A new automatic notification from the home screen will now notify you of new versions of the OS and system apps, including updates to third party applications. The new firmware also replaces the current email app with an open source version based on Modest and tinymail. Chinese fonts have also been added, reported openssl bugs have been fixed, and browsing panning experience has been improved.

Links: Nokia N800 Firmware, Nokia N810 Firmware, maemo.org announcement

The new version gets a user interface overhaul and uses the same graphics library of Canola. A Trip Report feature has been added that lets you graph your trips so you can find the fastest and most econimical route, based on engine stress. It also adds simple navigation using maps from OpenStreetMaps.

Enjoy some screenshots below. You can find more at Marcelo’s blog.

Actually, I mean both “the idea of a community” and “the ideas” of that community when I think about this.

It’s easier when the name helps bind you together — I belong to a group called FAMCAM - Families with Cambodian Children and you can tell immediately who wants to belong to this group and why.

Maemo is a made-up word and people encountering it form the meaning by what they learn from the encounter. Well, it’s good that a branding process is going on since what exactly Maemo represented hasn’t always been so clear — the OS on the Nokia Internet Tablets, the development kit enabling software for NITs to be developed on a desktop, a Linux distro that had a Hildon UI overlay to make things run smoothly on a NIT, the software side of the Nokia effort, the open-source side of the NITS, the collective effort spurred by Nokia but encompassing individual FOSS developers, something somewhere in this is what has been meant by “Maemo” over this time.

Now, “Maemo with a capital M” is being identified as an “open source software platform for mobile devices. Developed by Nokia in collaboration with the Maemo community and some of the best open source upstream projects.” The Maemo platform is distinguished from the Maemo SDK and is manifested in numbered Maemo releases. Maemo Software refers not to applications compatible with Maemo but instead to the team at Nokia that’s responsible for developing the platform, SDK and some of those apps.

And the other apps for Maemo? Well, they come from the Maemo community, of course. And if ever there are going to be any “devices running Maemo” other than those released by Nokia, then the line between Nokia’s supportive actions and the community will need to be clearly demarcated.

And that demarcation is in process now. The logo contest for maemo.org is one step in separating Nokia’s own use of Maemo from others’. Now maemo.org will be an expression of the community and not of the Nokia team. Or something like that.

Hence my logo design:

Maemo.org isn’t a company and even the “dot org” is an honorific rather than recognition that a real organization has existed. But as a community, it represents the group of people who all contribute toward the same goal. So in my interpretation of the maemo.org logo, you don’t get machined results or perfect alignment. Yet it’s precisely this non-automaton, non-corporate approach that is the essence of Linux and the FOSS movement and which accounts for its vibrancy.

You can see other expressions of the maemo.org community as a logo at the contest submissions page at wiki.maemo.org.

Nokia is quite serious in redefining the Maemo brand and maemo.org, the community behind Maemo, is holding a maemo.org logo contest (pending proposal approval). If you happen have an eye on simplicity and comfortable in using fonts with open license, design and submit a new maemo.org logo before August July 27, 2008 and you can win yourself (again, pending proposal approval) an all expense paid trip to the Open Source in Mobile (OSiM) World and the very first Maemo Summit in Berlin, Germany on September, plus be among the first to own the new Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition.

Head on to the official maemo.org logo contest wiki page for the details of the contest proposal.

Update: Contest is now official.

In a few hours from now, Dr. Ari Jaaksi, Nokia Director of Open Source Operations is scheduled to present his 30-minute keynote over at Handsets World in Berlin Germany on “Nokia’s Vision for Wireless Handsets”. The schedule lists his talk as follows:

• What are the attributes of wireless handsets going forward?
• What do users want?
• How is Nokia meeting the needs of the market around the world?

It is also expected that he will touch on the maemo.org community brainstorming session that a lot in the Internet Tablet community have participated on.

Let’s hope someone records his speech and posts it online.

And the deciding point came down to this: How much computing power did I need away from home?

You have to know that my friends expect me to separate from them when boarding the train to New York so I can sit in a laptop-friendly seat. They’ve also seen me skip a not-yet-full PATH (subway) train on the next leg into the city and wait five minutes for the next departure so I can open up the laptop for twelve more minutes of screen time.

Did I truly believe a weblet like the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet would suffice for my mobile computing?

Or has my fervent evangelism been tainted by way-cheap access to the Nokeys* I’ve used and by a top-of-the-line 17-inch laptop that my employer nefariously supplied me with, ensured its constant access by having me work at home two days a week?

Would I spend my suddenly scarce dollars for another laptop, intending to cart it most everywhere as I’ve been accustomed to for the last four years?

Or would I buy a sufficiently powerful desktop for less money and rely on my N810 for all my mobile computing?

