Registration for the MeeGo 2011 Spring Conference, which is being held in San Francisco on May 23rd, 24th and 25th, opened last week. The conference is expected to have a greater industry focus than previous events and will likely showcase some of the first commercial MeeGo products. The conference organisers have also recently issued a call for sessions proposals for those wishing to speak at the event.

Sebastian Nyström has been appointed as Nokia's head of MeeGo, Qt and WebKit, according to a blog post on the MeeGo website by Peter Schneider, Head of MeeGo Marketing at Nokia. In the last few years Nyström has been responsible for leading Nokia's Qt efforts and has been an eloquent spokesman for the open source framework. His new job gives him responsibility for MeeGo and WebKit activities at Nokia, in addition to his existing responsibilities for Qt. 

The alternative browser company, Opera, has announced that the Opera Store is now available for users of the various browsers from the Norwegians. Powered by Appia, the store can be found at mobilestore.opera.com and will be on the initial speed dial for new users to Opera. In tandem with the launch, their Publisher Portal is also open for business.

Digia, a Finnish software company, has signed an agreement with Nokia to acquire the commercial licensing and professional services arm of Nokia's Qt. The major portion of Qt, including all core development and LGPL licensing remains with Nokia. Nokia plans to continue to invest in the future development of Qt, which remains core to its Symbian (150 million additional devices) and MeeGo (future disruptions) activities. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the month; neither company are disclosing cost details.

The Qt SDK beta 1.1 was launched today. While the SDK is a beta release, the Qt (4.7.2) and Qt Creator (2.1) releases within it are final (i.e. not beta or previews). This means that Qt Quick can now be considered to have been officially released. Qt Quick  is a crucial step forward for Qt, bringing easy UI creation, which allows developers and designers to work together more easily to create applications with great user experience.

In this in-depth feature we look at the thinking behind the smartphone portion of Nokia's new strategy, which was announced on February 11th and sees, in essence, a transition from Symbian to Windows Phone. We consider Nokia's three options and explain that ultimately the necessecity for a competitive and sustainable ecosystem proved to be the vital factor in the decision. 

There's an interesting editorial over at The Telegraph, quoted below, in which the author questions, as I have done several times, the prevailing wisdom over whether the current craze for 'apps' (for accessing information and services) is a good thing. The editorial starts and ends in the pub, which is a good start to some decent left-field thinking. Why use 'apps' when we have the Web itself? Surely what we need is a better and more intelligent Web?

Following our recent story about Aien Dalvik, there have been sightings of the Android run-time environment running on a Nokia N900 at MWC 2011. Thanks to mobile bloggers Julien Fourgeaud and Steve 'Chippy' Paine, there are now independently produced videos of product demonstrations and interviews with Myriad's John Ronco. The videos show off how Android applications icons appear alongside native applications in the Maemo 5 app-grid. They also show off the Android Photoshop app running on the N900 and a HTC Desire, with apparently equal performance.

Over on Engadget, Chris Ziegler has grabbed a video Q and A session at Mobile World Congress with Stephen Elop. It’s wide ranging in the ground covered, although given the short time-scale it’s mostly sound-bites and short paragraph style answers. And some questions were outright dodged. Nevertheless, it casts some more sunlight on the decisions of Elop and how the next few months are going to pan out for Symbian, Meego and Nokia.

Mobile World Congress, the largest mobile industry event, takes this week. We'll be using this story to provide live coverage from the event. This will encompass a number of activities including Nokia's media briefing on Sunday (5.30 GMT), Nokia's Developer Day (Monday) and a number of keynote speeches from Intel.