitive.  (Sometimes almost to a fault.) The phone is darned good. And the battery life is hard to beat at 408 hours of standby (on GSM), 50 hours of music play time, and even a whopping 11.5 hours (again, on GSM) of talk time. It’s a phone that you don’t need to constantly keep plugged in.  (On 3G you can pretty much cut those times in half.  Another reason to not upgrade.)

And as far as Nokia Belle goes, as far as I’m concerned Google and Apple can go glut themselves. Symbian’s quality and user experience I found it easier to use and more flexible than iOS 6, Android 4, and even Windows Phone 7. And as a software developer, it’s hard to overlook the lure of developing my own apps for my phone using Qt. (Quite possibly the basis of Qt in Symbian now is why it’s so easy to use.)

The Nokia C6-01 is the bee’s knees. For not being a “smartphone”, it’s smarter and friendlier than most every phone out there, and at a price that can’t be beat.

There’s a lot that we can beat Nokia up for. And now it looks like there’s one thing more: their reluctance to stick to Symbian. There’s absolutely no reason why this OS should be relegated to the bargain bin of feature phones. Nokia really should have stuck to its guns.  Instead, Nokia just announced that Symbian Nokia Belle is the end of the line for Symbian.  There’ll be one more big patch-o-rama, and then that’s that.  No C or D versions, as were originally slated.  Just like Qt, Nokia is washing its hands of Symbian.  It’s no surprise.  What we can hope for though is that Symbian will become open source.  There it might finally have a chance of competing with Android and iOS in the market.  From a manufacturer’s perspective.  From a usability and security perspective, Symbian has already won in my opinion.

So if you follow these kinds of things on Ye Olde Interwebs, it turns out that Nokia’s shiny promotional videos and photos showcasing the Lumia 920 and its PureView camera to tout the new optical image stabilization were actually faked. Or to put it nicely, “simulated”. Basically, they were shot with equipment other than the Lumia 920 that they were touting.

Even if the “simulation” were true enough to real life to make no difference (though I claim no such thing) it’s still really bad form.

Now, one could say this was Nokia’s first bad decision. Though honestly, if you follow their constant OS changing (that in the process did considerable damage to desktop Qt) it’s really very difficult to call that the first bad decision that Nokia has ever made. And the jury is still out about the whole Windows phone thing…

But suffice it to say, in regards to just the Lumia 920 debacle, the decision to “simulate” a key selling point was certainly the first bad decision there.

That however has been quickly followed by a second one, to remain closed on the raking of an alleged scapegoat over coals. Because all Nokia is willing to say on the matter is that “poor judgment was exercised” and that they “have taken appropriate action.”

Yes. Quite. I’m sure.

Oh, wait, no … I’m not sure!  Not even one little itty bit!

Not that we want to literally see heads roll, but gosh! I don’t think you could understate and obfuscate more if you tried without just plain not admitting to any culpability whatsoever. So who’s poor judgment was it exactly? How high up did that decision go? And what’s being one? A slap on the wrist? A quick shove out the door? Who? What? When? Where? All we really know is the why.

It grates on the nerves because it really stinks to high heaven. It seems more like a case of sweeping the crock of pixels under the rug than actually admitting and correcting a problem.

But whatever. No one buys Nokia smartphones anyway.

Okay, okay, so maybe the title isn’t exactly a fair statement.  Maybe Nokia isn’t really “washing their hands” of Qt.  I mean it’s not like Nokia has been incompetently juggling an OS to replace Symbian for years now…

Wait.  Maemo, Meego, Qt, Microsoft Windows Phone … okay.  So yeah, they kind of have.

Huh.  But so it’s not like Nokia got themselves into a politically compromising situation by wholeheartedly committing to a draconian platform like Microsoft Windows after having spent years on Linux-based …

Honestly, no, I couldn’t keep a straight face there either.

So here’s the poop:  Nokia is desperate to salvage the mess that they’ve made of their once-top position.  They kept investing in brave new worlds in an effort to remain bleeding edge, but got caught up in the “shiny shiny” of Information Technology, and let their ADD/ADHD get the better of them.  They had a perfectly good Linux-based Symbian replacement in Maemo, but they let Intel sweet talk them into a joint venture to merge Inte’s Moblin with Nokia’s Maemo to create Meego.  But before the fruits of Maemo or Meego could even be realized, Nokia already saw a new shiny in the theoretically more robust Qt.  Which left Intel with a dead fish and Nokia once again with a lot more work to become relevant again in the smartphone industry.

