Nokia 500 navigator on Windows CE
Not quite accurate. Nokia does use Windows CE 5.0 on it's Nokia 500 Auto Navigation product.
Nokia-owned Trolltech has re-committed its Qt cross-platform application framework and toolkit to Windows. Trolltech's developer tools community manager Knut Yrvin told The Reg deep in the bowels of LinuxWorld it made healthy business sense to continue supporting Microsoft. "It would be unwise not to take Microsoft's mobile …
Qt is a good UI toolkit and it does a very good job on a variety of platforms. The signal/slot thing is a pleasure to work with, the Qt class hierarchy is pretty rational.
Nevertheless, and even in the strength of Qt, I'd advise Trolltech to avoid providing garish default icons that Redmond cannot deal with. MS might just buy Nokia in order to retain control of the desktop!
Nokia is unfortunately forced to ship a Windows Mobile phone since companies running Windows servers and MS Windows corporate users insist on "Windows Mobile" portable devices. This happens even while "Mail for Exchange" is offered free on E Series business smartphones.
Nokia is not Microsoft or Apple. They are out there to make money and they can't ignore that market too. So don't be surprised or call "Symbian" dead if they ship a Windows mobile smart phone.
Nokia PCSuite is a bit of an abomination, but if Nokia is serious about being a service company then it needs something like iTunes running on Windows, mac and linux.
Remember that PCSuite currently does sync, backup, messaging, photo sharing, music upload etc. It represents quite a big investment.
Also, any large software company creates development tools throughout the organisation, so you might have tools running on windows to calibrate phones, get crash dump info from the phones etc, I'm sure Nokia networks have good uses for a windows based toolkit also.
And other thoughts: Maybe the trolltech UI designer tools for mobile need to run on windows also.