Personally I like Nokia products and it doesn’t matter whether it is a cell phone or a tablet. Currently I own Nokia N800 and would like to say a bit about it.

In 2007 Nokia N800 was introduced as a replacement for Nokia 770 version, which was one of the first tablets ever. It had a large variety of new and improved features such as:


processor, which was faster than ever
doubled the amount of RAM
additional improvements such as a built-in camera for video calls
built-in stereo speakers
2 x SD-sized memory card slots
a built-in stand, which I use every day


Nokia N800 started to win buyers attention – it was nice looking with its attractive curvy steel-and-plastic casing. And to round everything up, it was added to N-series and if you are a Nokia fan, you know what difference it makes.




But let’s talk more about improvements of N800 compared to Nokia 770. It had a totally new operating system (Internet Tablet OS 2007), which replaced the 770's OS 2006. But all these improvements didn’t make this tablet perfect. In late 2007, Nokia introduced a new N810. This new tablet was the replacement for the N800.

The new version offered improvements of the operating system, new OS 2008 was released, and a built-in keyboard and GPS receiver, which sounded like an insane thing back then.

The N800 even has some of its own hardware advantages to counter the N810's keyboard and GPS. Nokia N800 has two fully functional memory card slots and the N800 has a built-in FM radio receiver.

All in all, the N800 was one of the first good tablets, which I got to use and I pride myself upon it.

Technical Specifications of Nokia N800 Internet Tablet

Year of Launch: Early 2007

Weight: 206g

Battery Life: 3.5 hours working time and 13 days standby

Wireless: Internet access through Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), internet access through Bluetooth-compatible mobile phones supporting DUN profile

Camera: 352x288 pixels in video mode

Screen: 800x480 pixels, 65 thousand colours

Storage: 256 megabytes built-in, two SDHC memory card slots. SDHC slot compatible with SD, miniSD, microSD, MMC and RS-MMC card sizes.

128 megabytes of RAM

400mhz or 330mhz processor

Supports OS 2007 or OS 2008

After hacking on Tumbler for a while, I decided to install the Maemo SDK and see how Maemo runs in Xephyr. I have to say it runs nicely and I really like the interface. The three level zooming interface from application overview to window overview to panorama desktop works well for me. The conversations view and IM notifications make it easy to concentrate on what you want to do without being interrupted too much. I’m chatting with a friend via Jabber at this very moment. Running apps in parallel rocks too.

Hey everyone! Our little web browser specialized for Gmail just got a new feature! Thanks to the patches from Jie, requests from some nice folks on talk.maemo, and one hour on Firebug debugging Gmail code to find out why the hell it didn’t let I zoom fonts, now Macuco has zoom support with hardware keys!

Oh, and some people requested screenshots of it running other google apps then Gmail, so here it is:

Google Reader on Macuco Opening a feed item on google reader

 

 

Orkut on Macuco Opening a google docs spreadsheet

My objective right now is to send the application to extras and put it on the Downloads page. Bye!

 

The foremost reason which led me down this track was finding out that creating native GUI apps for maemo devices is really not that simple. It’s getting better all the time, nothing like back in 2005, but for the intended audience of this series it may still be not quite there.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-10-26 through 2009-11-01

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-10-26 through 2009-11-01

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-10-26 through 2009-11-01

Hmm…it looks sunny Take a look at this video. This is a demo we did using Qt 4.6 for S60 and the N900. You can find the source code in the same place where you can get Qt’s source code.

This is a “making of” video from the designers perspective, that shows from where they started and where they are right now in terms of design and of course, the implementation of the demo by the end of the video . It also shows a little bit the work flow of INdT’s designers when designing new products.

Nice weather application. We didn’t have time to improve KDE’s  one but for KDE 4.5 we’ll abuse so much of Qt 4.6! Performance improvements and features added. Who can imagine what’s coming in Qt 4.7 and 4.8 ???? (ok ok, maybe we know that and Thiago for sure knows that….but come on…you too can take a look at the repos and know what’s coming . Enjoy the video!

Changing the weather from Ian Moreira on Vimeo.

It all started like the video says. I got to Patricia asked her to do something really beautiful with Qt 4.6 in mind. Ian, Tam and Patricia then got together for this really fast project and now they also did a small video to show how it was done. When they told me that they [...]

Ah yes, web apps… So how do web apps help with our hero’s conundrum ?

I’m currently testing WordPy 2.0, a blogging client for the N900 that supports Wordpress, Blogger, and Livejournal.

What’s new with v2.0 is it’s Maemo 5 look, sporting new, much professional looking screens and buttons.

It lets you easily pull in images on your blog post from your local N900 drive(s), Flickr, and/or Picasa, and even gives you the option to proportionally resize, crop, roatate, flip, colorize, and change the brightness of images.

You have the option of crearting new tags and categories, although you can pull all your pre-defined tags and categories from your blog system as well. While it works great, I wish the way to select tags and categories would mimic the way you tag images and videos on the Maemo 5 gallery app.

Another feature that I like is that it lets you retrieve previous blog entries, edit, and post changes, direct from your N900. It lets you even manage comments, letting you add, approve, and delete comments on a specific blog entry.

This is easily a killer app for bloggers and I can see myself using it to blog anytime anywhere with just an N900.

WordPy 2.0 is still in extras-testing. Hopefully it gets released in Extras soon.

Discuss this at talk.maemo.org.

This post was fully created using WordPy 2.0 on a Nokia N900.

You probably already know that Qik lets you stream video live from your phone. In case you need a reminder, I met the cofounder, Bhaskar Roy, at the Nokia N900 NYC meetup and asked him to give The Nokia Blog viewers a demo. Take a look.

You can also watch this video in HD on Youtube. Subscribe to the channel to preview the latest videos before they get published on the blog.

As a reminder, this is just a preview of what’s to come. This article is based on Qik version 0.0.36 running on a pre-production Nokia N900. Features may be added or changed when the Nokia N900 arrives in stores.

Qik on the Nokia N900 has a very simplistic interface. There’s a prominent green button that lets you stream videos immediately. There’s also quick access to set a title and and privacy.

The application menu on top gives you more settings to play with. Here, you can choose whether to stream videos with max quality or minimum delay. You can also go to your Qik profile from this menu or sign up if you’re new.

Clicking anywhere else on the screen toggles full-screen mode just like the main camera application on the Nokia N900. I noticed there’s currently no way for me to use video autofocus. I hope this feature gets added in an update.

Video Sample

Results

I found streaming to work really well on wifi. The delay is very minimal. My main complaint is that the videos aren’t really viewable ‘live’ when using the a carrier’s internet connection. Viewers will see a choppy video until the file is fully uploaded. For best results, use wifi. What’s also great about Qik is that it will automatically resume uploading if it was previously interrupted or disconnected.

Qik is the fastest way to share your videos online. You can choose to automatically upload your videos to Facebook or send out a Tweet when streaming live. There are more services to automatically forward the Qik streams. I recommend installing it if your phone is supported and definitely recommend it on the Nokia N900.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• Nokia N900 for $479 at Dell with Coupon Expiring Jan 9th
• T-Mobile USA Upgraded to HSPA 7.2Mbps – Blazing Fast on Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 Ads Take Over Gizmodo
• Watch Out for BarrioSquare – A Foursquare App for Nokia N900

Firefox for Mobile Firefox on the N900 video - http://tnkgrl.wordpress.com/2009... November 2 from Benjamin Stover's Blog - Comment - Like

I know Mastory has been reviewed by Reggie to day but I decided to review it today also. I decided the best way to review it would be to do my review using my N900 and Mastory. The overall look has improved from older versions thanks to some new icons from Joshua.maverick on t.m.o. When first setting it up I had a little trouble because I did not have a option on my blog setup to allow remote publishing. When I failed to connect to my blog I checked the log and not only did it contain what my problem was but it contained how to fix it.

The overall look for buttons and the menu are very simple and very easy to understand. something that some applications don’t manage to do. I find that my first use of Mastory to be very nice and I can see myself writting most of my Blog posts from it on my N900. If you have a blog of your own I suggest you download it as soon as you can.

In September we mentioned PUSH N900, a promotional competition / project, that asked people to submit entries for modding an N900. The winners, who will receive funding to fully realise their ideas, have now been announced. The ideas range from an aerial photography project, though a skateboarding N900 to a light graffiti tool. We look forward to seeing these project once they have been completed.

Firefox for Mobile Madhava Enros and Ben Stover show off Firefox for mobile on the N900 at a recent meetup. Take a look: http://tnkgrl.wordpress.com/2009... November 2 from Twitter - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Watch Jay Sullivan give us a tour of Firefox for mobile (beta 4) on the Nokia N900: http://www.youtube.com/watch... November 2 from Twitter - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Take a look at Firefox for maemo (beta 4) running on Nokia N900 - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2009... November 2 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

So planet maemo is having a nice breeze about Fennec for N900. Nice youtube video and all.

But: dear friends, where the heck is the latest packaged version? I would like to try t out on my N900.

I tried googling, and found fennec for N810/N800 and some wikipages which I wasnt sure which version they talked about... I am left with this uncertainty, as I am not a Mozilla project insider. It would be nice if the video and blog posts would include a nice url. Maybe there is a website with all this info, but I, as a potentially interested person, havent found it..

So, where can people find it?

Before we move on to the other topics, there are two more aspects of web apps I’d like to highlight as relevant to the “least effort” crowd I’m trying to represent here, as well as to the mobile device category in general.

Quim Gil just confirmed the UX hackfest in Barcelona for 4, 5, 6 december: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33719

What is UX hackfest?
It's a three days meeting for Maemo developers, UX experts and people who want to learn about designing good user interfaces.

When?
On 4, 5, 6 december 2009

Where?
Barcelona, Spain. The exact location has still to be confirmed, but it should be http://citilab.eu

How many people invited?
About 50 people invited (Maemo developers, UX experts, ecc....)

If you are a Maemo developer and you have good user interface designer skills, this is the place for you.

If you are a Maemo developer and you are not a UX expert, this IS anyway the place for you: you'll have the possibility to talk with experts and improve your knowledge about UI design.

Anyone interested, please join the discussion here: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=33719

Update 3/11/2009 - 16:00: a wiki page with all information has been created here: http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo-Barcelona_Long_Weekend
please add your name/data to the page if you requested to join the UX hackfest.

So its that time of year again, we released a great product and instead of being content, we want to make an even greater one next time. It’s scary to think that I leave for the Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS) next week but as a Canonical employee we are all charged with coming up with great idea’s on how to make our particular field of interest even more awesome than it is now.

I personally have been working on the Ubuntu Netbook Remix flavour of Ubuntu and our ARM based offerings. With my experience, I truly believe that ARM has huge potential to break out of its ultra-embedded space and into the mobile ultra-smart phone or netbook area. All my efforts this coming 6 month cycle will be here.

Nokia has a great example of an ultra-smart phone, the N900. If you gave this device a 7″-10″ screen and a near-full size keyboard it would have rave reviews as an up-and-coming netbook distribution. Android is doing the same albeit in a different manner, coming from a very focused Mobile distribution to maybe something more? Canonical’s approach is another top-down example. We have traditionally targeted the desktop and server environments but as netbooks get cheaper (and hardware not particularly powerful) we all need to evaluate where the support line is drawn. The boundaries have definitely blurred on where the smart phone stops and the netbook begins.

Mer is another example of where some ARM distro’s are going. For me Mer is very interesting; Mer traditionally targets the lower horse-powered hardware which follows even closer to what todays phones have to offer. Not all phone hardware (and netbook hardware) is created equal and maybe the opportunity to offer Hi-Def playback and 3D acceleration on all platforms isn’t possible but I would definitely like to see Mer and other open source distributions on consumer-grade phones.

So, what I’m interested in these next 6 months is not just where I as a Canonical employee can take Ubuntu, but where I, as an ARM developer, generously employed by Canonical, can help the whole ARM eco-system. What would you like to see Canonical improve in the ARM embedded space in the next 6 months? All suggestions welcome.

Boston, meet litl.

Come say hi to litl. This Wednesday, 10:30am-12pm at Starbucks (755 Boylston St. Boston).

The litl webbook gets you online and more. It’s an internet computer that works great with your favorite websites. But the litl also flips over to create a new view of the web. Our intuitive interface and no-maintenance approach make it simple and carefree.

litl.com (@litl)

I looked at the internet radio stations in Finland, and discovered that MetroFM does have one. The fact that their stream uses ogg/vorbis format doesnt stop me from enjoying it in the N900 though

1. Install ogg support for N900 here. Update: Alternatively, open application manager, enable "Maemo Extras" repository if it is not yet enabled, and install "ogg-support" from there.
2. Enjoy MetroFM

Sweet

edit: too bad their terms only allow streaming to ip addresses in finland.

Please relax now, I’m not going to try to convince you that Python is the best thing since sliced bread… this part is not advocacy :-)

One of the most requested feature for Evas was rotation and other transformations. These are no more, Rasterman just did generic UV Mapping support, enabling rotation, perspective, 3d-simulation and more.

As usual he wrote a fast software engine to make this available on non-3d accelerated, next should come OpenGL and OpenGL-ES as some big players in the industry are now funding his work in both software and GL-ES support, as well as ARM NEON optimizations.

