For those that haven't seen it, David Wood has posted about some proposals that Nokia have made to the Symbian Foundation here:

http://blog.symbian.org/2009/04/30/reviewing-the-release-plan/

These include:

1) Qt for S60 to become an official part of the Symbian platform

2) Orbit - a new Qt-based mobile widget set (this is really implementation detail)

3) Direct UI - a replacement for Avkon and the existing applications

Yes, you read that right, Qt is proposed to become the new application framework for Symbian devices (from Symbian^4 onwards).

Personally I think this is a fantastic thing, and will be all the more exciting because developers with access to a hardware reference platform (hopefully more phone-like versions available by the time the code comes along) will be able to watch the progress of the development and even get involved.  However, it does imply (at least in the current proposal) a significant source and binary compatibility break.  Is this also a good thing?  I think so, but I'm sure not everyone agrees.

If you want to know more get yourself beta access to the new Symbian developer website and look at the proposals yourself.  Then discuss the implications on the new Feature and Roadmap Council discussion board if you have some useful input to the decision making process.

If you want more background info about Qt on Nokia platforms and the general strategy, see the excellent presentation made by Mika Rytkonen on this subject at the Nokia Developer Summit.  In the same session, the trolls also talked about the future of Qt, so if you're interested in this future UI based on Qt then look out for their declarative UI updates (extension of Kinetic work) over the next few weeks/months.

Please note - these are proposals for Symbian^4 which should ship in devices end-2010 or early 2011.  Avkon isn't going to disappear overnight. :-)