Nokia has just released the first Beta of Qt 4.6.0, the upcoming new version of the Qt cross-platform application and UI framework from Nokia, which includes the port to the Symbian platform with integration for the S60 framework. The focus of this release has been to stabilize the Symbian port, as well as adding a backend for the Phonon multimedia library enabling simple audio and video playback. Also, released today is Qt Creator 1.3 Beta with support for development targeting the Symbian platform.

This new release of Qt is expected to give Symbian OS the ability to create nice UIs and easier to write applications. Something that S60 has failed to bring so far when being compared to iPhone or Android environment. New features in Qt 4.6 includes:

• Advanced graphics effects like opacity, drop-shadows, glow and filtering
• A new animation framework
• Gesture-based and multi-touch input methods
• ..

The Beta release is available as a source package and as pre-built binary packages for Windows, Mac OSX (Carbon and Cocoa), and making its debut with this release, Symbian.

You can get the packages from the Qt website.

Below is a video of Qt 4.6 in action on existing S60 device: