Maemo summit 2008 was great success, good "hacker spirit" conference in plce that exactly fits to this, c-base in Berlin. Karoliina made exellent video composition about maemo spirit 2008.

If you like to see video in better quality, check following Vimeo link Maemo Summit 2008 from Karoliina Salminen on Vimeo.

I think that Nokia announced there two most wanted new features to next generation maemo Fremantle, the Cellular HSPA support and OpenGL-ES 2.0 support.

For animated GUI Fremantle will have Clutter toolkit, http://www.clutter-project.org .
Clutter may be best mobile optimized graphics animation toolkit at the moment. Clutter has been designed from beginning to work in mobile devices without need for fast floating point and utilize OpenGL-ES . You can find many nice video examples about clutter from project web site. Clutter is Glib based but it has bindings to many languages including Python, C++ and Vala.

The clutter is not either user interface toolkit or just drawing canvas. Clutter itself does not provide any widgets for UI construction but it has small widget library called Tidy (which is not fully featured toolkit, but rather an example implementation about how to make your own toolkit based on Clutter). Clutter differs from ordinary drawing canvas that it is based on dynamically behaving objects, stage and actors. Actors are display objects that are shown in stage. Actors can be transformed, moved, rotated, scaled or opacity changed. All actor transformations can be controlled by dynamic timelines, paths and they can react to events. For example actor can move via predefined path with speed profile when it receives mouse click event. Actors can contain texture, as example image or even a gstreamer video as a texture. Using these features, it is relativelly easy to make really cool looking animated GUI. 

There was also announced that we will have Qt port for Fremantle in SDK beta release in May-June 2008. Our intention is to have Qt 4.5 version ported for it. Qt graphicsview provides lot of similar functionality than Clutter. Graphicswiew has similar objects, QGraphicScene and QGraphicsItem and QGraphicsItemAnimation and QTimeline for dynamic animation.  Qt software is doing a lot of optimization for Qt 4.5, let's see how it performs in Fremantle. You can read some related stories from

http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/09/22/sorry-guys/
and http://akademy.kde.org/conference/slides/aKademy2008-HowGraphicsViewWorks.odp

I had a presentation at Maemo Summit about maemo heldon Qt port Qt-Hildon-MaemoSummit08.pdf with Antonio Aloisio and maemo tutorial  "Introduction to maemo hacking". The tutorial material will be here soon.