Posts Tagged nokia
If you follow maemo then unless you live under a rock you’ll have heard all about MeeGo.
Yesterday Intel and Nokia announced the merging of their two linux based mobile projects, Moblin and Maemo. This has certainly got a lot of people talking in the maemo community, but with little extended detail about the project a lot of assumptions are being made and some people are getting quite worked up.
Ari Jaaksi (head of maemo at Nokia) has posted some interesting bits of info. More details here at the Symbian Blog.
So basic info seems to be:
- MeeGo aimed at more devices than just phone (TVs, netbooks, etc)
- UI will be QT based, like Maemo 6
- Packaging system will be RPM, unlike DEB in Maemo
- Version 1 expected Q2 2010
- Will “build upon” the Moblin core software platform
- Will support both ARM and X86
The first question that’s raised is what happens to the Maemo community? Whilst those whose main interests are Maemo 5 and 6 may well switch there are many people who still support the older N770 and N8×0 tablets with the older versions of Maemo. Also it’s not yet known if the N900 will be officially supported or if it will need community effort to get MeeGo (or Maemo 6) onto it. From the Ari’s posts it seems if you’re developing for Maemo 5 in QT then your apps will work on MeeGo. Also it seems the contracts of the maemo community members paid by Nokia have been extended. So it looks like support of Maemo 5 is fairly safe during the lifetime of the N900.
The next question is, what happens to Maemo 6? On first hearing the news I figured this meant it would not get the chance to advance from Maemo 5 because of all the time involved with the merger. However something Ari said has proved quite interesting, “Maemo6 will be MeeGo compatible…..consider Maemo6 already a MeeGo instance”. This seems to imply that Maemo 6 has already under gone the merger work with Moblin and is already a version of what would be called MeeGo. Considering that Nokia and Intel first announced plans to cooperate back in June 2009 this could mean a lot of the work required for the merger of the two systems has already been done.
Anyway, enough with the speculation. I think for now it’s best to sit back and wait for the news to come in over the next few weeks rather than getting too worked up over rumours and assumptions.
Interesting times lie ahead.
Update: Another interesting announcement yesterday was the release of the Maemo 6 UI Framework, screenshots here.
Update 2: Quim Gill gives away some details of how this affects Maemo 6. Maemo 6 will be renamed, however it is not a full MeeGo product. Seems what I assumed earlier wasn’t correct.
Update 3: Anyone worried about Nokia support for N900 should feel slightly better today, minor firmware release (PR1.1.1) is out. This should pave the way for the next major release (PR1.2) due in the next few weeks. So far those who have upgraded report performance improvements. No offical changelog yet.
My N900 finally arrived on monday after UPS failed to find an 8 story office block in central London two days running. I think it would have gotten here quicker if Nokia had tied it to a blind monkey and thrown bananas in my general direction. Anyway it got here eventually.
So far loving it. There are some software glitches but i’d expect them to be ironed out in the next firmware or two.
Currently writing this is on the phone with MaStory, a wordpress app for Maemo. Seems to work pretty well and can upload media too.
Another thing i’m enjoying is watching normal standard def divx videos. No need to reencode anything, just copy across and watch. The media player also plays ogg music files which is good as i ripped most of my cd collection to ogg.
Will update with more details as i explore the available software further.
Just got this from Nokia:
Welcome to the N900 meet-up !
The London meet-up is held in the St. Martins Lane Hotel (www.stmartinslane.com) Tuesday the 17th of November.
The doors open at 7.30pm and the ‘official’ part starts at 8pm. For the following couple of hours you will be able to meet likeminded people, as well as Maemo folks from Nokia and the community.
We will provide some nibble food and N900 demos, so you can get a feel for the device in case you have not had the chance yet or just have fun with it. The event then ends at 10pm after which we can continue the chats elsewhere. We will also have a surprise lottery at the end of the event.
As the space is limited, we have a name list at the door so we ask you to bring a piece of identification with you.
We are very excited about the N900, and we hope you are as well!
