It is contest time on our sister site, The Symbian Blog and we are giving away not one, not two but 3 Nokia N900’s! Since this is Maemo Central and I am sure all of you would want another N900 for hacking the bits out of it, or really want one if you already do not have it – I’ve decided to open up the contest to you dear readers of Maemo Central as well.
Firefox 1.1 is slated for a May release and will brings a ton of features that the team did not have time to implement in the initial release. The good news is that a beta will be out as soon as tomorrow, while a release candidate is expected on the 26th of April. The focus for 1.1 is UI experience and here is a list of the new functionality coming:
I personally found Firefox to be a little slow and sluggish on my N900 and hope that the 1.1 release fixes that issue as well.
[via: Mark Finkle, MozillaLinks & @bvlad]
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Yesterday we told you that the N900 had been overclocked to run at speeds upto 1GHz. Since then a lot of people have tried overclocking their N900’s for that speed bump and have reported that the N900 stays stable and performs faster even after being overclocked.
The N900, labeled as a hacker’s phone, comes with a Cortex A8 clocked at 600 MHz. So how long was it going to be before users pushed the limits? We now have N900’s running at an impressive 1GHz or 900 MHz or 800 MHz, you can basically pick the speed you want.
(Click to enlarge)
Before you entertain thoughts of doing this to your N900, do keep in mind that overclocking is generally known to reduce the life of your processor and cause stability issues, not to mention the battery drain. Manufacturers generally clock the processors to a slightly lower level than what can be safely reached, but 1 GHz sure seems to be pushing it.
That being said, reports suggest that the N900 is even more snappy at 800 MHz, up from the 600 MHz that it originally comes with. Such a hack would be useful in high duty tasks like video playback or capture.
(Click to enlarge)
If this something that interests you, this is the thread to follow. The actual scripts are not available for download directly, but you can request them via a PM. If you feel adventurous, here is how to overclock the N900.
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As promised, Day 1 is here and with it comes the first release of MeeGo for the N900. As of now this release is intended for the experienced N900 hackers only and should be of little interest to the majority of N900 users. Once installed on the N900 you will see that there is no GUI (Graphical User Interface) and the activity is limited to the terminal only.
If you have decided that you absolutely need MeeGo on your N900, there are numerous ways to install it. You can get pre-built images or make one of your own. You can do a native install or a chroot install or try out alternative boot methods mentioned. The ARM wiki for Meego has detailed instructions, depending on the method you choose:
Obtaining MeeGo images for N900
Installing MeeGo on N900
Native installation method is intended only for experienced N900 hackers at this point. If you choose to try it, you are doing it completely on your own risk.
Chroot install is safer way to try MeeGo without erasing Maemo 5 from your N900 device. Still, you need to know what you are doing.
At any point, if you want Maemo 5 back, follow this tutorial:
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If great looking UI is your thing, you might want to look at an application called Enna which is a media center for the Nokia N900. It is a fairly popular application if you are familiar with Linux, but like me, if you had not heard about it before, here’s the page to look up.
The version that has been ported over to the N900 is capable of playing music and video, displaying photos and has a bookstore. The app is still under development and is very alpha. Also, installing it needs a bit of work (detailed instructions below). While the UI is beautiful, the speed at which it currently runs is not. In the current state, sometimes a tap doesn’t register and the Bookstore is virtually useable.
Here are a few screenshots and a quick video of the media center.
If you like video:
If you would like to try the app yourself, here is a how to, but do keep in mind the fact that installing Enna could potentially damage the other installed apps and cause serious trouble to the point where you may need to reflash your device.
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There has been a lot of talk about Twitter apps for the N900, some good and some not so good. Recently we have seen Tweego, which has a lot of promise, but till the time that it matures what other options do we have? On device clients include – Mauku and Witter (which recently got a UI update), while web apps include my favourite Dabr.co.uk and Hahlo.com.
Another new web app really worth checking out is TweetGo.net. Its first page claims that it is currently the best way to Twitter from the N900 and in my opinion that may not be far from the truth.
Here are a few screenshots to give you an idea of what to expect.
All in all its a great way to use Twitter on the N900. While not being as fully featured as Dabr, it is a lot more finger friendly. If the developers can add editable retweets and the ability to twitpic, it might just become perfect. Check it out here.If you enjoyed this, you might also like:
For a long time there has been a demand for a nice Twitter app for the N900, so far we have Witter and Mauku and web apps such as Hahlo.com and Dabr.co.uk, but there is none that comes close to elegance of something like Gravity for Symbian devices. Enter, TweeGo, formerly Twitter Box, which has all the promise of quickly becoming the best Twitter app for the N900.
As of now it is very alpha with regard to functionality and has not been uploaded to the extras-devel repository yet. There is no dedicated @ reply column, no direct message section and so on but the UI is beautiful. The transitions are slick and the app makes you want to use it. Hopefully it will have much more functionality soon.
If you want to try it, you will have to install it using the terminal (instructions below).
HOW TO INSTALL TWEEGO
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RaeMote is a N900 desktop widget that turns your N900 into an Apple Remote that can control your Mac Mini, MacBooks and iPod docks via IR. RaeMote has been developed by Thomas Perl and is available for download in the extras testing repository. The widget works as expected and has surprisingly good range.
I was able to control my Macbook from around 5-6 meters away without having to align the device and this worked from wide angles as well. Here is a video of the application in action. If you haven’t enabled extras-testing, here’s how to do it.
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One really nice aspect of the the N900 is its four completely customizable screens, but setting them up sometimes becomes a problem. You keep wondering if there is nicer, more efficient or better looking way of placing your bookmarks, shortcuts, contacts and widgets.
For those of you who like a organized homescreen, the sheer fluidity of the setup process sometimes makes it difficult to align those icons symmetrically. This post aims to fix, that. First is an amazing application called Tweakr (available from the extras-devel) that allows icons to snap to a grid, you can even set the grid size.
Now that the grid layout is out of the way, lets get on to homescreen ideas. There is a wonderful ‘Show off your Maemo 5 screenshots‘ thread from where I have extracted the following homscreens to help spread a few homescreen setup ideas.
Complete credit to the original uploaders of the above screenshots. Have a layout you are especially proud of? Do share.
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In an effort to ease the process of migrating the Maemo.org community over to Meego.com, logging in via OpenID has been introduced. This way you will not need to create a new account on Meego and it would become easy to link your existing Maemo.org account to Meego. If you have already created an account on Meego, even then you can use Maemo.org’s OpenID to link your old account.
If you are wondering what OpenID is, check this link out.
Using Maemo.org account to create new MeeGo login via Open ID
1. Go to http://maemo.org/openid/ and copy your OpenID identity.
2. Go to http://meego.com/user/login and select Log in using OpenID
3. Confirm your identity at the Maemo.org screen.
If you have an existing MeeGo registration, you can associate your maemo.org ID to it.
1. Go to http://maemo.org/openid/ and copy your OpenID identity.
2. Log in to your http://meego.com account and go to My account
3. Under OpenID identities enter your maemo.org OpenID from step 1.
4. Press Add an OpenID button and then Confirm on the Maemo.org authorization screen.
Hat tip to @alextootchie for the find.
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If you are looking for a Google Reader application for the N900, I recommend giving Grr by Jan Dumon a try, considering that it has just been released it is a little short on functionality such as starring a post, sharing it and so on but it works well if you are looking for a speedy way to simply browse your RSS feeds on the go. It is in the extras-devel repository (here’s how to easily enable it, the usual warnings apply).
Hat tip to @alextootchie for the find.
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