This from someone who has written well over 90 percent of my ITT postings on a laptop. Who spends his free time looking at websites in Khmer (a script not supported by the Nokia weblets) and who works with multilingual texts every day. Whose eyes are aging and who consequently has a 14-point minimum font size set in his browser. Who installs on average one new program a week with a footprint of 30MB to 150MB.

Fabulous as the Nokia Internet Tablets are for spontaneous surfing, e-book reading, voip calls**, games, GPS geocaching, listening to music and watching video***, it’s not a full-service device. I can’t type 20 words per minutes on its keyboard, much less 100 wpm (as I do on a full keyboard). Can’t run any topic map software (needs Java). No great XML and XSLT editors. And so on. How much would this lack hurt me away from my desktop? Could I manage to do what I had to do on the run with one or another weblet?**** The walkaround web is wonderful but what about trips? Could I go days without a full-powered computer?

Ah, who am I fooling?

I bought the desktop, which was half the price of equivalently powered laptops. For any kind of on-the-go now, I’m a weblet guy, body and soul.

__________
* I’ve paid 99 Euros each for the 770, N800 and N810 as they appeared over these last three years (roughly $115 to $140) as part of Nokia’s seeding of the weblet development community. An N810 for $140 is a magnificent machine, there’s no doubt about it.

** I use Gizmo for my second line permanently now. When I’m on one- and two-hour conference calls, it’s really proved its usefulness by freeing up the main line for my wife’s calls.

*** TV mostly, via the HAVA player, Today in the kitchen and Charley Rose in bed.

**** OK, at the moment I have five NITs. But some of them I bought to give to family. Really! I just haven’t gotten around to it.

Great news! Access just released Garnet VM Beta 2 adding fullscreen support as well as MathLib support. Please verify and report any other enhancements that you find!

Since our launch in November 2007, the ACCESS Garnet VM Beta for Nokia Nseries can boast over 15,000 downloads! Like you, thousands of Garnet VM users around the world still enjoy using Garnet OS applications for their simplicity and their diversity. During the last six months, we have received a tremendous response about the Garnet VM launch. You have shared valuable comments about the features you want to see in the next version of Garnet VM and the improvements you want in the applications. We listened to our GVM community and thanks to your help made some changes. We have added the most requested feature—support for full screen rendering. We have also identified and made other improvements to Garnet VM including providing full support for MathLib that will enable many additional applications to run on Garnet VM.

Today, we are pleased to announce that the new ACCESS GVM Beta 2 for Nokia Nseries is available:

Download the ACCESS GVM Beta 2 from our web site: http://www.access-company.com/products/gvm/

Regards,

The Garnet VM Team

maemo.org is also hosting a brainstorming session for the next ten days to talk about the future of maemo.org. It aims to consolidate feedback from developers and end-users to draft its mid-term goals, and eventually become the community proposal of the maemo.org product strategty.

Two Wiki pages have been setup so everyone can add their ideas, suggest, and even complain. Head on to the wiki and let your voice be heard (note: deadline is in 10 days)!

• The Next 100 Days of maemo.org
• maemo.org in 2010

Thanks for reminding us how everything started Dan!

At the end, you will be asked (not required) for you name and email address. Filling it up will entitle you for an entry to a raffle where Nokia will give away a multimedia speaker system and headphones. The raffle will take place on August 30, 2008.

For those wondering if the survey is legit, I did get a confirmation from Nokia that the survey actually came from them.

Answer the survey.
Read the terms and conditions.

You must have all seen the video that I made of the HAVA Player for the Internet Tablet in action. If this is an Internet Tablet feature that interests you, you can then participate on Monsoon Multimedia’s HAVA beta program to get an advance copy of the software as well as help better the software.

As a beta participant, you can avail of discounted HAVA hardware which you can purchase now. Monsoon is then releasing the first beta of the HAVA Player for the Internet Tablet to the beta participants on May 8.

See the full HAVA Beta Program details after the jump.

Why web pads, internet tablets and ultra-mobiles aren’t the same thing

Ari Jaaksi famously announced the walkaround web in November 2005 when he pointed out that surfing wasn’t stationary any more than phone calls were. Cellphones had untethered calling, and a device like the first Nokia Internet Tablet meant the internet was available anywhere we were. We didn’t need to go to a computer in a specific location to get to the web any more than we needed to find a payphone to make a phone call.

Henceforth, we could carry our web-access with us, the same way we carry our phones. Ari said it all when he wrote: “I surf in trains, in cafeterias, at airports, even while driving. I can go online anytime and anywhere I want.” He called his observations “bold” but they were in fact revolutionary in understanding how this changes not computing, not using the web, but how we organize our lives.

Long before I heard of the Nokia 770, I used a small, keyboardless WiFi-enabled tablet to access the internet from Bryant Park in New York City. The notion of the web away from the desk antedated Nokia’s efforts by many years. By my count, it produced at least eight web pads (the contemporary term) prior to the 770, all of which failed to establish themselves.