Should be interesting.
This weekend I had a play with the Maemo SDK and tried out a number of the apps available. I’m trying to setup the dev environment so I can try out some of my rusty python skills, but part of it wasn’t agreeing with Windows 7 too much. I may have a solution that I’ll try later.
Popped into Nokia Flagship Store again today, but no Maemo Lounge open yet. As it was announced the N900 was shipping out today hopefully that’ll be up and running soon.
Yesterday I heard down the twitter wire that the UK Nokia Flagship store had a N900 in for people to check out so I headed down there at lunch.
I played with it for about 15 minutes. I wont go into too much detail but I definitely liked what I saw. The touch screen was very responsive and the slide out keyboard gave good feedback. The software on the device looked pretty nice but it’ll take a bit more time with it to be sure.
Rumour is that the device will be released on Monday (9th Nov) but the guys in the Nokia store are keeping very tight lipped.
I went back down there today with a friend who wanted to check the device out and whilst there we had a quick chat with Adam who mans the NokiaFlagshipUK twitter account. Whilst there is nothing definite he mentioned there may be a get together with the Nokia Bloggers when the phone is launched.
They are currently setting up a room at the back of the store dubbed the Maemo Lounge which will have 5 N900s to play with and a maemo expert on hand to answer questions. This should be open Saturday or Monday. I’ll be down there Monday to have another look.
On the 17th there is a N900 meetup at the store which is now taking registrations here, I’m signed up and looking forward to it.
My N95 died last night so the sooner the N900 is released the better!
Seems my plan to get easy entry to the London N900 meetup failed.
Currently you can’t register for the London event as they’ve not announced the date. However last week I found with a little javascript trickery you could get around it and signed up myself and a friend. I got confirmation emails and the number of seats available did go down by 2. It seemed I wasn’t alone and by earlier today the number of available seats was down to 73 (out of 80).
I just checked now and noticed the available seats were back up to the original 80. I guess this means my registration is not valid. Being a bit cheeky I did try the same method I used before to register, but it seems they’ve gotten wise to the hole and plugged it. 
I’m thinking this could mean that they are going to announce the date very soon and open up registrations properly. I will be watching the page very closely and hope to get into the event the old fashion way.
I love my Nokia N95, I’ve had it over 2 years and it’s pretty much always been good to me. In return I’ve done my best to take good care of it. I’ve bought it two new screens and two new cases in it’s life (ok, I’m not the most careful owner).
However good things come to an end and now I’m back in the UK and using the internet over the phone I really need a full keyboard and a bigger screen.
Most of my friends fell for the iPhone and swear by it, but there are somethings that make it a no go for me:
- No multitasking 3rd party apps (seriously, what the hell?)
- Lame bluetooth support
- Apple control over the apps you can use
- No physical keyboard
Now the most obvious upgrade path for me was a Nokia N97 and until a month or so ago that was what I was going to buy. Then I started to read more and more about the Nokia N900.
Firstly the hardware looks great, ok it’s not the smallest phone in the world but I’m going to be using it as an internet device way more than I’ll be holding it to my ear. The software is the interesting part. Rather than using Symbian S60 like Nokia’s other smartphones it uses Maemo. Maemo is a linux distribution for mobile devices that’s been in development for a while but is now starting to mature. Videos of it in action on the N900 are really quite impressive and it seems to handle multitasking very well indeed.
The main problem is the apps. There is a fairly large library of apps from previous version of Maemo, some which were originally desktop linux apps that have been modified for the mobile device. The trouble is I’m quite attached to a number of the Symbian apps that I’ve been running on my N95 for the last two years. Some are written by Nokia so may get ported across, others like Shozu are less likely. It makes it a tough decision, but the fact that the Maemo OS is very open really is swinging it at the moment. Having a fully accessible linux device in the palm of my hand is very attractive to the geek in me.
I hope to get my hands on a N900 as soon as possible, even cheating my way into an N900 meetup in London soon. I just hope that it lives up to everything I’ve read and seen so far.
