The new pre-release of Qt for S60 is there

After three incredibly short months, the Qt to S60 porting team is pleased to provide another pre-release of the port! :) This time, the pre-release code name is "Tower". Nearly all functional areas which are wrapped by Qt's beautiful Api are now doing their job also on S60.

Red carpet
The red carpet to S60 development with Qt is now rolled out for You. Despite some tiny roughness here and there, Your walk over that carpet should be safe and pleasant. In other words: If You did not already, this is the perfect time to start playing with Qt for S60 :)

What's new?
Besides the usual optimizations, fixes, code cleaning and various improvements, there are three fresh modules: Phonon, QtSql and QtWebkit, new softkeys and input methods APIs, as well as a brand new installer.
Phonon on S60 is building and applications that are built against it will run, but there is currently no functional Phonon backend on S60. QtWebkit on S60 is still considered experimental. However, You should already be able to start developing QtWebKit refined applications for the pocket. A complete list of changes can be found here.

In addition to the new features, work has also begun on making Qt exception safe, in order to fill the gap between Symbian and Qt exception systems. You can read more about Qt and exceptions here.

Installation is easy!
This release makes the installation of Qt for S60 easy. An installer will copy the Qt libraries (for emulator and hardware) to the places where they belong. Start using Qt, right away, the dark ages of required manual Qt builds are over.

Getting started
We at QtSoftware love to create videos. This time, we have three of them showing some demos and how to get started:

Qt for S60 is getting close to being feature complete, and is also much easier to install than before. We really think that this release makes it worth walking the red carpet!