So Nokia bought Qt from Trolltech, who admittedly seem to have kind of sold themselves out and let their work on Qt be a tad … “rushed” to get themselves bought out.  It was a desktop PC environment that they started wedging mobile phone interfaces into.  Enter Nokia, the new manhandlers of Qt, who concentrated that work even more heavily on mobile phones.  And who really seemed to have no interest whatsoever in supporting their own product.  (As a Qt user for many years now, from long before Nokia bought Qt from Trolltech, I saw firsthand how much of a decline Qt was under Nokia’s hand.)  To the point where the SDKs no longer even included the Qt source code and could barely even be comprehended, and often had glaring flaws like being unable to build for static library use.  Atrocities against desktop Qt were committed under Nokia’s ownership, in the name of making Qt more mobile-relevant.

But, just like Nokia has done before, instead of sticking to a platform long enough to make it work, they saw an easy out in the form of Microsoft Windows Phone, and they took it.  (And presumably a lot of cash to make that commitment.)

Now, having taken said cash, and becoming most thoroughly tied to Microsoft, whatever was Nokia to do with the heart of many Linux GUIs, Qt?  Talk about sleeping with the enemy!

So enter Digia, Qt’s new saviors.  Now Digia had already been taking over parts of Qt from Nokia already anyway, because frankly, Nokia was only interested in using Qt for phones.  Which is fair to Nokia, but completely and totally unfair to Qt, it being first and foremost a desktop multiplatform GUI and more set of libraries.  Digia had been selling their own commercial Qt licenses and support and, sadly, doing a better job of showing interest in the heart of Qt than Nokia ever was.  So when Nokia put their future into Microsoft’s hands, it’s no surprise at all that behind-closed-doors talks of selling Qt to Digia took place.  What is surprising is that it actually took this long after Nokia’s commitment to all things Microsoft to actually finalize their sale of Qt to anyone else.

So what now?

Well, nothing bad, as far as I can figure.  At least not for Qt.  (Nokia has already fallen way behind in the smartphone market, and being tied to Microsoft Windows Phone in the Apple/Google iPhone/Android game seems fairly unlikely to dig themselves out of their hole no matter how much initial financial improvement from MS it may have made Nokia to commit to that.)

Digia seems to honestly and legitimately be interested in all of Qt.  And as a business, to make actual money on the product of, not just as the middleware to a line of gadgets.  Digia knows Qt already, so they’re not blindly investing here, and there hopefully won’t be much or any stumbling with a new learning curve.  And even better are the canned quotes from Digia saying positive things like, “Digia’s targeted R&D investments will bring back focus on Qt’s desktop and embedded platform support, while widening the support for mobile operating systems.“  (Bold was my emphasis.)  There’s Windows 8 for desktops that Qt really needs to work on incorporating.  Then there’s all of those mobile platforms that Nokia had no interest in supporting when they bought Qt, like iOS, Android, and yes, even Windows Phone 7 and 8.

There’s a lot for Qt to catch up on.  And a lot of direction that was lost under Nokia’s ownership.  Digia seems honestly interested in fixing that.  So “Huzzah!“, I say.  It’ll be nice to see Qt returned to it’s former glory as the unquestionable leader of truly multiplatform desktop GUI technologies.

Now if only someone could convince Digia to take Qt Python support seriously, I’d be grinning ear to ear instead of just broadly smiling. 

Smartphones are either too smart, or not smart enough, apparently. It turns out there’s a number of interesting grievous security vulnerabilities in our cellphones lately.

The first to shiver your timbers is that Google’s Android is a lot less secure than – well, I can’t say anyone thought it was, because frankly, I don’t trust the security on any cellphone with a ten foot pole – but certainly less secure than most people could ever imagine their phone being. Research done at North Carolina State University by Michael Grace, Yajin Zhou, Zhi Wang, and Xuxian Jiang is pretty clear about “explicit capability leaks” in Android which allows Android app developers to actually bypass the key security defenses built into Android, allowing apps access to personal information such as your GPS coordinates, or to functions such as text messaging or audio recording (yes, that means tapping your texts and phone calls is included in the capabilities), regardless of your security settings, typically caused by manufacturer-supplied “enhancements” to the base Android install.