As ProFUSION is also being funded to work on WebKit-EFL, I thought I could demo our work using new rotation support, and the result is quite good:

As you can see, there are still bugs… actually this video was first meant to report a bug with mapping code, but raster is already fixing it.

As soon as I have time I’ll try to update EFL for N900 and try out the new expedite tests, they include 3d cubes, coverflow and more. Hopefully by the time OpenGL-ES will be ready and then we can compare software and hardware performance on this amazing hardware.

All in all, this semester is being quite busy for EFL hackers. Fast OpenGL-ES, UV Mapping, WebKit and soon-to-be-release Edje Editor were all done, with much more to come. Stay tuned!

I have finally got Glom packaged for Maemo 5. It is currently in extras-devel and is installable from the Application Manager. This took quite a bit of work, which I put down to not knowing enough auto-fu. However, the Debian packages are now /opt-ified, and the DBus .service file and .desktop file are installed to the correct locations on Maemo, which gives working application launcher icons. The process for doing this is not particularly well-documented (the best documentation is from Diablo), so here is a quick list of what the average (moderately complex desktop application) Debian package would need in order to be modified for Maemo:

• Maemo-optify support. This involves running maemo-optify just before dh_builddeb is run, and adding maemo-optify to the package's Build-Depends. For CDBS packages, this can be performed in the binary-install target. Glom produces several binary packages from a single source package, and maemo-optify is run for each binary package to be optified. There are alternatives to running maemo-optify, but it was something that I wanted to try out, and it worked.
• DBus .service file and .desktop file modifications. This involves adding a X-Osso-Service line to the .desktop file, e.g. X-Osso-Service=org.maemo.glom. Then, a DBus .service file must be created, with the same service identifier, e.g. Name=org.maemo.glom. The paths for installation of these files can be obtained via pkg-config from osso-af-settings (do not forget to add it to the Build-Depends of the package). My changes to Glom are in git (and a patch in the Glom package). The application must respond to DBus events if it is started in this way, and the simplest way to do this is to pass the DBus service name as a parameter to osso_initialize(), from libosso.
• Maemo-specific MIME-type modifications. Assuming that an application already installs MIME-type information and desktop files, and updates the databases correctly, there is one modification that can make things nicer on Maemo. There is an additional category that can be added to the MIME-type description. The change is safely ignored on non-Maemo-platforms.
  
• Atypically, Glom links to libgettextpo (most packages that use gettext for translations do not need to do this), and the package list on an N900 and in the SDK/package autobuilder is different, such that the required package does not exist on the N900. Rather than packaging gettext or libgettextpo for the N900, I decided to statically link to the library on Maemo only. This neatly solves the problem, and only increases the binary size by a few kB.
  

After unlocking my iPhone and testing if a T-mobile USA SIM card worked on it, a nationwide outage occurred. For a moment, I thought it was my fault. Well, it’s back in service and T-mobile confirmed it was a backend system software error. I ran some speed tests on the Nokia N900 today to see any changes.

Before Outage

Tests from October 15th

After Outage

Tests from November 4th

Results

It seems both download and upload speeds increased after the outage. Is this conclusive? I’m not sure, but I hope I continue getting these speed rates on the Nokia N900 here in New York.

Oh, and one more thing… speedtest.net is a flash site. Not many phones right now can even see this page on their browsers.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• How AT&T USA Users Can Get a Prepaid Tmobile SIM Card For 3G Usage on Nokia N900
• Video: Nokia N900 on Tmobile USA 3G Speed Test
• Google Nexus One vs Nokia N900 Hardware Photos and First Impressions
• Nokia N900 for $479 at Dell with Coupon Expiring Jan 9th

After the landing of QGraphicsWebView implementation (in summary, a mimic of QWebView widget but for the QGraphicsView world) in WebKit trunk, your creativity is your guide :-)

A week ago, I tried to quickly exercise what it is up to, and inspired in Kent's flipin widget idea, I got some cool rotation effects on the Web content. See the (amateur) show off below:



Nice stuff thanks to Qt and its QGraphicsView and QStateMachine flexibility.


--
--Antonio Gomes

OK, let’s pause for a second to recap, and pinpoint our position on the map :

Well boys (and girls), Maemo lovers especially, as the launch date of your much awaited Nokia N900 is getting closer and closer the more unboxing videos and photos starting to appear all around.

Yeah, I know, smartphone unboxing stories are a little lame (and maybe a little pointless), but we are all getting very excited as the day is getting closer to when the phone that could change the smartphone game will finally arrives to stores near us.

So here it is, a little photo story, performed below by unnamed editor from Fone Arena who managed to get his hands on the most ingenuous and powerful combination of software and hardware that they have ever created.... .. .

Firefox for Mobile Got a mobile phone? Participate in “Light the World with Firefox” - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2009... November 5 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

A small series of events in the mobile technology industry have produced ideal market conditions for Nokia in the US smartphone market. While predictions of Nokia's doom and failure in the US market continue throughout the blogosphere, Nokia has stayed its course, and hedged its bets on only competing in the US market when the opportunity was optimal for sustainable growth.

This strategy looks to have been sound, as the perfect conditions for Nokia to act have finally arrived, and Nokia is making its move, entering into a perfect storm for increasing mar... .. .

Before we move on to the last topic in this series, we need to answer two questions I’ve hinted at previously:

I read about this deal on the Nokia N900 and then found out the extra savings expired or it would have been priced way down at $441.99. I decided to then cancel my Nokia N900 order over at Newegg and wait out until we see more of these deals. Since I have the pre-production unit until January I am sure I will be able to find the N900 for less than $500 by then. Were any readers able to score the N900 for just $441.99? That was one heck of a deal and I wish I would have scored that one.

Note that 3-5 day shipping is also free. I used to buy my devices from Dell and they used to have an excellent return/exchange policy that still looks to be in place.

Nokia has officially unveiled its first Linux powered smartphone couple of months ago on 27 August, but only started taking pre-orders for the device last month but unfortunately company failed to deliver phone as promised which makes the long wait even more frustrating!

However, it seems that long wait is nearly over, as Softpedia and Pocket Lint reports that phone is rumored to make an appearance in the US as soon as on November 14, while it is expected to hit the shelves in the UK two days later on November 16.

Nokia's highly anticipated smartphone will be available on Orange with £0 price if the buyer agree to signing 2-year cont... .. .

Just an extended microblog post to let you all know about something that is growing pretty fast: Maemo – Barcelona Long Weekend.

It all started with a UX Meets Code workshop for 50 invited Maemo developers but then we started getting questions in forums, emails and phone calls. Specially about local activities. This is something we wanted to start sometime, somewhere… So why not Barcelona next month! We are now proposing developer training en español, a localization workshop taking el català as test case, gatherings of local groups interested in Maemo and the N900…

GNOME, KDE, Debian, Softcatalà, Hispalinux & co: cuanto mejor sea la respuesta local más gorda la podremos liar.

Tagged: Barcelona, events, maemo

Hopefully you all read about my Nokia N900 meetup in Tacoma, WA tonight. I also dug around my gear closet and found something like six prizes to giveaway to attendees. Sorry, they are not Nokia devices (one Nokia Bluetooth headset actually is included), but there is some cool gear and it is FREE. Nokia just let me know the meetup is live on their N900 meetup site too so check that out and bring a friend tonight.

I will have at least the N900, N810, N800, and N97 to show off, along with some other pretty hot mobile devices. Come on out for some free food and mobile device talk. I’ll post some photos and thoughts after the event so you can all see what you missed

Following on from N900 meetups in New York, Chicago, Helsinki and Dubai two additional dates have now been announced: London on November 17th and Moscow on the 24th November. Both meetups will take place at the Nokia flagship stores in the respective cities. At the meetups you'll get a chance to hear more about the N900, get some hands on time with demo units and potentially win prizes.

Zeitgeist is an “event logger”. It registers the activity of the user on the desktop, what documents uses, when, while talking with who, combined with what… and then different UIs can consume this data to show a Journal of activity, a better relevance in the searches, related documents to the one you are working on and [write your own cool idea here].

Tracker and Zeitgeist are complementary projects: Tracker knows the documents, Zeitgeist knows the activities. We (tracker developers) have been talking with Zeitgeist developers before and have a common understanding about the big picture. Now is time to start fixing details, and I’ll be next week in the Zeitgeist hackfest to work on that.

By the way, with some patience and fixing few details, Zeitgeist and Tracker 0.7 can be installed in maemo5. Catching few events here and there, zeitgeist can grab some basic informacion, and somebody could write a Journal home-screen applet, like the call log, but about all kind of activities/documents… Quite an interesting project.

Firefox for Mobile Fennec – Add-ons and Image Sizes - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 6 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

This i just something that I saw on LWN (from Harald Welte) and felt needed a little more visibility here at maemo.

The presentation shows how Google has simply thrown 5-10 years of Linux userspace evolution into the trashcan and re-implemented it partially for no reason. Things like hard-coded device lists/permissions in object code rather than config files, the lack of support for hot-plugging devices (udev), the lack of kernel headers. A libc that throws away System V IPC that every unix/Linux software developer takes for granted. The lack of complete POSIX threads. I could continue this list, but hey, you should read those slides. now!

 The slides

As usual the commentary at LWN raises some interesting counters.

Firefox for Mobile Congrats to Yaroslaff Chekunov, winner of the “Firefox Goes Mobile” design challenge! - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2009... November 6 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

As most of you already know, Firefox is coming to mobile phones and it is a huge step towards the goal of providing access to one Web that everyone can enjoy regardless of device or location, and bringing well known Firefox's customization, usability and features to the world of mobile.

As the part of this transition, they have started “Firefox Goes Mobile” design challenge with the main goal to create the official emblem of the new mobile version of Firefox. By "emblem" they mean an image that can used to represent the themes and value of Firefox for mobile in a wide variety of promotional while the Firefox logo we all know will continue to work quite well for that purpose.

Anyway, the results from the Mozilla Creative Collective’s “Firefox Goes Mobile” design challenge are in, and the winner is “Pocketfox”, by Yaroslaff Chekunov. As the official emblem of the upcoming mobile version of Fir... ...

It was a dark and very rainy night in Tacoma, Washington, with heavy traffic on I-5 and for the first 30 minutes it was just myself and Peyton eating pizza and chatting about the N900. We then added another and then four more so we had a total of 6 people, and myself, in the room checking out the Nokia N900 and all the other gadgets I brought along. Everyone was pretty excited to get some hands-on time with the N900 and it looks like 4 out of the 6 will be buying the N900 when it is released. We took a few photos with the N900, N97, and N86 8MP that you can see in the gallery below, along with the Qik video shot with the N900. I had the N900 hooked up to a projector via the TV out cable and it worked like a charm.

Peyton actually taught me a couple functions that will make the N900 even better for me and that is to use the volume button for zooming in and out in both the photo viewer and web browser. I couldn’t figure out how to zoom in while viewing photos and also found the volume zooming option in the browser to be much faster. Thanks for the tip!

Full screen YouTube video watching in the browser was awesome. We found the connection to be pretty slow on T-Mobile and maybe the Sprint store next to the restaurant was blocking us out. People threw some heavy sites at the browser and I think the connection had more to do with the slowness than the browser, but the browser did prove to be pretty capable. Overall, I think people were pretty impressed with the N900 and a desire for more marketing of the device and launching on T-Mobile was expressed.

I had six things to giveaway from my gadget closet so everyone who came received something. Thanks to Nokia for paying for the pizza and pop. Maybe we’ll try to plan something bigger and with a bit more notice in the future to show off a Nokia device since I had a great 3 hours chatting about mobile tech with folks who drove quite a ways through the foul weather to see the N900.

In this last section of the series, we’ll try to determine what makes a web framework appropriate for a) bricoleurs, and b) hosting embarked apps on the tablets… which is generally not what their creators had in mind :-)

There have always been complaints about Ogg being more of a battery hog on the Nokia tablets compared to Nokia optimized MP3. I decided to measure the difference.

One of my favorite Desktop Widgets on my N800 was the "Internet Search" applet. However, I was disappointed to find out that it was being dropped in Fremantle and there would be no official replacement. Since I wanted to learn a little more about programming for Fremantle and something as useful as a Search Widget wasn't available, I decided to tackle both at once.

The widget is called TouchSearch, and it allows you to search the web right from your Fremantle Desktop. It has a decidedly different feel than the Nokia-made widget because of some of the Fremantle Desktop restrictions, but accomplishes roughly the same thing.

TouchSearch is currently in the extras-testing que and is in need of testers! So, if Touchsearch sounds useful, give it a whirl. The package page is here and it contains a link to the bugtracker if you find issues or want to request new features. Please leave a thumbs up/down if you test it (packages need to have +10 karma to be eligible to be promoted to regular extras). Thanks!

Here are some screenshots on Scratchbox:

Clawmotia is a MythTV remote using edje and Qt. It works well on maemo, desktop and other devices. It requires a MythTV Web setup to talk to. See previous posts for how to set it up.


I got rid of the rendering artifacts on maemo, added hotkey support (volume, fullscreen) and some of the buttons on the main remote screen now bring up submenus. This paves the way for more advanced remote control configurations where intricate but rarely used controls are still available on the remote. For example, aspect ratio and image fill are unlikely to be needed on a well setup MythTV installation, but they are in a submenu of the remote should they be needed. I know the backgound for the submenu panel is not really nice, but with the drop shadow and pan in effect (which also needs tweaking) you can easily see it's a submenu.


