Nokia Acquires Trolltech For $153 million

Nokia Acquires Trolltech For $153 million. Trolltech (www.trolltech.com), a company headquartered in Oslo, Norway and publicly listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange is in talks to be bough out by Nokia for $153 million. Trolltech is a recognized software provider with world-class software development platforms and frameworks. In addition to the key software assets, its talented team will play an important role in accelerating the implementation of Nokia's software strategy.

Nokia plans to use the newly acquired talent to reduce development cycles and redundancy. Take the contact list for example, currently the S40 and S60 guys have to write separate versions of an application that essentially does the same thing. Some may argue that the contact list program on S40 does more than the same application on S60; regardless now this application can be written once and compiled for both S40 and S60 therefore giving Nokia more time to work on bringing more services and better software out.

The acquisition is still subject to regulatory approval and final closure, with 66.43% of shareholders having already accepted the bid. Nokia said that the acquisition will allow it “to accelerate its cross-platform software strategy for mobile devices and desktop applications, and develop its Internet services business.”

With Trolltech, Nokia and third party developers will be able to develop applications that work in the Internet, across Nokia’s device portfolio and on PCs. Nokia’s software strategy for devices is based on cross-platform development environments, layers of software that run across operating systems, enabling the development of applications across the Nokia device range. Examples of current cross-platform layers are Web runtime, Flash, Java and Open C.

With the Trolltech purchase Nokia hopes to use the Qt framework to bring all the current platforms together, including Maemo, and to make the desktop Ovi experience as seamless as possible. No time tables have been given for when this will actually occur and no word has been given about whether or not Nokia plans to build a mobile phone that utilizes Trolltech’s Qtopia platform. The acquisition is expected to be completed in the second quarter of 2008.