Trolltech launches Qtopia Phone Edition for Neo1973 Mobile Phone

Neo1973 and logo Trolltech and Qtopia Trolltech has introduced Qtopia Phone Edition that has been ported to the Neo1973 mobile phone. The phone has been manufactured by OpenMoko, a Taiwanese manufacturer FIC and open-source software provider.

Qtopia Phone Edition is the leading application platform and user interface for Linux based mobile phones. In addition to Trolltech’s Qtopia Greenphone, developers have an additional reference platform and form factor for development and testing of new mobile Qtopia applications.

An open platform phone, the Neo1973 has the combination of the FIC hardware and OpenMoko software integration and software environment along with Linux software developed by OpenMoko.

“We welcome Trolltech extending the reach of our Neo 1973 and the OpenMoko platform. And we applaud their efforts at simplifying application development for mobile devices. I look forward to a closer collaboration between our two communities,” commented Sean Moss-Pultz, President of OpenMoko.

“We applaud OpenMoko’s vision to make the Neo an open platform and the excellent work they have done with this phone,” said Benoit Schillings, CTO at Trolltech. “In the spirit of open development and innovation we want to showcase the versatility of Qtopia by porting our application platform to the Neo phone, which has had a positive impact on the open mobile ecosystem.”

Trolltech also announced that the Qtopia Phone Edition with all its components will be fully accessible under both the open source GPL version 2 licenses and a commercial license. Moreover it also continues to support Greenphone as a reference platform for mobile development within the company and through its partners.

It is said that the full GPL of Qtopia Phone Edition will also be configured to run on the mobile camera phone, called the Greenphone, which can be re-flashed with new and different applications. Greenphone comes bundled as part of a Qtopia Phone Edition SDK.

Until till now, Qtopia has been ported onto 90 different devices, including 25 phones. There are over 9 million Qtopia-based handsets in the market that also includes mobile devices from Motorola, ZTE and Cellon.