Grab it here. I've included the x86_64 and armel binaries as well as the edj "edje" file. You'll need QtCore and qedje and you're in business. For the mameo you'll still have to make a menu shortcut yourself, and of course, see the README.

Better artwork very welcome. If you have skills, I should be able to take an xcf file and turn out a theme. Conversely, take a look at the edc file and you shouldn't have much trouble adding/removing buttons and changing the images.

Firefox for Mobile Fennec – Localization Update - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 7 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

We say that the Nokia N900 running Maemo 5 is a computer. It is a computer in your pocket. What an earth do we mean? Let me try to explain what I think. This is my interpretation.

Firefox for Mobile Fennec – Mobile Optimzed Web Pages - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 8 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Trying to Explain Mozilla as an Opportunity to High School Students - http://ahdesai.wordpress.com/2009... November 8 from ahdesai » Mozilla - Comment - Like

In case you'd like working in Maemo, we're looking (also) for an IT specialist:

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-11-02 through 2009-11-08

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-11-02 through 2009-11-08

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-11-02 through 2009-11-08

How it begun

When I read Quim's thread about the idea for a better Maemo chess app I knew I wanted to join the project. To me, it's all about the device and the sparkling Hildon UX. I really want a good chess app, for myself! I want to play chess online, everywhere! And I want to analyze games as (OK, maybe after =p) they happen. No more "I'll check this position later" (we all know this rarely happens).

So I finally started last friday. At this point, Quim and Andreas had already created a beautiful, content-rich wiki page. It took a while for me to digest it all, and I added information where appropiate.

Kick-starting the development

Andreas had registered a garage project, but we eventually decided to use gitorious for our repository. Gitorious' UI definitely improved over the recent months, and the possibility to have teams working on a single project - also known as not-so-extreme-dvcs-development - makes gitorious a better choice than github, at the moment.

Saturday night (what better things to do than coding some Qt - my soul will be forever lost) I had a first running example (see screenshot). Currently, Miniature can move between positions, using next/prev menu navigation (we don't need this functionality per se, but it's perhaps a good demonstration that the simple approach I took works).

So no matter the toolkit, no matter the outdated packages or the endless confusion I had with the various Qt repos at gitorious - this project is really fun! Hopefully we get to make a 0.1 release soon.

In this part we’ll look at some technical aspects of web2py that make it interesting as an embarked server on a mobile device. I won’t go into too much detail about the bells and whistles here, the feature list is available from the site’s front page, and a good summary is here. Suffice it to say that there are more than enough features for our needs, and all the right buzzwords to please the corporate types too. I’ll just underline those traits that serve our purpose best:

At the end of last week, I put packages for flv and ffmpeg gstreamer plugins into maemo extras-devel for fremantle (the version of Maemo that ships in the N900). With those packages, the N900 can play flv files from youtube and elsewhere but there was no app making use of it except the built in media player which one would have to write a mafw plugin for the different sites. So on Sunday afternoon, after a good round of golf (albeit some really crappy short putts missed) I decided to try and write a youtube browser and player. After 20 minutes (and code to parse youtube stuff borrowed from Canola2), I had a start. It would get the top rated videos list from you tube and display them in a pannable area as a list of buttons. Tapping a button would play the clip with GStreamer’s playbin2.

Then I thought maybe the app could be more useful to others with a little work, I gave the app a name: zoutube. I gave the app a crappy icon (icon designers feel free to contribute a nicer icon) and added debian packaging stuff. I made the app show a list of YouTube’s categories as well as Recently Features, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Recent as the front screen before it showed the videos. The next features I plan are:

• search
• show full description
• seek bar when playing
• download
• thumbnail of video

Please try it out, it is in extras-devel if you have it enabled, it will appear as zoutube in the App Manager on your N900 under Internet and Networking. Also feedback welcome and appreciated. Screenshots here (video not in player screenshot because screenshotting on N900 does not show accelerated video overlay):

Portrait of Xournal

Just as a reminder or for those not subscribing the mailing lists, tomorrow (Nov 10) will be held a discussion about the community Q&A for Extras-testing.

We appreciate input from everyone, if you can't attend the meeting please express your thoughts in advance in the related thread[1].

Meeting details:

*IRC: irc.freenode.org
*Channel: #maemo-meeting
*Time: Tuesday, November 10th, 14:30 UTC

 

More details and discussion:

[1] - http://n2.nabble.com/Quality-Assurance-and-Extras-testing-discussion-on-IRC-td3945607.html#a3945607

 

Firefox for Mobile Meet Firefox for mobile - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2009... November 9 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

In the last weeks I (among other things) worked on a new plugin repository (vastly inspired by EOG’s) for third party plug-ins for Emerillon.  There are currently 4 plugins being worked on and not all of them should be distributed with the base Emerillon application. Enters emerillon-plugins.

It currently has 1 plug-in.  This plugin is one that will be useful to Montréalers: it displays the status of the Bixi network.  Bixi is Montréal’s self-serve public bike system.  Apparently its design is so good — the bike system, not the plug-in — that it’ll be implemented in both London (UK) and Boston (USA) very soon.

So the plug-in is quite simple: you have a drop down list where you select to see available bikes in stations near you or available docking stations.  The map is updated instantly to display the new values.  The markers on the map change in size depending on the available bikes/docks.  The information is automatically updated every 5 minutes.

After all the legal verifications, this plug-in is now free for everyone to share.  It should serve as a good example of what you can do with Emerillon and libchamplain.  It is the first piece of code (that I am aware of) to demonstrate ChamplainMarker sub-classing to implement unique look & feel.

Disclaimer: This plug-in has been independently developed by Novopia Solutions and is not in anyway related to or endorsed by Bixi, the operator of Montréal’s public bike system.  Bixi is a trade mark of Société de vélo en libre-service.

I am looking to hire (permanent position) a talented web developer. He/She need to be proficient in

• HTML (4/5), Javascript, AJAX, CSS (2/3)
• Javascript UI & Animation frameworks like dojo, jQuery, script.aculo.us or similar

If you are one and are interested to know more about the position, please send me your profile to Devesh Kothari (email is first name dot last name at nokia.com). Position is based in Tampere (Finland)

Firefox for Mobile Firefox for Maemo Beta 5 Released - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2009... November 9 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

Firefox for Maemo beta 5 became available for download tonight, so get your Nokia N900 and install it now! Oh wait… the device is not available to the public yet. I wouldn’t get mad though. I found beta 5 to be slower than the default browser and less accurate at displaying some sites. For example, The Nokia Blog looks ugly on it.

Firefox for Maemo

Default Browser

Here’s what’s new from the official Firefox Beta 5 release notes. It also builds upon the feature set of the previous releases. Read the complete list on the release notes.

• Enabled official branding, with Firefox name and logo
• Support for localizations, currently including Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Russian
• Enabled plugins
• Viewport meta tag support
• Fixed a number of sites that resize their content after the page is loaded
• Added a form assistant to make filling forms easier
• Improved panning performance and behavior
• Zooming doesn’t jump around anymore
• Numerous other bugs and polish issues addressed

I’m not giving up on Firefox on Maemo though. I notice a HUGE improvement in performance from the previous version, making me feel the developers are working really hard on this project. I hope they make The Nokia Blog appear more accurate on the next version, though.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• Firefox Release Candidate 1 Now Available for Maemo – Nokia N900 & N810
• Mark/Space Releases GoGadget to Sync Music, Photos, Ringtones, Video, and Docs For Mac and Nokia N900
• Google Nexus One vs Nokia N900 Hardware Photos and First Impressions
• Nokia N900 for $479 at Dell with Coupon Expiring Jan 9th

Firefox for Mobile Fennec – Form Assistant & Password Echo - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 9 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Fennec is Firefox, Firefox is Fennec! - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 9 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

We’ll round up this series about web2py with two more subjects: how to best run the server on a tablet using the stock distribution as is; and how things could be made easier for the end user by creating a specific Maemo package.

Couple of months ago, Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind Firefox, has rolled out first beta version of Fennec, the long awaited mobile version of the Firefox and now I'm glad to inform you that they have released a fifth beta for Nokia’s Maemo based devices last night which bringing them one step closer to the final release.

The initial focus of Fennec development was on building a new user experience that reflects Firefox's design principles, adding touch screen support and other interactions appropriate for mobile phones and other handheld devices, while preserving leading features like the Smart URL Bar ("awesome bar") and support for add-ons.

Feirefox beta 5 further improves user experience, brings numerous performance, speed, functionality and UI improv... .. .

Over the next two day I'm at Nokia's The Way We Live Next event, which 'features presentations and demonstrations from Nokia and our ecosystem partners, showing how Nokia are connecting and building the communities of the future'. You can follow along via our live coverage below or via @aas.

Accroding to Reuters’ Tarmo Virki, Nokia has started deliveries of its first Linux powered Smartphone, a real game-changer that will help Nokia to finally turn the tide of smartphone war in their favour and control the mobile market again.

Nokia Chief Executive Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo said in a speech the company started deliveries of the phone on Tuesday.

Analysts see N900 and following Linux devices as key for Nokia to gain back ground in the coming years, something that market has been waiting for a years, a real game-changer that will help Nokia to finally turn the tide of smartphone war in their favour and con... .. .

We gave a few hundred Nokia N900s out to the Maemo Summit participants. That happened about a month ago. You have now been using the devices and provided us with feedback. Thank you so much! That has been very helpful. You've helped us to focus our effort and work on the remaining issues. That's why I want YOU to be the first to know.

We have also been testing the software extensivly in our own labs. We will continue working on the software and will provide important software upgrades as we go forward. But we also wanted to have very good software release to start with.

Based on our testing and your feedback we decided to postpone the delivery start. We had oroiginally said October, but now we said November. Now I'm happy to tell that we ment only days, not weeks or months.

The shipments of the Nokia N900 have now started. The factories are now working full speed and the devices are on their way to distribution.

Houston, we have a take-off!

Good news people, the Nokia N900 is now shipping and should be available soon at retailers here in North America. The current pre-order price at Amazon is $559.99 so this might be the best deal going at the moment with their return policy flexibility compared to other stores. I still have my pre-production unit and don’t have a pre-order in place at the moment because I need to see how the shipping software performs. Unfortunately, I still have an early version of the software and Nokia has not provided an update for the device.

There is no word on whether T-Mobile USA will ever pick this up, but I am doubting it since we haven’t seen any substantial rumors yet. I think it is quite strange though for Nokia to include the 1700 MHz frequency in all the N900 units without some kind of major deal with T-Mobile since they are the only ones using this band.

Any readers order a Nokia N900? Where did you purchase one?

With the fast processor, large display, and internal 32GB flash memory I started thinking the N900 could serve as a great base station for a full computer experience. Could I connect my 37″ LCD TV and a Bluetooth keyboard to the N900 and use it as a mobile PC? I turned on the Bluetooth radio and selected to add a device. I then enabled searching on my Think Outside BT keyboard and voila the N900 found it and identified it properly and they were paired together. I also used the Nokia TV-out cable and plugged the yellow cord into my TV port for instant video appearing on the large display. It seemed to all work together out of the box with no additional utilities or tweaks.

I then went about seeing what I could do with the BT keyboard and found it does not work for navigation or controlling anything on the device, but works pretty well inside text entry fields. I was hoping that some of the application buttons on the keyboard would launch apps, but that support is not yet present. There is not yet any Office software so I went into the Notes program to test out the functionality.

You can use the keyboard for entering all letters of the alphabet, navigate within your note using the directional arrow keys, enter a comma and a period, and activate the shift, caps lock, backspace, tab, and enter buttons. There is no support for the number row, other punctuation or symbols, or any other keys that I could find. The predictive text capability of the N900 is supported and may be helpful for some, but I type quite fast and am a good speller so don’t really need it.

If you are planning to write a novel or other long email or article with the N900, then the BT keyboard solution works pretty well. It is quite helpful that the N900 has the kickstand for propping itself up too. I also used the TV out last week to show off the N900 with a projector and that works flawlessly, even showing off video. The display on the N900 looked better than my projector output, but the 37″ LCD looks quite nice.

Valgrind’s massif tool tracks how much memory an application uses over time, allowing you to see leaks. Previous versions produced pretty graphs. For instance, see the graph in this out-dated GNOME tutorial about massif.

However, massif’s behaviour has changed and those graphs are no longer generally appropriate. But they were nice. So I hacked a copy of the current ms_print perl code, producing massif_grapher. Forgive me for my perl code.

I used perl’s GD::Graph module. It worked but it’s a little eccentric. The image size is hard-coded and needs to be increased in the code when Gd::Graph complains that the vertical or horizontal space is too small, if you have too many data points.

massif_grapher.pl outputs a massif_pretty.png file:

• There’s a simple graph (the default) that just shows the stack and heap allocations, splitting the heap up into useful and extra (allocated as an optimization) . It doesn’t mention any functions. See this example.
• And there’s a detailed graph (via –detailed) that tries to show the old-style cumulative graph, with color for each allocating function. See this example. I won’t put it directly in my blog because their’s some obviously weird stuff happening at the top. Also, the legend needs to be reversed so it’s easier to associate the functions with the blocks on the graph. Patches welcome. You’ll get weird results if you don’t specify–detailed-freq=1 to massif.

Time will tell if this is useful.

Other useful massif tools:

• Eclipse Linux Tools’ valgrind support: Scroll down to see the video for their massif support. This allows you to jump right to the code. Useful if you are using Eclipse.
• massiftool: A Qt-based application for navigating massif snapshot data.

Nokia announced this morning that it has begun shipping the Nokia N900 to retailers, which means you should be able to purchase one within the next few days. It also means that if you were one of the lucky ones to place your pre-order through Amazon.com while it was so cheap, you should expect your order to be shipped really soon, as well.

The Nokia N900 is the latest Maemo-powered device from Nokia, and the first one to feature a built-in SIM card slot, so that it can be used as a phone. The device also packs a 5 megapixel autofocus camera with dual-LED flash, 32GB of internal storage, built-in WiFi, GPS, and more. I’ve been using the Nokia N900 for a few weeks now (with pre-release firmware) and will have a full preview posted soon.

If you haven’t already, you can place your N900 directly from Amazon for $559.99 here.

Related Posts

• Pre-Order Your Nokia N900 Now
• Dell Now Shipping N900 Pre-Orders
• Nokia N900 Pre-Order Drops To $582 On Amazon
• Maemo Will Soon Power The Nseries
• If You Love Ovi, You’ll Hate The N900

I just ordered N900 for 250€ directly from Nokia thanks to discount which I got recently.

Plan to write review after first days of use so stay tuned.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Discounted Devices Program: N900 was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. DDP — does it has any sense?
2. Nokia N900 discount
3. N900 arrived

Firefox for Mobile Developers…start your extensions! - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2009... November 10 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

Have you heard about the awesome N900 ? Do you want to try it and know more about Maemo ?

If you’re based in Portugal this is the perfect opportunity to get your hands on an N900.
Thanks to the WOM World/Nokia folks, we’re hosting a small meetup about the Nokia N900 and the Maemo community, in the next Saturday in Lisbon at the “Mar Adentro café” (Maps) between 15:00 and 18:00.
I’ll give a small demonstration of the N900 and then will let people ask questions about the device and the community and enjoy some hands-on time with the device. If you already have an N900, join us anyway, you’ll not regret .

Due to the space logistics, I appreciate that those willing to attend contact me.

To conclude this series I’d like to highlight an important point that didn’t quite fit in before, because it is from the point of view of the end user, rather than of the developer (although they may well be the same person :-).

The Mozilla team just announced a new version of ‘Fennec’, which is also known as Firefox for Maemo. The new version, Beta 5, includes several updates, listed below. I’ve tried Fennec on various Maemo devices, including the N800, N810, and now the N900, and this version is the first that I would consider even remotely usable. It launches in seconds, rather than minutes, which is a first step towards usability.This new browser for the Nokia N900 is still somewhat slow, even over my home WiFi network, though the interface is, in my opinion, much nicer than the built-in browser. After a bit of loading, this new version has no problems rendering the full version of Maemo-Guru.com, in fact.

One cool thing about Firefox for Maemo is the Weave add-on, which allows you to synchronize information between your desktop and N900. This is one of the things that was missing in every one of the previous Maemo devices, and I’m really glad to have the ability to easily sync bookmarks and tabs with my device finally. The implementation is still somewhat buggy, but I’m still glad to see someone working on it. I would also like to see Xmarks.com update their add-on to support Firefox for Maemo in the near future, as well.

Here’s the list of improvements from the Mozilla team:

• Firefox official branding, with Firefox name and logo
• Support for multiple locales, currently including Spanish, German, French, Italian, Dutch, and Russian
• Flash sites such as YouTube now work
• The viewport meta tag is now supported by Firefox on mobile sites using it
• New form assistant to make filling in forms easier
• Improved panning and zooming performance and behavior
• Numerous other bugs and polish issues addressed

Not bad, though I can’t help but wonder how many betas we’ll have before we get the finished product. You can get Firefox for Mobile installed on your N900 by going to http://www.mozilla.com/m in your device’s browser.

Related Posts

• Guide To Maemo Apps For Symbian Converts
• Maemo Will Soon Power The Nseries
• If You Love Ovi, You’ll Hate The N900
• Nokia Is Now Shipping The N900 To Retailers
• …But Very Much Excited About Maemo 5

We all know that the N900 is starting to ship out to retailers now so should hopefully be coming to buyers soon as well. Things are starting to happen around this latest Nokia Maemo project and we now see that applications are appearing on the Maemo Select site with links to download directly to your N900. I already have most of these apps loaded on my test N900, but it is good to see this site start to have content available. I am still looking for new themes and wallpapers to appear as well.

I tried going to the Ovi Store app on the N900, but it still goes to the website saying it is coming soon so that is not live yet. I also understand that there is a later ROM than the one I have on my test unit and I was told the update for this unit should be on the device software updater soon. Thus, I have my T-Mobile SIM card back in the N900 and am checking regularly for the update.

After now having had the N900 for a few weeks, I have to say I am quite disappointed in the battery life with the current ROM. I can go further than I did with the horrible T-Mobile G1 battery, but for my regular, moderate usage I can only go a half a day before I need to charge it back up. This is with background apps and updates at a fairly minimal level, surfing for 30 minutes, calling for about 20 minutes, WiFi on for occasional usage, and MFE push email going. You can always carry an extra battery, but is sure would have been nice if Nokia had used that sweet E71/N810/N97 1500 mAh battery in this device.

Today, I feel like exposing you to some bleeding edge development going on as we speak at the Tracker team. I know you’re scared of that and that’s precisely why I want to expose you! Hah.

We are prototyping writeback support for Tracker.

With writeback we mean writing metadata that the user passes to us via SPARQL UPDATE into the file that he’s describing.

This means that it must be about a thing that is stored, that it must update a property that we want to writeback and it means that we need to support the format.

OK, that’s three requirements before we write anything back. Let’s explain how this stuff works in the prototype!

In our prototype you mark properties that are eligible for being written into the files using tracker:writeback.

It goes like this:

nie:title a rdf:Property ;
   rdfs:label "Title" ;
   rdfs:comment "The title of the document" ;
   rdfs:subPropertyOf dc:title ;
   nrl:maxCardinality 1 ;
   rdfs:domain nie:InformationElement ;
   rdfs:range xsd:string ;
   tracker:fulltextIndexed true ;
   tracker:weight 10 ;
   tracker:writeback true .

Next you need a writeback module for tracker-writeback. We implemented a prototype one that can only write the title of MP3 files. It uses ID3lib’s C API.

When the user is describing a file, the resource must have nie:isStoredAs. The property being changed ’s tracker:writeback must be true. We want the value of the property too. That’s simple in SPARQL, right? Sure it is!

SELECT ?url ?predicate ?object {
    <$subject> ?predicate ?object ;
               nie:isStoredAs ?url .
    ?predicate tracker:writeback true
 }

You’ll find this query in the code, go look!

Now it’s simple: using ID3lib we map Nepomuk to ID3 and write it.

No don’t be afraid, we’re not going to writeback metadata that we found ourselves. We’ll only writeback data that the user provided in the form of a SPARQL Update on the default graph. No panic. Besides, using tracker-writeback is going to be completely optional (just don’t run it).

This is a prototype, I repeat, this is a prototype. No expectations yet please. Just feel exposed to scary stuff, get overly excited and then join us by contributing. It’s all public what we’re doing in the branch ‘writeback’.

ps. Whether this will be Maemo’s future metadata-write stuff? Hmm, I don’t know. Do you know? ;-)

Firefox for Mobile Android vs iPhone metrics - http://androidandme.com/2009... November 11 from Benjamin Stover's Blog - Comment - Like

Today at work, David King kindly informed me that there was some new Qt package in extras-devel. This could only mean one thing - I immediately fired up my scratchbox environment and installed the packages, trying to confirm that this new version would run with Qlom. And in fact, it was surprisingly painless. Thanks to autotroll, a simple QT_PATH env variable did all the magic, hooray!

Both of us were impressed with the UI improvements. It's certainly a big step forward regarding the Hildonisation of Qt on Maemo5. The application menues look correct now. Button sizes, colors, animations, etc - it all comes together nicely, finally.

There are still some widgets that need more work, but for a tech preview this is a pleasant surprise.

On another note, the timing for the Miniature project could not have been much better. We immediately switched to Qt 4.6, and it even runs on the N900. It feels good to know that we can stop using hacks and that we can start to do (most) things properly, staying as cross-platform as possible. Needless to say, Quim was happy, too.

David Schleef’s theora optimisation for the dsp in the OMAP3 will really make open video a reality for the N900 and other OMAP3 devices like Palm Pre/Motorola Droid. Thank you David and Mozilla for the work.

Worldwide mobile phone sales totalled 308.9 million units in the third quarter of 2009, a 0.1 per cent increase from the third quarter of 2008, according to Gartner, Inc. Smartphone sales surpassed 41 million units, a 12.8 per cent increase from the same period last year, and Apple overtook RIM in Western Europe for the first time since the launch of the iPhone.

“The third quarter of 2009 saw the announcement of many new mobile devices, including several Android smartphones ready for the holiday season in the fourth quarter, but hardware commoditisation and the growth in open platforms will make it harder for them to stand out,” said Carolina Milanesi, research director at Gartn... .. .

In which Ewan Spence takes a slightly light hearted look at the infrastructure and privacy implications of Nokia's latest Device/Services concept video, introduced at The Way We Live Next event in Espoo. Rafe responds, having been in attendance. Your comments most welcome, of course - this one could run and run!

In which Ewan Spence takes a slightly light hearted look at the infrastructure and privacy implications of Nokia's latest Device/Services concept video, introduced at The Way We Live Next event in Espoo. Rafe responds, having been in attendance, pointing out that the future will always contain challenges and changes to The Way We Currently Live(!). Your comments most welcome, of course - this one could run and run!

Being one of the developers who received the discount to buy a N900, during these days I contacted the DDP customer care to have more informations and details. I'll publish here both my original question and the official reply.

1) The price of N900 is 250€ and I've read of people who paid it this price. Anyway here you say that the VAT is not included:
https://pro.forum.nokia.com/site/global/tech_resources/discounted_devices/l_ddp.jsp
so it should costs 300€ not 250€, right?

The VAT applies only for Finnish developers, for the others the price is the price they see in the eStore, no VAT is added to that.

So, all non-finnish european people, will pay 250€ for the N900.

2) How much time can I wait before ordering it? In this moment I'm in Valencia (Spain) and I won't come back to Italy before Christmas. I'd like the order to be shipped to my home in Italy (I registered as italian user and I want italian keyboard layout), but I'd like to wait to order it, because since there's no warranty and I need to tell you about any problem within a week, if I order it now I will be able to check it only at the end of december when I'll come back to Italy.

I guess this should not be a problem.

This part is not confirmed yet, since Quim told us to hurry up to buy it.

3) How many devices can I buy at that price? Here you say I can buy two:
https://pro.forum.nokia.com/site/global/tech_resources/discounted_devices/l_ddp.jsp
but here you say I can buy one: https://pro.forum.nokia.com/showProduct.do?product_id=5096

I don't want two devices, but another friend of mine, who help me in a project for the Maemo Community, would like to be able to buy one for the same price (he wasn't able to get the discount because his karma is still low).

As far as I know, you can only purchase 1x device per person, regarding MAEMO N900.

4) Where can we find the new firmware? In the FAQ you say: DDP does not flash devices. It's ok, I can do it, but there's no public firmware for N900 at the moment.

To update N900, can possibly be using NSU. Nokia software updater.

5) Is it possible to have a device with localized keyboard (for example italian one) ?

All N900 will have EURO variant, Italian language is one option.

Note: even these replies come from the official customer care, I don't assume any responsability if they shouldn't be all exact. If you have any doubt, please contact them directly at DDP.program@nokia.com

Nokia is horrendous at services, this we know. The true level of this, however, is lost until you try to use the company’s latest and greatest product, the N900, with its latest and greatest services, the Ovi family of services. What’s even more silly is that the Nokia N900 has an icon for the Ovi Store – Nokia’s software store, predominantly loaded with Symbian applications, but with other content, too. Other Ovi services are unsupported, which just makes no sense at all.

Last week I visited Google for the first time. I even passed by Rob Pikes office...

Today I'm using the language he and his team just created. Lots of inspirations from C, python, limbo and friends, and I actually had fun playing around with it.

1 package main
2
3 import "fmt"
4
5 func PrintAll(x interface{}) {
6     var str string;
7     switch value := x.(type) {
8         case bool:
9             if value {
10                 str = "True"
11             } else {
12                 str = "False"
13             }
14         case string:
15             str = value
16         default:
17             return
18     }
19     fmt.Printf(str + "\n")
20 }
21
22
23 func main() {
24     PrintAll("Hello world");
25     PrintAll(true);
26     PrintAll(false);
27 }

Now look at that :-) Hello World, here we Go.

$ 6g test.go && 6l test.6 && ./6.out
Hello world
True
False

PS: "!" replaced with ".", emphasising that I'm talking about "Go" and not the "Go!" language.

