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posted by janrinok on Thursday February 22 2018, @10:49PM   Printer-friendly
from the choose-wisely dept.

Both Facebook and Netflix implemented their eponymous apps with Web. Despite spending millions of dollars, neither of them could achieve an iPhone-like user experience (60 frames per second and less than 100ms response to user inputs) on anything less powerful than a system-on-chip (SoC) with four ARM Cortex-A9 cores.

In contrast, numerous products like infotainment systems, in-flight entertainment systems, harvester terminals and home appliances prove that you can achieve an iPhone-like user experience (UX) on single-core Cortex-A8 SoCs. Our above-mentioned manufacturer HAM Inc. (renamed for the sake of confidentiality) verified these results by building both a Web and Qt prototype.

In this white paper, Burkhard Stubert explains how he could save one of the world's largest home appliance manufacturers millions of Euros by choosing Qt over HTML. The secret? Qt scales down to lower-end hardware a lot better, without sacrificing user experience.

With a five times smaller footprint, four to eight times lower RAM requirements and a more efficient rendering flow than HTML, Qt provides faster start-up times and maintains the cherished 60fps and 100ms response time, where HTML would struggle. The calculations show that being able to just downgrade your SoC by just one tier like this, Qt can reduce your hardware costs by over 53%.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:37PM (5 children)

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Thursday February 22 2018, @11:37PM (#642077) Journal

    TL:DR;

    Qt is from a company selling software and services for profit. Thus it naturally follows that all his arguments are invalid and not even worth considering.

    --
    People today are educated enough to repeat what they are taught but not to question what they are taught.
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  • (Score: 1, Redundant) by inertnet on Friday February 23 2018, @12:50AM (4 children)

    by inertnet (4071) on Friday February 23 2018, @12:50AM (#642118) Journal

    Kind of ironic is that Qt was originally created by Nokia, which lost the smartphone race while creating Qt.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @01:42AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 23 2018, @01:42AM (#642146)

      Not accurate.
      Nokia took ownership in the late noughts.
      It was created by Trolltech. [wikipedia.org]

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by pipedwho on Friday February 23 2018, @01:45AM (2 children)

      by pipedwho (2032) on Friday February 23 2018, @01:45AM (#642147)

      Qt was originally created by Trolltech in 1995, and KDE started up about a year later. Then 13 years later in 2008 Nokia bought Trolltech, and started contributing to the project.

      No, Nokia didn't create Qt, but yes, they did 'lose' the smartphone race. There move towards Qt was too little, too late. And it still wasn't anywhere near as open, portable and usable by third parties as Android.

      Qt development never ceased, and it has always been a usable open source library for developing GUI applications.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Friday February 23 2018, @04:29AM (1 child)

        by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Friday February 23 2018, @04:29AM (#642213) Homepage
        It's actually more complicated than that, it wasn't "too little too late", Nokia were flitting between platforms like a headless chicken at that stage - even within the same *product*. For example, between the keyboarded maemo n900 and the swipey harmattan n9, there wasn't just one scrapped phone, the keyboarded n950, there were two, an earlier swipey thing codenamed "Columbus".
        http://www.ubergizmo.com/2012/09/nokia-rm-581-columbus-harmattan-prototype-leaked/
        Nokia couldn't decide what platform/toolkit Harmattan should be based on, and changed their minds several times. Hilarity, like the eventual loss of thousands of jobs, ensued.

        And Elop was Microsoft's Trojan Horse.
        --
        Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by pipedwho on Friday February 23 2018, @05:48AM

          by pipedwho (2032) on Friday February 23 2018, @05:48AM (#642234)

          It was sad to watch while Nokia screwed up with Symbian, and then tried to go the open source route with Qt, but were floundering so badly in the wind that they finally hit the proverbial ice-berg when they struck the deal with Microsoft to use Windows Phone. Then Microsoft bought them out, which was monumentally stupid, and we know where that led. The iPhone (or equivalent) should have been a Nokia product. It was their market to lose. It seems they just got too big and didn't have a strong enough captain to steer the ship where it needed to go.

          It kind of reminded me with IBM and OS/2. They could see Microsoft doing all sorts of things to gain market share, yet, there they were charging ridiculous prices for an OS that needed work and needed apps. IMO, if IBM kept with the program, fixed some underlying design issues, and engaged much stronger marketing strategies, they might have staved off the MS Windows monoculture. There was already impetus from businesses to move towards OS/2, and they just needed to get Word Perfect and Lotus 123 ported to their platform and they would have owned it. But, no, they sat back and did jack shit (but what else do you expect from IBM) and instead developed Lotus Notes (the biggest POS software that ever was written), made that half arsed Lotus Smartsuite, and overpriced everything they made. Meanwhile, Microsoft is massively benefitting for everyone rampantly pirating their shit, benefitting from their predatory practices of making DOS and Windows (in)compatible with externally competing popular software, and of course the shady deals with manufacturers to exclusively pre-install DOS/Windows. So, in short, I blame IBM for Microsoft's eventual market dominance.