Nokia on Friday revealed early details of Maemo 6, its next-generation smartphone platform. The OS will be the first to natively support multi-touch and capacitive touchscreens and should finally put the Linux-based OS on par with modern platforms like iPhone or webOS. Until now, the software has depended on single-touch resistive (pressure-dependent) screens incapable of gestures or other more precise movements.

Compared to Maemo 5, Nokia claims Maemo 6 will treat the device screen as a window on the desktop, which it calls the canvas principle. Slides from the presentation reveal the desktop window contains widgets and controls and the device pans over it. Both portrait and landscape viewing modes will be supported, improving it compared to the normally landscape-only Maemo 5 and earlier.

A preliminary development kit schedule was also revealed, with a Beta version of the Qt development framework and Beta of Nokia Web Runtime for Maemo 6 due for the second quarter of 2010.

At the same time, Nokia said it has ported Qt to its Maemo 5 mobile platform, which will allow developers to not only write mobile apps for devices such as Nokia's N900 but also easily convert them to Symbian or Windows Mobile phones. A download of the Technology Preview Qt port is now available.

A final release for the Maemo 5 OS is due for early in 2010. In comparison, Maemo 6 isn't due until sometime later that year. [via SlashGear]