On Tuesday the Nokia N900 started shipping from the factory to retailers and distributors. N900s are currently being made in Nokia's Korean factory. Shipment from the factory to retailers usually takes a few days; you can therefore expect the N900 to start becoming available in retail channels at the end of this week. The N900 is shipping into Europe, North America, the Middle East and Russia. Availability will vary by country and retail channel.

Firefox for Mobile Geolocation support in add-ons - http://dougt.org/wordpre... November 12 from dougt's blog » mozilla - Comment - Like

I’ve been using the Nokia N900 as my primary device for a few weeks now, and have made some really interesting observations. One of the things that has really stood out is the fact that this thing is seriously not a phone. It’s not even a smartphone, to be honest. There are a number of factors contributing to this, some of which could be fixed in the future.

Clawmotia is a remote control for MythTV using Qt and qedje. The claw works on maemo and desktop systems. I have updated submenus to fade better, added hotkey support, and improved images and icons since 0.2. Grab it at my maemo repository.

In the shot of it running on the device shown below, the euro sign is for commercial skip forward and back. Having the skip back in the top right of the device makes it very easy to hit if an auto skip has gone too far. It is no accident that pause, mute, and cancel are placed in the other corners. The icons below change the volume up and down. In the middle of the top is an icon to bring up a submenu letting you set the aspect ratio and stretch the video in various ways to get maximal use from your screen.



I have also been tinkering with allowing switching between landscape and portrait mode, the edje is ready, there are just a few things to iron out before it works as expected. Of course, such switching will be far more useful on an n900 where it can happen automatically as you rotate the device. But for n8x0 users a button will be available trigger a rotate...

The Nokia N900 was just announced that it started shipping on Tuesday. I’ve been using a pre-production version for a month now and just updated to the production firmware (1.2009.42-11). I’ll edit this review when I get my hands on a production hardware model and notice any difference. Want to know what I think in one sentence? I like the Nokia N900, but Nokia still has a lot of work to do.

There are a few people in the mobile ecosystem whose opinion I make sure to listen to. Mark Guim has been around the block almost as long as I have and here provides a (month) long term review of the Nokia N900, running Maemo 5, of course. If you're currently using an N97 (for example) and had been wondering whether the grass was greener on the other side, his review should answer your questions. Summary? If you live in the browser, you'll love the N900 - if you live in apps and media, then best stick with Symbian and the N97.

The uni semester is in full swing again, so development has slowed down a bit again compared to September. At least we are able to work on the my.gpodder.org webservice as a project in one of the courses (so expect some new development there soon). Anyway, here are some thing I've been working on recently:

gPodder has gained search-as-you-type filtering for both the podcast list and the episodes list. This allows you to make good use of the hardware keyboard, and text searches temporarily override the current view mode (e.g. only podcasts with unplayed epiosdes or hide deleted episodes), so you will always find the podcast or episode you are searching for (independent of the current view mode). This will obviously also be available for Maemo 4:

In non-gPodder news, I have been working on a tag cloud widget. It will allow developers to provide a set of tags and a weight for each one, and the tag cloud will display something like this:

The tags displayed act as buttons and can be used as an alternative to long lists of items (depending on the kind of data that is to be displayed and selected). This tag cloud might come in handy in a future project..

In all of my previous posts on the N900 (found in my Definitive Nokia N900 Guide) I was using a pre-production N900 running firmware 1.2009.41.10. I understand that the firmware shipping with the N900 devices is later than this one I have. Nokia stated that these pre-production devices would eventually get a firmware update so I connected via Nokia PC Suite this morning and ran the Nokia Software Updater to discover an update was indeed available. I just downloaded the 161.4 MB file and updated the Nokia N900 to firmware 1.2009.42.11.

I thought it would have been like some of the more recent Nokia updates where all your apps and settings remain in place, but it appears everything was wiped out. I wanted to start over anyways so didn’t mind having to reinstall apps. All of my photos were still on the 32GB drive so that is good. I plan to test this out extensively this weekend to check on any battery life improvements and try to find anything else out that might have been updated. I cannot find a changelog for this firmware update anywhere and if you happen to find it, please do share it with me.

I will update this post as I setup the N900 again and discover changes. So far, it really does appear to be snappier, but that could be a matter of having a fresh device again. I also plan to avoid enabling the Maemo testing repository since some of those apps are in alpha and could be messing up the battery performance. I want to give you a new user perspective so will stick with Maemo Extras instead.

Clarification: I just wanted readers to know that these N900 units sent out early were a bit special and needed to use NSU to update while future/shipping versions of the N900 should have the same OTA support you expect in new Nokia devices.

Sygic, a software company that creates voice guided, turn by turn, GPS navigation software for mobile devices, today announced that its product would be available for Maemo 5 and the Nokia N900 by the end of the year. The software will include mapping coverage for Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Colombia, USA, Canada, Mexico, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and all of Europe. Read on for further details and screenshot.

After an interesting ride internal, I’m back to open and hacking Bugzilla — at least for a couple weeks — helping Andre with technical and coding stuff for maemo.org Bugzilla, as the increasing amount of incoming bug reports takes more and more time. It’s very nice to see the same old guys still around.

My priority tasks are first some quick, much needed tweaks to the current version. Then on to new lands, getting Bugzilla 3.4 in shape for maemo.org. Stay tuned.

I’m still working on the version 3.0 of PYGTKEditor.

For those which don’t know what is this application, let me resume it in few words : PyGTKEditor is a small source editor specially designed for onboard developpers.

PyGTKEditor 3.0 is a complete rewrite from scratch. Indeed, gtksourceview isn’t useable with PannableArea without a rewrite. Why using a PannableArea ? Because scrolling with small scrollbar is a pain on small interface. And using large scrollbar eat too many space on the screen, specially when re#ing source code. The other things which push me to rewrite it, is the graphical change in the Fremantle’s interface, which make many things hard to use, like the menu for example.

Currently the development is a bit slow as i ve to rewrite a complete source code parser for hilight, which is done now in full python. But as now the parser is written, open/save is working it ll be a bit faster.

The roadmap is the following :
- Support all language supported by gtksourceview for the hilight (DoneJ
- Save/Open/Open Recent (Done)
- Shortcut
- Execute python script from the editor
- Undo/Redo manager (done)
- Help
- Auto rotation based on accelerometers (Done)
- Icon
- Package
- Set mime type for hildon manager

- Search/Replace

Some screenshots of the current developpment version :

And if you have some features request, do not hesitate.

If you want to work with gst-launch and gst-inspect on the N900, you need to “apt-get install gstreamer-tools” to install them on your device (or SDK).

gst-launch playbin2 uri=file:///path/to/file.ts

It plays, but still low framerate and playbin2 bickering about “this computer is too slow.” :-)

Now looking for disabling scaling, improving pipeline and going fullscreen

The information on this page is essential for everyone out there who is even tiny bit interested in UPnP/DLNA.

To answer some reader questions and get some visibility for the N900 in the enterprise world I just posted this article over on my ZDNet blog and think you will be pleased to see Google Docs and more Google services work just fine on the Nokia N900.

I just read this article titled 15 ways the N900 is better than the iPhone and 5 ways it is not and have to say it is quite a well presented argument. Obviously at this time, the available applications for the iPhone beat just about any platform, but as I have said before the extremely strong browser on the N900 makes having many apps a moot point. I have a preproduction N900 and an iPhone 3GS and admit I do keep switching back and forth because there are some key apps for my usage that I find appealing on the iPhone. I also think Apple has the user interface down so the common user feels comfortable with the device. Then again, no one ever said I was common and I really enjoy the geekiness and power of the N900.

I like the N900 for the following:

• Powerful web browser
• Hardware keyboard
• Awesome camera
• Prop up kickstand
• Standard microUSB for charging and connecting to PC
• Notifications (Apple can’t even touch these or the Android model)
• VoIP/IM integration with easy calling/chatting via Skype, Google Talk, SIP, etc.

I like my iPhone 3GS for the following:

• Applications for Twitter, Facebook, Bible reading, and GPS navigation
• Ease of getting media content on the device through iTunes

Hmm, I guess there isn’t much about the iPhone I like over the N900. They both have mediocre battery life, but at least the N900 has a removable battery and standard microUSB port for charging. If the N900 can get support for Amazon Video On Demand added to it like the Nokia N97, then that will address my video content issue. The N900 also needs some good social networking apps and I am sure we will see more as developers continue to work on Maemo and the device gets out into more people’s hands.

What do you like about the Nokia N900?

Today I was thinking...that wow! the new N900 with the latest available firmware (1.2009.41-11) is simply amazing. My main concern with the N900 is that its battery life used to suck hard when using it as it should be (multitasking, always on-line, always on GPS and stuff like that).Two days ago I've updated it to the official final firmware and I am happy to say that I am REALLY impressed by its

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-11-09 through 2009-11-15

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-11-09 through 2009-11-15

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-11-09 through 2009-11-15

Sygic announces the compatibility of its Mobile Maps turn-by-turn navigation application with the new Nokia Maemo mobile phones. The application will get ready for sale from Sygic web site e-shop by the end of 2009.

Turn-by-turn voice guided navigation software Sygic Mobile Maps converts mobile phones into full-featured navigation devices. Sygic now extends its current compatibility range to support the new Nokia Maemo 5 OS devices. Further operating systems supported already are iPhone, Symbian, Android and Windows Mobile, incl. Windows Mobile 6.5.

All currently available regional apps for other operating systems are in progress to be available on Nokia Maemo... .. .

The Nokia N900 is landing in the hands of real users with the Maemo 5 final release that we have been polishing in the last weeks.

The fortunate users of a pre-production Nokia N900 are encouraged to flash completely their devices in order to have them as they come out of a sales box. The instructions to flash the internal memory and the eMMC can be found at http://wiki.maemo.org/Updating_the_firmware. Even if technically your backups and the current eMMC firmware should work, we recommend you to start completely from scratch. As if you would have got a new device today.

The Maemo 5 SDK is being updated accordingly (as we speak, so wait if you still don’t see it). It can be downloaded at http://forum.nokia.com/maemo. Now it comes with a GUI installer to ease the path to get you started. Current Maemo 5 final SDK users can simply update their sources in order to get the content matching the sales release.

Welcome the Maemo 5 final release! Welcome the Nokia N900!

MS windows users willing to update the [[N900]] can use the [http://europe.nokia.com/get-support-and-software/download-software/device-software-update Nokia Software Updater].

Thanks to Mathias, Miniature is now suitable for debian packaging. He also uploaded a first test balloon which at least allows you to move pieces around. Feedback is of course more than welcome.

Personally I wish the board's cell size could have been made bigger, but 60x60 pixels is already the upper limit. It is now up to us - the Miniature team - to come up with clever techniques to make the board handling as finger-friendly as possible.

With the production Nokia N900 units now shipping to most countries, those of us with pre-production units need to update our firmware to the latest release. Also, historically in Maemo, there are much more frequent firmware updates than there are in the Symbian world, so the maemo.org community has put together a Wiki with helpful links on how to update your device’s firmware.

There are different steps to use, depending on what operating system you have running on your computer.

Windows: Windows users can update their Nokia N900 using Nokia Software Update tool. You can use this walkthrough to install and run NSU under Windows 7, too. Be sure to backup any critical information before applying the update, as it will reset your device to factory settings. The internal device memory will be cleared, but your 32GB internal memory card will not be.

Linux: Linux users can use the Flasher to update their firmware. Download the flasher here, and the N900 firmware image here. To start flashing, turn the N900 off, then connect the USB cable (with the device still powered off). Open a terminal and run ‘sudo ./flasher-3.5 -F <firmware image filename> -f -R‘ and enter your administrator password. You’ll get a message that a suitable USB device isn’t found, so you’ll now need to press the power button to turn your N900 on. Once it’s on, it will start flashing, and then it will reboot. When you see the normal desktop, you can disconnect your N900.

Mac OS X: Follow the same steps as for Linux users, except you’ll need to download the 770Flasher application. As with Linux, you’ll want to connect your N900 (powered down) via USB cable, then run the 770Flasher and drag the firmware image that you downloaded (ends with .bin) over to the 770Flasher. It will tell you a suitable USB device wasn’t found, and that’s when you press the power button to turn the device on. It should then begin flashing your N900, and again, when you see the normal desktop on the device, it’s safe to disconnect.

Note that Nokia also releases updates to Maemo devices OTA, using SSU (Seamless Software Update). This will show as a small orange box blinking in your tray, and will update different parts of your device, without the need for a computer and without erasing any of your data.

How did these steps work for you?

Related Posts

• Nokia N900 Review: Things I Love
• Nokia N900 Preview: Things I Hate
• Nokia Will Likely Only Have One Maemo Device In 2010
• Dell Now Shipping N900 Pre-Orders
• What Do You Love About Your N900?

So it is possible

Firefox for Mobile Following mobile Firefox nightly builds - http://stechz.com/2009... November 16 from Benjamin Stover's Blog - Comment - Like

I’ve been using Dabr on the Nokia N900 for my Twitter needs, but I stumbled upon a better web app called Hahlo. There’s no need to download anything since it’s accessible through the web browser. I’m surprised at the features it offers like auto-refresh, inline photos, inline replies, tweets near me, OAuth login, and more.

You don’t even need to read this review since you can quickly head over to the site from your current browser to see for yourself. I’ll highlight the 6 things I love about Hahlo.

