Nokia has a pretty unparalleled manufacturing/delivery/logistics chain for low end phones. They like to claim they can put a phone on a shelf anywhere in africa for less than competitors' manufacturing costs. That's pretty impressive, if true. But we're talking about phones that retail for $35. The smartphones are a joke.
But the software! I sure hope Qt is starting to pay some dividends for them. When i was dealing with native Symbian/S40/S60 development a few years ago, I wanted to stick a fork in my eye.
The big threat there isn't Motorola or Samsung figuring out a way to ship phones around the world more efficiently -- it's local competitors in emerging markets. For example, India-based Micromax is gaining serious market share in the country at Nokia's expense.
This is not true. Micromax phones are just re-branded chinese/korean knockoff phones. There was a craze for these phone two years back because of dual-sim capability. Now everybody realized that the quality is very bad and started buying nokia/samsung/lg dual-sim phones instead.
Lots of local brands have suddenly gained some traction in Indian market. Mostly because of their cheap prices (Micromaxx brought out an Android one for $130!).
Also, if you look at the PR of these new mobile companies, they are mostly targeted at the people living in rural areas. So, they are in fact eating a part of Nokia's pie, but a final verdict can be said only a couple of years later. Micromaxx is going public soon, so, lets wait and see how many of them make it.
I have started learning native development at first. That was good experience from the point that you get some inner understanding how Symbian works but overall it is too hard to develop using native code.
As well I am developing actively two Qt based Symbian applications during my free time currently. I really love it because I can in relatively small time develop nice and working applications. There are some problems still (e.g. kinetic scrolling, problems with QtMobility on some phones, like flagman N8, full screen issues and etc.) but it looks like those problems will be solved in the future.
I love that development on Linux is possible as well.
Just yesterday I attended a presentation on the upcoming Qt Quick toolkit and QML, the language for defining UIs. Should have support for both Meego and whatever Symbians remain. QML looked quite nice in itself and a definite improvement but, in historical context, I'm not yet convinced…
I have not considered using QML at all. At the moment samples were unusable or very slow on Nokia E51. Pure Qt from other side was faster than I have expected. Actually I do not feel difference from native applications.
Although their smart-phones (which predate the iPhone by many years) have had commercial success world wide that would make any manufacturer extraordinarily jealous.
But the software! I sure hope Qt is starting to pay some dividends for them. When i was dealing with native Symbian/S40/S60 development a few years ago, I wanted to stick a fork in my eye.