Aussie-made Qtopia takes top gong at LinuxWorld

An Australian-developed application platform for embedded Linux mobile phones has taken top honours in the Linux Journal Product Excellence Awards at LinuxWorld San Francisco.

Trolltech's Qtopia Phone Edition 4 took out the gong for Best Application Development Platform and Tool. The awards distinguish product and service innovations by LinuxWorld exhibitors and are divided into 13 categories.

"This award is a great honour for us - especially given the excellent competition in our category," Trolltech vice president of engineering for mobile and embedded systems, Warwick Allison said.

Qtopia Phone Edition 4 was up against, Eclipse Callisto, Revelation Software OpenInsight for Linux 7.2, SureSoft Technologies CodeScroll-API Tester/CodeScroll-Embedded Tester and IBM WebSphere Everyplace Deployment.

The application was designed and developed by Trolltech's Brisbane-based development-arm. Based on the Qt toolkit which uses an extended version of the C++ programming language, Qtopia Phone Edition allows full access to its source code so manufacturers can customise specific features for mobile devices.

"This recognition shows that talented Australian developers do not have to go overseas to get the opportunity to be part of a world leading software development program," Allison said.

Meanwhile, Trolltech's Brisbane team has just finished development on a new Greenphone, an open-source Linux-based phone which enables developers to build custom features for target markets.