#1 If a tweet is a reply to another, pressing “in reply to” shows the reply on the same page.

#2 Tweets with photos like twitpics or flickr are shown.

#3 I can choose how often my timeline automatically refreshes and new tweets become highlighted for a moment.

#4 Access to more options like tweets near me, trends, and advanced search.

#5 It’s customizable. Settings allow you to hide/show or turn on/off features.

#6 Options to retweet, reply, favorite, or direct message by clicking on a tweet.

Hahlo is a great example of how we really don’t need to install applications to get what we want. The browser is a powerful all-in-one app. It looks great on the Nokia N900.

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I’ve posted a couple of deal alerts for the Nokia N900 and we again have another deal that knocks $50 more off of the device so you can pre-order now on Amazon for $509.99, after $50 rebate. I canceled my preorders from Amazon and Newegg a couple of times as I wait until the device is actually closer to release and with the price drops we are seeing this may turn out to be the best strategy. Picking up the N900 for $510 is excellent, but I think I may continue to hold out since I have the evaluation device until January and may see it get down even further by then.

If you have already preordered this at Amazon, then it looks like the rebate will apply to your existing purchase since the rebate is valid until 31 December. Great news for prospective N900 owners. If you preordered with Newegg or another source, you may want to jump back over to Amazon now.

UPDATE: A reader stated this rebate is also available on Newegg so you may get this with a pre-order there too.

Firefox for Mobile Vigils of the URL - http://stechz.com/2009... November 17 from Benjamin Stover's Blog - Comment - Like

Firefox for Mobile Watch Firefox for Maemo (Beta 5) in Action - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2009... November 17 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

I've just came back from N900 meetup held in London tonight, 17th of November 2009 that is. There are few things I'd like to point out.
Read more »

According to folks over at ElectricPig, the world’s number two browser, is rapidly rolling out its plans to invade the mobile space and is trying to get latest version of its mobile browser in shape to finally leave beta status in December.

In recent weeks, Mozilla has released a number of enhancements, new features, significantly improved performance, new logo and replace the code name (Fennec) with a well known Firefox brand.

Mozilla’s user-experience lead for Fennec, Madhava Enros, told to ElectricPig that final version of the browser will bring an improved overall user experience and drop the beta tag.. .. .

Nokia has (allegedly) officially spoken up (albeit at a Maemo-only event) about its plans for Maemo to take over new Nseries models by 2012, reports Ben Smith over at TRMP. According to the Nokia representatives at the event, although further Nseries Symbian-powered smartphones will appear in the meantime, it seems that after 2012, Symbian OS will power the new Xseries and Eseries smartphones and Maemo 5 will power the eye-candy-heavy Nseries top end. Of course, IF that is to happen, there's an awful lot of work needed by the Maemo team - watch for our analysis here both on All About Symbian and All About Maemo. Updated: Nokia official statement on the report below.

The statement that Nokia is moving from Symbian to Maemo for high end Nseries devices is no surprise to anyone, especially after we have seen how powerful and capable a device like the Nokia N900 can be. This is the first time we have heard someone official publicly state this and keep in mind this was someone from the Maemo team. I think it makes perfect sense that Symbian lives on in the Eseries and other mid to low end devices while the more capable Maemo is targeted to the high end/geek enthusiast market.

There will still be Symbian-based Nseries devices for the next couple of years and I imagine we will see capacitive touchscreens and more very cool features and functions added to these Symbian Nseries devices in 2010 and 2011. Two years in the mobile space is a long time so we will see how things shake out.

The other day I was dreading having to get photos of everyone of my contacts so I can have nice pictures of everyone instead of the standard no image icon. I forgot to get my photos off my old phone so I would have to take photos of everyone again. I really hated doing that, I remembered seeing a post on t.m.o a week or two ago about using Facebook profile photos, since most of my friends use Facebook this would work great for me.

I found the post very easily using the new power search on t.m.o. It uses a Google custom search to search the entire maemo.org domain. More on that in another post maybe, like I said I found it real quick and it seems there are several people working on ways I decided to try out Hermes since it sounded like what I wanted to do and the developer of it said it worked great.

Hermes is one of those applications that just works and works well. You just open it up tell it where to get your contact photos from Facebook or Twitter. Facebook has to open a web page for you to authorize Hermes to use it. I’m not sure how Twitter authorizes since I haven’t tried it.

Once you have you details in you tell it to Retrieve your contacts info and it goes and and searchs for the missing information. It will automatticly link some of your contacts with the Facebook/Twitter contacts using personal information, the ones it doesn’t auto link up you can go in and mannually tell Hermes which Phone contact is which Facebook contact. I had to do that with my wife’s Facebook contact, its no real big issue and I would rather manually select who was who then have it putting the wrong information in. That is really all there is to it your done. You can go back later and Refresh the contacts information in case some stuff changes. I really recommend this application if you use Facebook or Twitter.

It’s a good day for Nokia N900 fans as we just received word (check out the press release) that the N900 is now shipping to consumers in the US. I can’t wait to start hearing from more of you when you get the device in hand and if you have any questions or need help, then please leave a comment and we’ll try to work together to figure this amazing device out.

“Consumers from every segment of the population are looking for more out of their mobile device – more power, more ability, more connectivity. The Nokia N900 ushers in a new era with a very powerful mobile computer,” said Alessandro Lamanna, Vice President, Retail Sales, Nokia. “With an open source operating system, incorporated technology like an OMAP processor, and real time web widgets, the Nokia N900 delivers the experience of a pocketable computer that has the information you’re looking for right there waiting for you thanks to the ability to be connected just about anywhere.”

Feel free to report when your device ships and from what online vendor. I saw that Amazon still shows the N900 as a pre-order, but their system may not be updated yet.

The first Nseries device to use the Maemo operating system was the N800 Internet Tablet, which I still have. The N900 is the first Maemo-powered Nseries device to have a built-in SIM card slot and cellular phone capabilities (ignoring VOIP, of course), and according to a Maemo representative at an N900 meetup last night, it won’t be the last. Ben Smith of The Really Mobile Project is reporting that Nokia will phase Symbian out of its iconic Nseries product line, replacing that with Maemo.

The move will reportedly be gradual, starting now and working itself out over the next 2 years, so that in 2012, all Nseries devices will be powered by Maemo. Symbian will be relegated to the Eseries and Xseries smartphones, so as not to be totally forgotten.

This is a major move for Nokia, who has historically only released a single Maemo-powered device at one time, typically around 12 months apart. However, the company normally launches five or more Nseries devices each year, and I personally hope they continue that trend with the Maemo-powered Nseries devices in the pipeline.

Certainly this is good news for the Maemo community, as well. The Nseries line is Nokia’s cream of the crop (with notable exceptions like the N81 and N96), representing the ultimate mobile device and technology. Gradually introducing Maemo into an entire product family is a big deal, and I’m definitely excited to see the improvements that this move is guaranteed to bring to Maemo.

Related Posts

• Nokia Will Likely Only Have One Maemo Device In 2010
• Guide To Maemo Apps For Symbian Converts
• If You Love Ovi, You’ll Hate The N900
• Nokia Is Now Shipping The N900 To Retailers
• Nokia N900 Preview First Impressions

Nokia today announced that the highly anticipated Nokia N900 is now on sale in the United States and shipping to consumers who jumped on the opportunity to be among the first to pre-order the Maemo-powered mobile computer. With the Linux-based Maemo platform and with multiple ways to connect to the Internet, the Nokia N900 enables users to be online as it happens with a powerful computer in the palm of their hands.

“Consumers from every segment of the population are looking for more out of their mobile device – more power, more ability, more connectivity. The Nokia N900 ushers in a new era with a very powerful mobile computer,” said Alessandro Lamanna, Vice President, Retail Sales, No... .. .

It looks like the Maemo marketing team at the Nokia N900 London meetup got a little excited and said something they shouldn’t have. Ben Smith from The Really Mobile Project wrote that the team revealed on Wednesday that Nokia plans to drop Symbian from the Nseries line of devices in favour of Maemo by 2012. I’ve reached out to Nokia for comment and they say that the speculations are “completely premature.”

This is the official response from Nokia’s corporate communications,

“While it is our policy not to disclose details of our product roadmap, we’d like to explicitly communicate that we remain firmly committed to Symbian as our smartphone platform of choice. Any speculation on what our 2012 roadmap, including operating systems and product branding, are completely premature.

As we have stated earlier, Nokia has multiple platforms to serve different purposes and address different markets. Symbian is more successful than ever in bringing smartphones to the masses. Maemo is our software of choice for devices based on technology that you’d typically find inside a desktop computer. It delivers a different user experience and enables us to widen the market we can address.”

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Firefox for Mobile Windows Mobile and the open web - http://stechz.com/2009... November 18 from Benjamin Stover's Blog - Comment - Like

Want to know what all this fuss about Maemo is about?

http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo-Barcelona_Long_Weekend

December 4-6 at Citilab Cornellà!

Incoming reports in the last weeks As I’m quite busy with the normal “Triaging and Syncing” business already (as seen above, a first increase of bug reports happened right after Maemo Summit in week 41, but I expect way busier times ahead) Karsten concentrates on technical stuff. It’s good to have him back as now stuff [...]

Hey all,

Yesterday we started to see some announcements of companies backing Enlightenment Foundation Libraries development. Of course, INdT was pioneer in that since it was decided to use it for Canola2. Later on I created my own company and we officially support EFL as GUI alternative (together with Clutter, GTK and Qt), being the first company to do that.

While there are speculations about which company is it, what I can assure you is that this company is serious and is not alone. ProFUSION itself worked on EFL on behalf of various clients and you may expect another press release about a big French internet and telecom company deploying a massive number of units with EFL pre-installed. Not accounting various community driven projects that choose it and E17 as its base platform, such as OpenMoko and OpenInkpot.

Bottom line? While EFL does not get the same amount of marketing and visibility as Qt and GTK counterparts, it is playing fine enough to be considered to ship in dozen million devices in the next year. Why don’t you consider it for your project? Be open minded and try it out

Some time ago I start a new implementation of a Ogre OpenGLES render system, to get this running in the future on Maemo devices, I finished this but never get a chance to see this working on Maemo. But now the things have changed and the new Maemo device already have support to OpenGLES, and my code was merged in Ogre mainline, I can go back and start the test but first I need update this to OpenGLES 2.0 because the old code is implemented on OpenGLES 1.0. I will keep you updated about the news and I hope show some videos :D.



Ogre OpenGL render system: http://ogre.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/ogre/trunk/RenderSystems/GLES/src/

Pinch Media, who provide analytic software for developers on Apple's phones, are estimating that piracy rates are as high as 60% on the iPhone (reports Pocket Gamer). You can be sure that this number is matched on Symbian, Windows Mobile other mobile platforms. The level of piracy nowadays is incredibly high. Apple's iPhone may be pointed out here, but a little bit of exploration online and every games console can be found to be exploited. Read on for my thoughts, though.

It’s funny the turns Life takes.

Today I found some time and played with Maemo 5 SDK. As I am one of those who do not like Scratchbox I used official image for VirtualBox. After boot I landed in GNOME session of Ubuntu 8.10 and after few moments I got Maemo 5 started thanks to instructions from forum.

Ok, so let’s test it. As official release notes mentioned Polish translation I switched to it. What I saw was disaster… And the problem is that latest firmware has same version available. Examples:

Note: I did system update by using “apt-get update;apt-get upgrade” followed by “fakeroot dpkg --configure -a” (because sbox root ‘emulation’ was too weak for “libosso-abook”). As a result translation “6.0+r7250+0m5″ were installed (”calendar-l10n-plpl” package). Scary, isn’t it?

Next thing which I looked at was instant messaging — which I was not able to use since there was no Jabber support. It has ICQ, Gadu-Gadu, MSN, Sametime, Salut, QQ, Groupwise, Google Talk, AIM, Yahoo but no Jabber. I even installed “telepathy-extras” but that added me yet another MSN and still no Jabber… Probably other package needs to be installed but why it has to be? OK, maybe SDK image does not contain same packages as device one but why it supports such poor thing like Gadu-Gadu out-of-box?

Contacts app is improved when compared to Maemo4 one — finally something closer to application which I described some time ago in other post. Has some bugs (I can not enter “+48123456789″ as number because only digits are available (and ‘p’ for internal numbers).

Looks like there will be a long list of things to report as bugs when/if I will get my N900 (so far it is somewhere in deep nowhere). Why not reporting them now? Simple — I want to be able to check them on device itself.

Other things I will check next time. Now it is time to sleep.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Played a bit with Maemo 5 SDK was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Nokia N800 emulation
2. Nokia N900 discount
3. Localizing Maemo

If you left your name and phone number with the Nokia flagship store in New York for the Nokia N900 waiting list, they have started contacting those on the list to go buy it at the store. It’s being sold for $569 plus NY tax. Unfortunately, I was told on the phone tonight that it’s not available for sale to the public because the waiting list is already full.

Here’s a couple of photos from lefteyecc of Talk Maemo who happened to pick one up today from the NY store.

I couldn’t call the Chicago store before they closed to find out if they’re doing the same thing. It’s good to know this long-awaited device is now slowly trickling out to the sales channels. It shouldn’t be long until other retailers like Amazon to get their shipment.

Let us know if you also got your Nokia N900 today!

