David Wood recently gave us an interview regarding the future of the S60 platform. Even though it was well-received, he got back in touch with us, posting the following clarifications / additional infiormation:
Hi – A few quick clarifications…
The body of the article is correct but I would not have chosen a headline talking about the death of S60 / Avkon. That’s misleading (though attention-grabbing):
a.) S60 will continue: there are huge amounts of non-UI APIs, which will be available to developers from S^4 onwards
b.) Avkon has a lot of life left in it in the meantime! It’s impossible to know for sure, but there could be 100s of million new devices shipped on S^1, S^2, and S^3, in the months and years ahead. That’s a huge opportunity for application developers to bear in mind.
Second to answer some comments from PaulT:
It’s true, Qt itself can coexist fine with existing Avkon and S60. It’s not Qt, but Orbit (the new set of UI elements) that causes the incompatibility. However, even with Qt and Orbit installed, the vast majority of Symbian platform APIs will continue to be accessible, as before.
>endless partnering requests with Nokia for non platform API’s
Happily, that’s something that the move to open source should render unnecessary!
The difficult question is: why not support Avkon alongside Orbit? That’s a decision for the Symbian community as a whole to take. It’s conceivable that some manufacturers might ship devices like this, but it looks more likely (from reading the discussions on the Symbian Developer Forums) that complete removal of Avkon will allow a more efficient software system that will also pose less confusion to end-users.
Another big question is: when should Symbian be talking to developers about this forthcoming change. Some people say “it’s too early to introduce this news” and others “it’s already too late”
So I think we’ve probably got the timing about right.// David Wood, Symbian
With that, everything should be clear 
.
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