The MeeGo project today announced the availability of the MeeGo 1.2 release. This release is intended to provide a solid base line from which device vendors and developers can start creating software for a range of device categories. In this sense it can be seen as the first mature release of the core platform. Also available today is version 1.2 of the MeeGo SDK and the first MeeGo tablet developer preview release (Tablet UX).

Google Reader is a blogger's best friend. For Symbian, the most accessible methods of access have been the various modes of its mobile website. However, noted Qt developer Tommi Laukkanen has been working on a Google Reader application called NewsFlow, which he has written in QML and Javascript. Read on to find out how well it can feed your news needs.

Nokia today announced the release of the Qt SDK 1.1. The final release version of the SDK is based on Qt 4.7.3 and Qt Mobility 1.1.3. It's an important milestone which effectively marks the first fully mature version of Nokia's complete Qt offering on mobile platforms. Applications which use Qt 4.7, including those written purely in QML, can now be uploaded to the Ovi Store; the first few of these are already available to consumers.

Nokia today announced that it plans to cut its workforce by 4,000 employees by the end of 2012, as part of the restructuring resulting from its recent strategy changes. The majority of the cuts will take place in Finland, Denmark and the UK. They are part of the previously announced measures to cut Nokia's operational expenditure by €1 billion. In addition, a further 3,000 employees will move to Accenture as part of the transfer of Nokia's Symbian software activities, which was also announced today.

Nokia has released its Q1 2011 results, reporting an operating profit of €439 million (down 10% Year-on-Year), with net sales of €10.399 billion (up 9% YoY). Nokia's device and service division's profits were €439 million, down 10% from last year. Margins in devices and services were 9.8% (down 2.3% YoY and down 1.5% QoQ).

Total converged devices sales (mainly Symbian-powered smartphones) were 24.2 million, compared with 21.5 million units in Q1 2010 (up 13% YoY) and compared with 28.3 million units in Q4 2010 (down 14%, QoQ). Worldwide smartphone market share was 26%, down 5% sequentially and 15% year on year. Read on for more analysis and more details.

The Qt labs team has just announced the release candidate (RC) for its Qt Software Development Kit (SDK) 1.1. This follows from its recent beta release. The final release, following this RC, will allow developers to take advantage of all the latest Qt features and submit Qt 4.7 based applications to the Ovi Store. However, it should be noted that Qt 4.7 will not support S60 3rd Edition, which sadly, but predictably, points to a deprecation of that version of Symbian. Read on for more details.

A definite link of interest of for all Nokia users is the Nokia Support Videos channel on YouTube. We’ve posted before about support videos having been posted for individual phones. Now though, Nokia have compiled all of these into a well presented, cover flow-like, custom YouTube page. Digging further into the standard YouTube video listings reveals support videos for other Nokia devices such as the E72 and N900.

NAVTEQ, the Nokia-owned company behind Ovi Maps, have announced a new product called “Destination Maps”, which aims to provide the data that would enable guidance services inside public buildings. Initially, the data will cover more than 200 shopping malls in the U.S. One of the possible indoor location technologies that could use this data was previewed at Nokia World 2010, where I interviewed one of the development team about this technology. Read on for more information on its background and implementation.

Opera has announced the new versions of its mobile browsers, Opera Mobile 11 and Opera Mini 6. These bring an updated user interface, improved text wrapping, and most significantly, multi-touch zoom. Overall performance is improved too, with native handling of heavy sites appearing to load faster in Opera Mobile 11 than with Opera Mobile 10. Read on for more about the update.

As part of last week's MeeGo Technical Steering Group meeting several nominations to new Working Groups (WG) were approved. Notably these included nominations for LG and China Mobile to the Handset WG. Working Groups are governance structures within MeeGo, which are currently being formed, that will be dedicated to discussion around a specific vertical. Membership of a Working Group is meritocratic, with an emphasis on overall contributions to the MeeGo project and a commitment to create a MeeGo product in the specified vertical.