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• Nokia N900 Available at Nokia NY Flagship Store… For Play
• Nokia/S60 Users Meetup at NY Flagship Store September 18th
• Paid Apps in Danger at Ovi Store for Nokia N900

Firefox for Mobile Fennec Quality Update – The Team MOQA Effect - http://ahdesai.wordpress.com/2009... November 19 from ahdesai » Mozilla - Comment - Like

After a few unexpected delays, we have finally set a time and date for the DFW Nokia N900 Meetup! If you’ve never been to a meetup, it’s just a gathering of sorts of nerds like us, talking about and obsessing over our favorite gadgets. This meetup will be focused around the Nokia N900, and we’ll have at least 2 of them on hand, perhaps more (still working on that). It’s free to attend, but I do need to get a count of how many to expect, so an RSVP is required.

The DFW Nokia N900 Meetup will take place on Wednesday, November 25, at 630pm, and go until 830pm (though you’re welcome to stay later). I realize this is Thanksgiving Eve, but it was the only time that worked, so hopefully you can make it. We’ll be gathering at Champps in Las Colinas, located at 855 West John W. Carpenter Freeway, Irving, TX 75039. A big thanks goes out to Nokia WOM World, who is helping out by providing appetizers and munchies for us. Drinks are on you.

If you’re in the area, please come by to check out the Nokia N900. We’ll have access to an HDTV that we can test the TV-out functionality on, and there should be WiFi in the restaurant, as well.

Please click here to RSVP.

Related Posts

• First User N900 Meetup In San Francisco October 29th
• Nokia N900 Meetups Taking Place Soon
• Witter Brings More Twitter Features To Maemo 5
• Nokia N900 Gets Disassembled On Video
• Nokia N900 Review: Things I Love

A Maemo bottle of water

My Symbian based Nokia E66 phone has Ovi Maps installed so one day I decided to make use of routing function in it when I was driving to the town (on a road where I did not needed to be guided). BT headset on ear, paired with phone and let’s drive.

At start road was selected quite properly, the problems started later. Many times it was recalculating route (the funniest was when I stopped at traffic lights it recalculated route and then made it again after driving for 5 meters). Directions changes information were also distracting: “on 200m go left” then “go right” when I reached point. Or “go left,right” when it was straight road or when I had to turn right at crossing.

I have to admit that after two tries I totally gave up on driving with it and switched back to TomTom device. But there is one good thing in Ovi Maps — it works quite good for walk navigation. I used it in many cities abroad and it handled. I hope that Maemo5 version will work at least that good as Symbian one.

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz Driving with Ovi Maps was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Online map services and routing
2. Car navigation with N810
3. Nokia N900 discount

Browsing the talk.maemo.org boards today, I came across a fun request from user Timsamoff. It seems W+K, Nokia, Lcuk, and Tim are trying to put together a library of video footage of the Maemo community. They’re looking to get N900 users to put together a short video sharing what they like most about their N900s. Apparently, these videos will be used for something really cool, though we’re not being told just what – yet.

You can see all of the submitted videos on Vimeo, to get an idea of what they’re looking for. Tim’s also given a few rules/suggestions, like these:

Record one more video where you answer the following question:

“What is your favourite feature on the N900 and why?”

DO

• Do shoot it in front of a fixed camera or webcam.
• Do talk directly to camera.
• Do hold the phone.
• Do make sure that what you are saying is audible.
• Do talk about why you like whatever particular feature.

DON’T

• Don’t try to show the feature on the phone. Just hold it.
• Don’t move the camera around. It should be a fixed shot.

Once you’ve recorded your video, you’ll need to send Tim a PM on the talk.maemo.org boards (so you’ll need an account there, which you should have, anyways). He’ll then give you the login information to upload your video to the Vimeo account.

What is your favorite thing about the Nokia N900? I’ll submit my video soon, and will add it to this post so you can see what I like the best.

Related Posts

• Vagalume Update Brings Last.FM To The N900
• Witter Brings More Twitter Features To Maemo 5
• Nokia N900 Gets Disassembled On Video
• Nokia N900 Review: Things I Love
• Nokia N900 Preview: Things I Hate

Firefox for Mobile Product Shots of Firefox on N900 - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2009... November 20 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

GUPnP AV 0.5.2

Changes since 0.5.1:

- Add a missing NULL check.
- Fix a potential leak of xmlDoc.
- Register a (g)type for GUPnPSearchCriteriaOp for better gtk-doc and
 vala-gen-introspect support.
- Fix docs for GUPnPSearchCriteriaParser::expression.
- Fix parsing of SearchCriteria strings: Closing parenthesis doesn't imply end
 of SearchCriteria expression.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 

Download source tarball from here.

GUPnP Vala 0.6.2

Changes since 0.6:

- Remove bogus type_argument from gupnp metadata.
- No need for custom bindings for SearchCriteriaParser.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require vala >= 0.7.8.
- Require and adapt to gupnp-av >= 0.5.2.

Bugs fixed:

1850 - Vapi for ServiceAction.get_message is wrong

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 

Download source tarball from here.

Rygel 0.4.6 (They've Got a Secret)

Brief summary of changes since 0.4.4:

- Implement optional UPnP Search action. This is not only a must have feature
 for a commercial MediaServer but is also a big first step towards proper
 XBox 360 support.
- Simplify Browse action handling.
- Simplify MediaServer plugin implementation.
- Make sure autostart dir exists before attempting to write to it.
- Fix a potential crash that is trigered by MediaContainer reporting incorrect
 (higher) number of children.
- External:
 - Work around (vala) bug#602003.
 - Optimizations and code clean-ups.
- Tracker:
 - Provide an efficient Search implementation using Tracker's search API.
 - Minor code clean-ups.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.2.
- Require gupnp-vala >= 0.6.2.
- Require valac >= 0.7.9.

Bugs fixed in this release:

600256 - Segfault when trying to access a stream

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 

Download source tarball from here.

For those interested in UPnP/DLNA on Maemo and happen to miss Maemo summit, here is the video of my talk. You'll notice that slide screen is only half visible but that is not really a problem since you can access the slides here.

I've been discussing this idea with a few key contributors over the past few days to make sure it's realistic and feasible. We've polished it and would like to ask for volunteers for a new Maemo Weekly News digest.

I've been discussing this idea with a few key contributors over the past few days to make sure it's realistic and feasible. We've polished it and would like to ask for volunteers for a new Maemo Weekly News digest.

Couple days ago I posted a video example of the MVC-model running on N900. Someone asked me that how did I do that thing and I believe that the question was about how to react on orientation changes in Qt application on N900. If you are not familiar with Qt D-Bus Module it’s worth to read [...]

I had the Nokia N900 meetup a couple weeks ago and had 6 people show up to play with the device and chat about Nokia products. Since that time a few more review devices showed up and I have LOTS of cool devices in hand. I will be showing them off and giving people a chance to play with them next Tuesday, 24 November, from 7 to 9 pm on the Microsoft campus. I will have the following devices to show off:

• HTC HD2
• Samsung Behold II Google Android device
• T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold 9700
• HTC Hero GSM model
• Nokia N900
• Nokia N97 mini
• FC Sounders custom Zune Original Zune HD.

I also learned that my friend from many years ago, Dale Coffing, will be there show off some things.  The CEO of Pharos Science and Applications, James Oyang, will be showing some of the latest Pharos GPS gadgetry. It is going to be a great time with some awesome folks and the latest and greatest devices. Please respond on the Facebook event page so we can estimate how many will be there.

Everybody who has seen the n900 with english/generic keyboard thinks all keyboards will have arrow keys. Well, they don't. And this sucks big time for any gaming applications, as they cannot assume that keyboard has specific direction keys that would actually work. In most of the keyboards, there are only left and right keys. While up and down are behind fn+left/right.

Only thing we can really do to fix this 'great kb layout design' is in my opinion:
Forget that we ever even had the arrow keys and start using the usual WASD combo for the default direction controls. And to balance the AB,XY buttons, we should probably use the I,O,K,L buttons. All of these buttons are the same in all kb layouts that I know. This is a pretty balanced layout, but again, not so easy to discover. Grr.. I hate the kb layout mistake that we made. Sane solution would have been to move the extra letters behind fn key.

Otoh, I have finnish kb on the device, but I have switched to english layout so that I can have a sane d keys on the device. But it feels confusing.

On a whole different note, I just read an interesing articles on DUI, the UI frameworks of Harmattan written by Zchydem:

Part one:
http://zchydem.enume.net/?p=128
Part two:
http://zchydem.enume.net/?p=149

I'm eagerly waiting for part three.

We are also preparing for a small update for the N900 owners to come really soon, which is going to keep me busy next week in preparation of it. Let's see when we can deliver it to you guys. After we have released that, I'll start blogging a bit more on what is up for the end of the year update and what is brewing for the other near future updates.

At GCDS Jamie told us that he wants to make a plugin for tracker-store that writes all the triplets to a CouchDB instance.

Letting a CouchDB be a sort of offline backup isn’t very interesting. You want triples to go into the CouchDB at the moment of guaranteed storage: at commit time.

For the purpose of developing this we provide the following internal API.

typedef void (*TrackerStatementCallback) (const gchar *graph,
                                          const gchar *subject,
                                          const gchar *predicate,
                                          const gchar *object,
                                          GPtrArray   *rdf_types,
                                          gpointer     user_data);
typedef void (*TrackerCommitCallback)    (gpointer     user_data);

tracker_data_add_insert_statement_callback (TrackerStatementCallback callback,
                                            gpointer                 user_data);
tracker_data_add_delete_statement_callback (TrackerStatementCallback callback,
                                            gpointer                 user_data);
tracker_data_add_commit_statement_callback (TrackerCommitCallback callback,
                                            gpointer              user_data);

You’ll need to make a plugin for tracker-store and make the hook at the initialization of your plugin.

Current behaviour is when graph is NULL, it means that the default graph is being used. If it’s not NULL, it means that you probably don’t want the data in CouchDB: it’s data that’s coming from a miner. You probably only want to store data that is coming from the user. His applications won’t use FROM and INTO for their SPARQL Update queries, meaning that graph is NULL.

Very important is that your callback handler works with bottom halves: put your expensive task on a queue and handle the queued item somewhere else. You can for example use a GThreadPool or a GQueue plus a g_idle_add_full with G_PRIORITY_LOW callback picking items one by one on the mainloop. You should never have a TrackerStatementCallback or a TrackerCommitCallback that blocks. Not even a tiny tiny bit of blocking: it’ll bring everything in tracker-store on its knees. It’s why we aren’t giving you a public plugin API with a way to install your own plugins outside of the Tracker project.

By the way: we want to see code instead of talk before we further optimize things for this purpose.

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-11-16 through 2009-11-22

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-11-16 through 2009-11-22

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-11-16 through 2009-11-22

Nokia said last week that the Nokia N900 had begun shipping to retailers around the world, though of course that doesn’t instantly mean they’ll be available to you, the average consumer. There have been sightings around the net of various status of pre-orders, specifically those from Amazon.com, but we now have confirmation from reader @bdogg64 that his Nokia N900, which he pre-ordered from Dell, has already shipped.

You can see the confirmation below, clearly showing that his N900 will arrive shortly!

Is yours shipping, too? If so, where did you order it from?

Related Posts

• Nokia Is Now Shipping The N900 To Retailers
• Nokia N900 Pre-Order Drops To $582 On Amazon
• Pre-Order Your Nokia N900 Now
• Vagalume Update Brings Last.FM To The N900
• Witter Brings More Twitter Features To Maemo 5

Wow! Just after my last week post about companies supporting EFL, we were pleased with two more announcements:

• Ardy, a tool that brings together EFL and Arduino using Python
• Free.fr, the second biggest ISP in France opened up the development of their Freebox HD set-top box using Enlightenment Foundation Libraries and Mozilla JavaScript library. This is pretty amazing as it’s the biggest deployment of EFL out there, an uncertain number that ranges from 2 to 3 million devices.

Nokia Conversations have been producing 30-second videos to highlight some features of the Nokia N900. If you haven’t seen them, I’ve collected them below:

How to keep it stuffed with the best apps

Multi-tasking pub window showdown

Streaming online video to big TV

Facebook video sharing and playback

Audio and video podcasts made easy

e-coach sport buddy in action

Phone calls and data monitoring skills

Stop motion mini movie battery test

Geotagging and sharing photos online

Custom backgrounds and organizing your desktops

Broadcasting live streaming video with QIK app

Playing nice with Ovi Files and Apple Mac

Motion control and touchscreen gaming

Enhancing your contacts with Hermes App

Subscribe and read RSS feeds

Instant messaging made easy

Eccentric accelerometer apps

Talking clock talktime challenge

Juggling heavyweight tasks

Blogging on the move made easy

Enhance your music with song lyrics

Scientist survival pack

Maemo web browser talents

Facebook & Twitter status updates made easy

Pocket weather station

View important docs on the go

Sketch and send an e-card

Pocket cookbook

With more than 450 million Skype users worldwide, the integration of Skype on Nokia N900 is a significant step in bringing converged Internet experiences from the desktop to the world's most advanced smartphone.

As you may have laready know, the Nokia N900 has Skype built-in – it’s totally integrated into the phone’s operating system, with no extra downloads required. You can make free Skype-to-Skype calls and IM on 3G or WiFi, and call phones abroad at great, low rates.

