Maemo brings the power of computers to mobile devices. Designed with the internet at its core, Linux-based Maemo software takes us into a new era of mobile computing.

Maemo is an open source development platform for Linux-based handheld devices such as Internet Tablets. It is built from widely-used open source components with additional tweaks to integrate well in handheld devices.

An Internet Tablet is a handheld device which provides desktop PC-level support for Internet services (such as Web pages and e-mail). Nokia has released three Internet Tablets running on the maemo platform: the Nokia 770, the Nokia N800, and the Nokia N810. The devices have a high-resolution, 800 x 480 pixel touch-sensitive display.

Maemo uses Hildon Application Framework, based on the open source GTK+ toolkit, as the user interface manager. Although the Hildon/GTK+ libraries are coded in C, bindings for other languages, including C++ and Python, are also available.

The native programming language for Symbian OS devices is C++. So, any S60 developer can take advantage of the Hildon/GTK+ C++ bindings and easily start developing GUI applications for maemo devices. On the other hand, Windows Mobile extensively uses .NET Compact Framework. Writing managed code with .NET CF is quite different from programming with C++, which offers a more direct approach of handling available resources and gaining all the benefits the platform can give. This document demonstrates how a Symbian C++ or Windows Mobile .NET CF developer can get started with developing C++ applications for maemo.

Before you start to write your own C++ applications for maemo, learn more about the maemo platform and the Hildon Application Framework. For more information, see the Overview of the maemo platform section in the maemo tutorial.