Using a diagnostic app they call “Woodpecker” that can diagnose which of your security settings are actually compromised, they found these vendor-created vulns in Google, HTC, Motorola and Samsung brands. Other brands are certainly possible to be vulnerable as well, but were beyond the scope of their study.

Now, as if that weren’t enough, in highly related news and yet a completely different security hole, security researcher Trevor Eckhart has released some shocking evidence of just such a vendor-installed piece of software that completely and totally compromises the security of your smartphone. (Normally I would embed the video for you, but as requested in the video, I’m instead pointing you to the page itself.) This nasty bit of software, which I quite agree with his estimation that it counts as a rootkit, is called Carrier IQ.

Carrier IQ logs (nearly) every key press and button press that you make, meaning all your passwords are belong to … whoever is collecting that data. Carrier IQ also snoops on your text messages, snooping on them before the phone even manages to display them to you. It even bypasses the encryption meant to be in SSL / HTTPS.

Amongst other nasty things.

And Carrier IQ is not just an Android menace installed by the likes of HTC (on which Eckhart tested). In theory Carrier IQ software can be put onto any smartphone. There’s a version for them all. So is your smartphone affected? Here’s a quick breakdown of the scuttlebutt across various blogs:

Well if it’s Android, obviously there’s that possibility, since Eckhart used an Android phone and its debug tools to find Carrier IQ in the first place. So you’re probably infected.

BlackBerry? This one is a little confusing. It’s been alleged that Carrier IQ is on BlackBerries, and yet Research in Motion is adamant that it does not pre-install Carrier IQ, nor does it authorize its carriers to do so. Of course there’s nothing actually stopping its carriers from installing Carrier IQ anyway. So this would suggest that while RiM may be against using it, that doesn’t mean that your BB is in any way safe from it.

iPhone? Yep. It’s a definite possibility to be installed on your iPhone. Carrier IQ has been on the iPhone since iOS 3, and is still there. Though supposedly now with iOS5 you can disable Carrier IQ by turning off “Diagnostics and Usage” in your settings. (Settings->General->About->Diagnostics and Usage->Don’t Send.) And supposedly it’s a lightweight version of a violation, only reporting your phone number, your carrier, your country, your location, and your active phone calls. Oh … that’s not so bad then? Eh?  Now, Apple is claiming that iOS 5 does not use Carrier IQ.  However, evidence shows that it does, just that it can be turned off.  So believe what you will.  Just because it’s turned off doesn’t mean that it’s removed.

Symbian is a confusing one. There are a lot of reports saying it is so. And yet Nokia claims that Carrier IQ doesn’t even have any Symbian-based products, so it simply can’t be true. Carrier IQ doesn’t list OS compatibility on their website anywhere that I can find, so I really can’t verify this one way or the other.

webOS … This one has even less information on it. It’s claimed, a lot. But often in generalized sweeping statements. I haven’t seen anyone offer definitive proof positive. Nor refute it. Given that it’s kind of a dead OS anyway, sold from Palm off to HP who has now abandoned it, it’s not much of an issue. But if you have proof one way or the other, I’m sure everyone would love to know with certainty.

Windows Phone 7? Strangely enough, so far it seems as if this is the only smartphone OS to be absolutely safe from Carrier IQ. How weird is that?

The key thing to remember with Carrier IQ is that this is not software designed to be pre-installed with the phone’s operating system. It is third-party software. Maybe it is installed by the manufacturer. Maybe it is installed by the carrier.  (As the name suggests.) There are a number of points where Carrier IQ can be installed on your phone. So just because one company refutes that they use Carrier IQ doesn’t mean that your phone hasn’t had it installed by another hand involved.

I have to say, I am highly disappointed with the bug resolution team working on Qt. I’ve reported a number of bugs that I’ve found now, and each and every time I get back basically the same response (whenever I finally do get any response at all), which is to hold the bugfix hostage until I provide them with a sample program to demonstrate the bug.

Never mind that each and every time I have provided clear instructions on how to reproduce the bug. Instructions which should make recreating it simplicity.

But that might actually entail them doing work. So instead they claim that somehow they can’t reproduce the bug. (Perhaps because they never even bothered to try?)

Because sure, I have all of the time in the world to be doing their jobs for them. No, I clearly have not already gone way above and beyond the call of a typical user by first reporting the bug and second making sure that bug report includes all of my system information and details on how to reliably reproduce the bug on my system. No, a silver platter is clearly just not good enough. If that platter isn’t gold or platinum with diamond studs, then clearly I haven’t given them enough reason to bother fixing the bug.