My most complete experience was with the Screen Media FreePad, from a Norwegian outfit. The FreePad had a 10.4-inch screen, 800 x 600 resolution, built-in WiFi and “cordless telephone services”; and it ran an embedded Linux. No disk drive; if you wanted, you could attach a USB keyboard.

The rest of FreePad’s hardware was feeble by today’s standards but practical for 2000. Even back then the group I was working with expected to buy the FreePad for just $800 (in quantity).[1]

Eight years ago, and only $800. WiFi was in its nascent stages then, but if you were describing an organization-wide device (as we were) and not a personal weblet,[2] that probably wasn’t what kept the FreePad from succeeding.

What did?

Or maybe easier to answer now, from the perspective of time: What is a walkaround-web tablet? What does it look like, what can it do, what is required of it?

This passes the truth-in-advertising test, I think. But it’s not one-hundred percent true.

Sure you can take just about any Linux application and compile it so that you get something that runs on a NIT. This screenshot of the particularly idiosyncratic font-creation program Fontforge running on my N810 is proof enough for me.

Even if some apps are slow or not really suited to a tablet, I am generally tempted to say you can do anything on a NIT that you need to do on a computer.

Except you can’t print.

Can’t print out that email with the address and time of the meeting. Can’t print that web page with the neat info. Can’t print out the short notes entered on the train coming in to work. Can’t print out that sketch of the new design to hand to your wife.

Supporting every printer imaginable — OK, it’s not something I want to ask for. I think a “full” Linux ought to, but I’m pragmatic enough to know that’s a fool’s errand.

It would be nice if some apps could print to a generic inkjet or Postscript device.

See, sometimes I want to surf away from my desk, on the walkaround web.

And sometimes I want to walk around with a piece of paper in my hand.

Please do not embed, copy, or distribute this video without proper permission from Nokia.

If you haven’t seen the Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition in action and the side-by-side pics with the N810 Standard Edition, you can view them here.

[Thanks Satu & Tomas!]

I can believe it.

MyPaint is a “small [Hildonized] pressure-sensitive painting application written in python and gtk” by Martin Renold and ported to Maemo by Anders Gudmundson.

Here are a couple example drawings done on an N810 in MyPaint by ArnimS:

Not the usual kind of thing we’ve seen so far.

Numpty Physics is Tim Edmond’s gravity-physics game using the same Box2D engine that Crayon Physics does.

MyPaint and Numpty Physics have one thing in common — they let us use the Internet Tablet as a tablet. Sketching can never be done gracefully with a mouse. Even graphics tablets — hand on the tablet, eye on the screen — have a disconnect. So sketching your idea right on the screen — or painting it — is, well, transformative.

Unlike other graphics programs the IT has seen so far, MyPaint focuses on brush controls, rather than image-editing, enabling the full range of styles a pressure-sensitive tablet can capture.

When we talk about the Internet Tablet as being revolutionary or transformative, it’s because everything in its conception — display, open platform, size and weight, price — serves to free us from the constraints our desk/laptops have imposed on us.

So, thanks are due to Martin and Anders and Tim and Erin Catto* for these specific versions of these great applications. And to the Nokia seers who conceived the Internet Tablet.

_______________
* Box2D progenitor.

We just received a quick note from Quim Gil about Maemo.org’s participation this year at LinuxTag 2008, a Linux and open Source exhibition, at Berlin, Germany.  This is a great opportunity for Maemo.org to become more visibile, as well as showcase the best Maemo applications, and its current and future plans.

There is currently a draft of the session over at Maemo.org and Quim is soliciting suggestions for tracks and additional speakers. If you would like to suggest topics and/or nominate speakers/developers, this is your chance. The deadline is on April 10, 2008.

1. It will run Diablo. Update for N810 and N800 coming.
2. The email client is now Modest.
3. There are no finalized rates/plans yet for XOHM (WiMAX).
4. Over-the-air update is now built-in.
5. Bulge at the back for better XOHM reception. I didn’t find the slight bulge to be an issue.
6. Price will be $475 and should be out 2Q.
7. No PIM planned yet.
8. No one will confirm if this if the “4 of 5.”
9. Connectivity has “Any Connection” option to switch automatically to WiMAX, WiFi, and Bluetooth. There is also an option for “WLAN and WiMAX.”
10. Navigation software gets an upgrade.
11. Still no video support for Skype.
12. Color is black brushed metal, black keyboard, and goldish bezel.
13. Case is pretty much the same but inside is carrot orange instead of sky blue.

Full demo video from Satu Sipola, Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition Product Manager after the jump.

Basically, the HAVA Player lets you take your TV anywhere and access your DVR, Cable, or Satellite boxes (standard and HD channels) connected to a HAVA appliance at home, via the Nokia Internet Tablet, as long as it is connected via WiFi or by any other high-speed connection.

