Qt Labs was the Nokia developer blog for the Qt framework, covering releases, C++ features, QML and the Qt Project.
HN links it for Qt news such as the Android port Necessitas, the Qt Project's open governance and a post on strict aliasing.
Nokia is also finally about to catch up on the developer side, which might prove to be a big advantage. If ease of development is in any way correlated with application quality, we might see some action in the Nokia world soon.
For the little glimpses that I've seen, UI development using Qt Quick and QML and is actually pretty nice. Nothing like the Symbian hell, and seemed a good deal more fun than developing for Android. (Can't say it's on par with iOS though, at least not yet.)
This is the first time I'm actually _excited_ by a Nokia technology.
Now is a good time to check it out, since the first phones supporting 4.7 are supposed to come out "soon" (my source at Nokia was reluctant at naming a specific date). And they just put out a new technology preview:
http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/01/20/qt-sdk-1-1-technology-preview-released/
If Qt / QML Quick seems a bit barebones, there's a library called Qt Components which adds things like checkboxes, progress bars etc.:
http://qt.gitorious.org/qt-components
That sounds similar to the Steve Jobs Calculator Construction Set story (http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Calculator_Construction_Set.txt).
For the 90% of people I imagine until something much better is forced upon them they'll be perfectly happy with what they have, be it Gmail or Outlook. For the people who want a better experience, I imagine a lot of them will have the technical ability to strike forth and do it.
Essentially what you want is a backend message server and then let people communicate with it however they fancy with a high level API they can plug into their widget toolkit of choice if you go down that route. If you're into C++/Qt there's already a solution that does that (http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2009/09/21/introducing-qmf-an-advanced-mobile-messaging-framework/).
Well, the project has simply transitioned to open governance, which means anyone can contribute and move up the value chain based on meritocracy. So, for example, KDE folks can now directly contribute to Qt and also directly affect its future direction.
Trolltech/Nokia employees remain inside Nokia, and continue contributing actively to Qt (they are the largest contributors by far currently, I remember reading 85% of contributors being Nokia). Nokia continues to use Qt for Symbian/Meego as well as their future low-end platform, which currently only offers J2ME. They have officially announced that Qt will be used for "the next billion" which has been referred to as Meltemi software in leaks.
Blog post explaining this: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/09/12/qt-project/
There was much gnawing of teeth when compilers started to take advantage of the “strict aliasing rule”: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/06/10/type-punning-and-strict-aliasing/
Programmers might think that it is okay to use uninitialized variables as a source of additional entropy (xoring with the real source of entropy), but it isn't, because the compiler will treat the uninitialized access as undefined behavior and eliminate code altogether:
http://kqueue.org/blog/2012/06/25/more-randomness-or-less/
This 3-part blog post by Chris Lattner has various examples: http://blog.llvm.org/2011/05/what-every-c-programmer-should-know.html
Well, I might be confused with exact terms, but Blackberry supports Qt on it's new platforms, meaning developers can distribute Qt apps. See http://blackberry.github.com/ndk/components.html#Qt
If I'm correct, the Qt Lighthouse is integrated in Qt 4.8 (now RC1), which means easy porting for any platform, including Android. Remains to be seen if Nokia and Google come in terms with this officially though. Of course, you can already distribute Qt apps on Android, using third party ports like Necessitas: http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/28/necessitas/ .
Hence QML. Right now I'm developing a desktop application with the interface done with QML and the main app in C++, and I would say the interface development is easy, as is connecting it to the C++.
The caveat at present is that the standard desktop widgets are not yet fully available from QML (see [1] for a recent update). For most of my application this doesn't matter (I haven't decided how I'll do the settings dialog yet), but for enterprise apps it quite likely does.
[1] http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2012/06/06/desktop-components-for-qt-5/