Новини от Нокия

1. What worries me is: there is none of the Belle FP1 enhancements. None. No Qt-based icon display, no fourth button in the home screen, no keyboard enhancements, and those items have nothing to do with processor power, they have to do simply with laziness. So, "Belle Refresh" is nothing more than 2 or 3 minor updates. At least, according to this leak.

2. The big point behind Belle Refresh is the Qt 4.8 upgrade. In a theoretical Belle refresh everything is designed to work with Qt 4.8. Let me explain how this update is so important and how, if this is the real state of Belle Refresh, I'm even more disappointed.
Almost no one here uses Linux, and those who do, are using Ubuntu. I use in a common basis the Chakra Project distribution, with an environment called KDE, entirely based in Qt. I filed bugs against KDE with the transition between Qt 4.7.4 and Qt 4.8 (the same transition that we are going to see in Belle Refresh). And I can tell you that Qt 4.7.4, at least with the QML, QtMobility and QGraphicsScene APIs, is pathetically slow compared to Qt 4.8. A 2x, 3x or 4x, even 10x delta in graphic operations is not uncommon, and there are speedups everywhere: in the OpenGL, OpenVG and Raster backends. In layman's terms: Qt 4.8, or a Belle Refresh based on it, will be FASTER than Qt 4.7.4 (Belle) on every possible scenario; will eat LESS resources, and will run A LOT faster, even if it is running THE SAME programs, if they are compiled against Qt. So all this speak about how this is a minor update dissipates.

3. There are developer tweets telling us that a ETA of ~August 30th is something possible. Those tweets are speaking about mails sent by Nokia, to prevent graphical and UI corruption issues that will happen with the transition between Qt 4.7 and Qt 4.8. Those issues WILL happen and CANNOT be prevented without developer access to the source code. When those issues are prevented and corrected, the QML apps will run against Qt 4.8, and that means we will see those QML interfaces flying at 2x, 3x, 4x or 10x the speed of the Qt 4.7 line.

4. I experienced all of that switching from KDE 4.7 (Qt 4.7.4) to KDE 4.8 (Qt 4.Cool. So everything I'm saying is backed up by experience.

5. With a immensely faster Qt engine, the only thing preventing further upgrades, or more widgets, is C: space. That's why I don't know why isn't Nokia switching core components, like the icon grid, or the home screen, to QML, since QML scripts are smaller than the programs they replace. Also, there are some things, like the fourth button in the home screen, that only take a few lines of QML Declarative code. So, this isn't an acceptable excuse.