From our initial tests, the Internet Tablet version of the HAVA Player even outperformed the PC version, with regards to video and sound quality. There were some minor sync problems that happen occasionally, especially when you keep switching from fullscreen to the remote control screen, but I never encountered the slow down nor the sound tone change that happens on the PC HAVA Player. The app is still on beta and should be released sometime the third quarter of this year.

We have been playing with the beta version for a week now but we weren’t allowed to disclose anything about it since we were under NDA until CTIA (a press release is coming out from Monsoon in a while). We are releasing a 11 minute first look video that I took this weekend. I hope you all enjoy it!

As always, feel free to comment and suggest features. The Monsoon folks will surely be monitoring this thread.

There are some things I just don’t understand about the tablets (or their OS or the pre-installed apps):

• Why I can’t construct a playlist in the Media player?

  You’d think this would be a no-brainer. I just want to grab 5 or 6 of the 80 songs on my N810 and play them together, even though they’re by different artists on different albums.

• Why isn’t connecting to my PC via Bluetooth really easy?

  Sometimes I’m at my office, where WiFi is verboten. I want the tablet to use my PC’s direct connection to the internet — I’ve done it plenty of times laptop-to-laptop in meetings where only one person was plugged into the wired network. Why isn’t this a snap with the NIT?

• Why is Linux made so hard?

  OK, it’s clear that Nokia doesn’t want to support unsophisticated users with all the things that can trip them up in Linux.

  But why doesn’t File Manager have a simple switch (Show hidden) that lets me see the whole contents of my drive? Even with the trick of adding a symbolic link to root (or any directory), I still can’t see hidden directories (eg, whose name begins with a dot).

  Which leads me to my next question:

• Why can’t I easily add fonts to my tablet and use them in the browser?

  Right. I had to make a /home/user/.fonts/ directory and mail myself a font and then jump through command-line hoops to put a simple font on my tablet. And go through contortions to tell the browser to use it. (Except I haven’t succeeded in that yet. Emoticon with amazed look of disbelief here.)

  Might as well ask the real puzzler here:

• Why can’t OS2008 et al just let you be root when you need to?

  If us unsophisticates need so much protection against our careless actions, shouldn’t we be wearing goalie gloves when we handle scissors? Why isn’t there just a switch that says, “It’s OK. I’ll take the consequences. Just please let me make a directory or use apt-get without having to acquire developer-class knowledge.”

  Heck. That’s the deep side. But what about the glam cam that arrived with the N800?

• Why isn’t there a face-to-face cam call capability yet?

  It’s only the most amazing possible use of this walkaround-web device — unlimited cam calling via WiFi without having to sit in front of an anchored webcam.

  It’s visual IM — just leave the call connected and talk when you want to talk. It’s IM taken to the next dimension.

  Btw, don’t tell me this is here. My wife has the N810 and I have an N800 loaner from Nokia, and we can’t manage it. It needs to be click-simple and using Skype.

• Why does upgrading the OS obliterate every manually installed app I’ve put on my tablet?

  I know, if I go from Windows XP to Vista (and I haven’t), I’d have to re-install my apps. But every upgrade and patch in WinXP is managed without that requirement. Shouldn’t it be possible in this marvelous Linux world?

• Why can’t the application memory be extended to one of the memory cards?

  Is swap the extent of this? You know, I’m willing to risk the possibility that my flash card will get the same spot written to 100,000 times and fail.

Yeah, there are more things I don’t understand about my tablet’s design. Just getting the answers to Why not a model with a keyboard? and How can you call it an internet tablet without handling Flash and YouTube? have really lowered my orneriness. I won’t pick and pick and pick.

On the other hand, it’s your turn. What behavior or aspect of the Internet Tablet makes no sense at all to you?

Added later:
_______________
* Tablet-to-tablet cam calls via Gizmo apparently arrived during my recent period of submersion. I’m happy, even if it isn’t Skype. (I mean: even if the five friends I know with VOIP all use Skype instead of Gizmo.) Me-to-wife cam-IM is plenty great

Ok, there’s no official announcement yet but Nokia has again let the cat out of the bag a bit too early — four days too early to be exact as we can probably guess that the new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet - WiMAX Edition will be announced at CTIA at Las Vegas on April 1.

Eagle eyed itT member and owner of Internet Tablet School, Krisse found the new image and link (that is not yet active) over at the Nokia Tableteer site. Judging from the image, it looks like it’s an N810 copy but in black brushed aluminum, rather than blue. The previously reported BestBuy Nokia ad perhaps shows how the N810 - WiMAX Edition will actually look. No wonder they made a mistake… they’re both “N810’s.”

I will be at CTIA on April 1 (only) to cover what ever Internet Tablet news transpire. Stay tuned.