Disingenuous much?

I’ve seen more dedicated efforts on open source projects with people volunteering their work for free!

I really never had these kinds of problems back when Trolltech owned Qt. Have the Trolls just gotten lazy ever since getting fat off the hog of selling out? Or did Nokia fire the Good Trolls and keep only the lazy ones when they bought out Trolltech?

Either way, I am not impressed.

What is the flirking point of me going through all of the trouble to report bugs if no one is going to even try to fix them? I might as well just stop wasting my time reporting the bugs in the first place!

It’s really sad when I have to honestly contemplate the idea of forking my own version of Qt and fixing things myself because their own quality control team can’t be bothered to do any real work. (Which I’ve already kind of started doing anyway because I’ve needed to create my own patches since they’re not on the ball.) Just to even drive me to consider forking Qt for my own use just to keep Qt usable for my professional needs means Really Bad Things.

When a customer takes the time to report a bug, that itself should be lauded. And when that bug report further contains so many important details on how exactly to recreate the bug, that’s freaking gold!

Not a reason to hold a bugfix hostage!

And the one time that I hand them source code containing a fix they can’t even be bothered to respond at all. Platinum platter with gold inlay … nada.

Why is anyone paying Nokia for this?  I sure don’t!

Nuts to the NokiTrolls* then! See if I ever bother reporting another dang bug of theirs. Bloody darn useless lazy sorry sacks.

Work on Qt really has gone downhill ever since the Trolls sold out. It’s really depressing. Back when Qt3 was it and Qt4 was under discussion, there were so many great talks on how the architecture would be cleaned up, every widget component would actually inherit from QWidget, things would be threadsafe, architecture would be consistent, etc.

Then they sold out.

And we got Qt4.

Which was missing some pretty major parts no less, like any kind of a replacement for Qt3’s QCanvas architecture. (That animal, the QGraphics architecture, wasn’t even introduced until version 4.2, and didn’t really work properly until later.) And there are still inconsistent parts. Still not all visual components are based on QWidget. It’s not threadsafe. (But it does have a wonderful mutex lock … if you feel like manually creating your own versions of everything to use it! Why didn’t they just make Qt being automatically threadsafe a configuration option for people who can’t afford to lose the processing time on it?) And basically, while Qt4 is worlds better than Qt3, it’s still not great. Qt4 has fallen very short of the hype, is struggling to stay modern, and if it basically weren’t for all of the great concepts introduced and work done before the sellout, would likely never have been able to even stand up on its own.

And now we have Qt5 looming, looking to have little or nothing to do at all with desktop Qt at all. It’s all just mobile-centric ideas. Which is no surprise since Qt was bought out by Nokia, but again is pretty darn useless for anyone using Qt as a Linux or multiplatform desktop GUI. (Umm … KDE much?)

But frankly Qt is just going to hell in a handbasket in my opinion. The new NokiTrolls are not fixing bugs. They’re producing a lot of new pieces to Qt that are more like proof-of-concept test code than polished release code. And Hades, they’re trying to switch it from C++ to Javascript! It’s a mess, and it’s not getting any better.

Mono isn’t looking as bad as it used to. Heck, neither is wxWidgets…

(I’m still going to avoid Java like the plague as often as I can though. And Javascript? Yeesh! No thanks! I’m a professional. I’ll take C++ (or a good derivative) any day. And if I want something scripty, or fluid and artistic, I’ll use Python, thanks! A language that Qt still doesn’t officially support even though clearly someone had enough time to wrap Qt for Python all on their own without their support!)

You know you’re disgruntled when you’re actually hoping that Nokia drops Qt entirely and forces Qt to become branched into only being open source so that a homogeneous community can form around Qt and get it back on track instead of this heterogeneous hodge-podge ruining what was once something great. Heck, if Qt were only open source, I might actually fix all of the bugs I find myself instead of just reporting them. But I’m surely not going to be taking the time to do that while it’s someone else’s paid job to, for a product being sold for a profit.

*= I chose NokiTrolls because Trokia is too much like Troika (both a game software company and generally meaning “a collection of 3” in Russian, which doesn’t work so well with 2, but might be applicable if Nokia sells Qt to someone else). And Trollkia sounds too much like a derogatory term for tuners ripping on Kia’s cars.