Skype on the N900 also comes with multiple accounts support but as of now video calls over Skype are not supported but they are promi.... .. .

If you're one of those who can't wait (we can't blame you; most of us feel the same way) to get your hands on hottest Nokia device during the last couple of years, here's some good news!

Nokia's N900 support site is online now which basically means that final version of the user manual is available for you to download and go through. Beside the user manual, support pages include detailed specifications, Interactive Demonstrations, PC and phone software as well as useful tips and tricks and detailed FAQ section.

You can learn how to Personalise your Nokia N900, how to switch between running applications , how to set up your email in moments, add tags to your ph... .. .

Power Twitter is a browser add-on that adds inline YouTube, Flickr, TwitPic, all sorts of playable/viewable media to the twitter.com interface. It also features link expansion to preview the link’s page title. Power Twitter makes the official Twitter page better, so read on to find out how to install on the Nokia N900.

If you don’t have a Nokia N900 yet, you can still see how Power Twitter works by installing it on Firefox on your computer.

You can also watch this video in HD on Youtube. Subscribe to the channel to preview the latest videos before they get published on the blog.

Steps

1. Install Greasemonkey-webaddon. It’s currently in the Extras-Devel repository.

2. Restart the Nokia N900. I’m not sure if it’s necessary, but I had to restart my device in order to install the script on the next step.

3. Install Power Twitter script for Greasemonkey from powertwitter.me.

4. Open twitter.com with the Nokia N900’s browser. There should now be a link to the Power Twitter settings on the lower right corner. Login with your Twitter account and check/uncheck options based on your preference.

5. That’s it! Thanks to Alan “Qole” Bruce for the tip.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• How to Tether Nokia N900 To Mac OS X Snow Leopard Via Bluetooth
• How To View Ovi Store Content For Nokia N900 From Your Desktop Computer
• Video How to: Install .deb Files on Nokia N900
• Witter For Nokia N900 Updated to 0.1.1-9 – Twitter App Steadily Improving

Some time ago Nokia offered discounts for their newest tablet: N900 for about two hundred people which were active in Maemo community. For European ones the price is more or less 250€ which looks nice compared to original price which is ~600€.

But there is one nasty part in it — devices have just one week of warranty. What can be checked during that time? Dead pixels?

Situation got more strange when I looked at Maemo forum where people lists misc discounts which they found on the Internet… For example Dell had one for $442 which makes it just a bit more expensive then DDP ones but gives you normal warranty.

This is weird — developers and active people from community gets worse offer then normal users. And additionally all DDP orders are marked as “Critical” which probably is other way of saying “ignore as long as possible” because tomorrow there will be two weeks since I ordered N900 in DDP and all I got was locking of 250€ on my credit card and nothing more.

Previous developer programs were better at handling users (at least that is what I hear from people which were part of it).

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz DDP — does it has any sense? was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Discounted Devices Program: N900
2. Nokia N900 discount
3. Things to check with Nokia N900

A friend was over on Sunday. His iPhone rang, and he took a call. After the call, I showed him the loaner N900 that I have. After playing with the media player, multi-tasking, desktop, and liking the 'call type' selector, he commented: "This is sick! It's like a Mobile Computer".

To which I replied "Precisely".

Today the PySide team released a new version of project, with full support for Qt 4.6, including QtMultimedia.



Another great news is support for Mac OS X. The first working package have already been released and you can download it from PySide website.


A package for Fremantle is coming :D

After getting the great news that Canonical would sponsor me for the Lucid Lynx developer summit in Dallas, I wanted to let people know about our book and the good reviews we are getting and find out what we could look forward to in the mobile world for this next LTS release.

One of the greatest thing in Qt has always been a sophisticated layout management. There are actually two different layout systems in Qt: a layout management for QWidget based widgets and a layout management for QGraphicsWidget based widgets. This article will focus on the latter one, but the basic idea in both layout management systems [...]

With the Long Weekend just a little more than one week away, I though about doing some experiments with gPodder's UI. Some users want a quicker way to play/download/delete episodes instead of opening the shownotes window and using its application menu. Here's one approach I tried out today (I know the icons are pixellated and ugly - please consider them as placeholders):

The idea is that you click on an episode, and instead of opening the shownotes view, you get this selection screen where you can choose to play/download/delete the episode or view the shownotes. Of course there have to be some fancy animations, because that's what all the cool kids do today. Just watch the video on YouTube and tell me what you think in the comments here (especially in terms of non-standard UI and annying animations - seriously ;).

In unrelated news, headphoned 1.4 for N800/N810 has been released and pushed to Maemo Extras with support for Panucci and MPlayer for all your "public transport situation" avoidance needs.

Firefox for Mobile Fennec is Now Optified - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 24 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

As you may have already know, Nokia N900 comes equipped with the build in FM transmitter so you can use it to listen to your favourite tunes through any FM stereo receiver.

This transmitter can modulate the audio frequency signal to FM signal (88 -108.0 MHz) and wirelessly connects phone to your car or home stereo quickly and easily using FM radio waves.

Why shuffle through stacks of CDs and tapes to find the song you want in the car when you can wireless access to your entire phone library? N900’s FM transmitter gives your car stereo great-sounding and basically all you need to do is to tune your car stereo or recei... .. .

The KOffice team is very happy to announce version 2.1.0 of KOffice, 6 months after the platform release 2.0.0. This release brings general improvements in the maturity of the individual applications as well as a number of new features such as the ability to run on the Nokia N900.

The advantages of the clean and well-structured codebase have started to show. Despite a relatively limited developer group, there are a large number of improvements over 2.0. During the development of 2.1

Import and export of foreign file formats have been given an overhaul, and especially the import filters for Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt) and Word (.doc) have been much improved. This is mainly result of the work done for the Nokia n900 Office viewers.... .. .

You have got new N900 but having hard time which ring tone to choose for your device and the songs you have are not suitable length and are not looping? Think no more, here is the solution:

Firefox for Mobile Fennec – Nightly Maemo Updates - http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog... November 25 from Mark Finkle's Weblog » Mozilla - Comment - Like

Recently there was a lot of noise regarding the new coolest guy on the street: Google Chrome OS. I was traveling and just today I could read all my feeds, emails and put everything on the right place

I am obviously a big fan of Nokia devices or I would not be writing for this site and in the spirit of Thanksgiving I wanted to write about the things that I appreciate about these devices and why I am thankful I have them in my life. I also wanted to say thank you to the awesome people at Nokia that I have worked with over the years, including Molly, Ray, Mark, Charley, and Joe. I am also blessed to call Rafe Blandford, from All About Symbian, my good friend and mentor. I have never met anyone as knowledgeable about the Symbian platform as Rafe and always enjoy hanging out and chatting with him. Dieter Bohn also deserves a big thank you for giving me the opportunity to create and run the Nokia Experts site. I have a passion for Nokia devices and am blessed to be able to share some of that with you all through Nokia Experts.

Firefox for Mobile Go Add-ons…It’s Your Birthday…Go Add-ons - http://missmobile.wordpress.com/2009... November 25 from Missmobile's Blog - Comment - Like

With the Nokia N900, Nokia threw a lifeline out to its many fanboys who were disappointed with the ‘flagship’ N97’s initial performance. However, most of these fanboys – myself included – are familiar with Symbian applications, but have no experience in this new ‘Maemo’ operating system. As such, we’ve put together this guide to help Symbian converts find the right Maemo applications to duplicate the functionality of their beloved Symbian applications. Note, also, some Symbian features that require an application are actually built-in on Maemo, which makes things easier.

Nokia is facing the unenviable task of telling to their suppliers that company’s first Maemo 5 powered phone has been delayed due the overwhelming demand and that they will not be receiving units until December 4th!

Situation is totally out of control and has reached the point where it has started to impact Nokia’s supply chain; company just can't keep pace with the hype and the number of preorders which not that bad after all, as this is a problem that most companies would love to have.

However, the good news is that pre-order customers will start receiving their devices immediately and the company has promised those orde... .. .

PyGTKEditor is now availaible in fremantle extras-testing repository.

This is the first release for Fremantle. And this is also a complete rewrite from scratch. Right now the syntax hilight parser isn’t really optimized. But it ll be for a next release.

Do not forget to test and vote for it on Maemo Testing QA

Some screenshots :

Features in release 3.0.0 :
• Saveas
• Open
• Help
• Execute
• Close ask when not saved
• Duplicate line
• Add/Remove comment
• Indent/Unindent
• Auto indent
• Search
• About

Available shortcuts
• Ctrl-O : Open file
• Ctrl-S : Save file
• Ctrl-W : Close file
• Ctrl-I : Show file info
• Ctrl-Z : Undo
• Ctrl-Y : Redo
• Ctrl-D : Duplicate Line
• Ctrl-F : Find
• Ctrl-R : Replace
• Ctrl-A : Select All
• Ctrl-E : Execute
• Ctrl-H : Show help

Hilighted “Languages”:
• R
• Ada
• C
• Changelog
• C++
• CSharp
• Desktop (.desktop)
• Css
• Diff (diff)
• Fortran
• Gtkrc
• Haskell
• Html
• Idl
• Ini (.ini)
• Java
• Javascript
• Latex
• Lua
• Makefile
• Markdown
• Msil
• Nemerle
• Octave
• Pascal
• Perl
• Php
• Po
• Python
• Ruby
• Scheme
• Sh
• Tcl
• Texinfo
• Vbnet
• Verilog
• Vhdl
• Xml

The roadmap
• Version 3.0.5 :
◦ Jump to line feature
◦ Welcome screen

• Version 3.1.0 :
◦ Prefs : indent size
◦ Prefs : font and text size
◦ Search and replace feature
◦ Optimization of the syntax hilight parser

• Version 3.3.0 :
◦ Plugins
◦ Snippet

Whoohoo!

We just committed the support for write back in master.

What is it?

Tracker has a limited capability to write metadata back into the data resource. In case of a file that means writing it back into the file. For example writing some of the metadata the user sets using a SPARQL Update back into an MP3 file as ID3 tags.

Which ones do we support already?

Right now the write back capability is under development and only supports a bunch of fields for a few XMP formats (JPEG, PNG and TIFF) and the Title of MP3 files. In near future we will start supporting increasingly more fields.

Documentation?

For people who want to write support for their properties and file formats, read the documentation.

Party like it’s 2009!

After some weeks using extras-testing and as the first people have the devices in their hands, one complain I heard is, that the documentation on how to use extras-testing might be not sufficient for some users. This is the reason for this little overview with questions and answers around the testing repository, hoping that this will help and promote the testing activity a bit.

Why testing the applications?
A nice description about the testing-process you can find in the wiki.

Which kind of places are there to get applications and what is the difference?

There exist three different community driven repositories:

• extras:
  This is the place where the end-user can find applications, which are ready and tested.
• extras-testing:
  Here are applications, which might have some issues and should not be for the real end-user usage. Applications you find here are meant to be proofed by experienced users, to ensure their quality or find possible blockers. This could be you, but be aware of possible risks.
• extras-devel:
  Applications you find here are just meant for people who know what they are doing. They can be in pre-alpha status and should not be installed by normal end-users. You should know what you are doing by enabling this repository.

I’m aware of what I’m doing now, but what are the first steps, if I want to test an application?

After creating a backup, add the extras-testing repository. Therefore open the Application Manager and follow these steps:

1. Open the menu and click on “Application Catalogues”

2. Add the extras-testing repository (Web address: http://repository.maemo.org/extras-testing)

3. If you have the  extras-devel repository enabled, disable it with the “Disabled” checkbox to check possible dependency issues:

Now I can start testing, but what to look for?

Besides the obvious problems like battery drain, crashes, performance etc. you can find here a good summary of what you should look at, if you want to test applications.

I have reached an opinion about the application, but how to continue?

1. It is necessary to have an account on maemo.org. If you don’t have already one, you can register here.

2. You find the QA queue of applications, which are in extras-testing here. Find the application you just have tested and vote for it!

I hope this makes the testing-process a bit clearer and activates the people, who are able to help to join the group of testers ;)

Recently I came across this blog post which introduced me to the new multiprocessing module in Python 2.6, a module to execute multiple concurrent processes. It makes parallelizing your programs very easy. The author also provided a smart code snippet that makes using multiprocessing even easier. I studied how the snippet works and I came up with an alternative solution which is in my opinion very elegant and easy to read. I’m so excited about the new possibilities provided by this module that I had to spread the word. But first, off to some background.

The usual way to do rotation to portrait mode in Maemo 5 is to set special flags on a window and let the window manager rotate our window and relayout after the switch. It's not as fast as it could be, and task switching (even between two portrait mode apps) is only possible by switching to landscape mode. Apart from that, things like the system menu don't work in portrait mode.

For some applications, an alternative could be to stay in landscape mode and simply rotate widgets without the window manager even knowing...

It's probably best described in a short demo video of how a simple media player could look like (sorry for the sloppy video, forgot my digital camera, so the webcam had to act as a replacement) - have a look, and tell me what you think. (For comparison, have a look at the older Panucci rotation video that uses the "normal" way of going into and leaving portrait mode.)

Zachary Goldberg reports:

As I've been mentioning lately I have been working on using PyGObject + GObject Introspection (recently forked, now called PyGI + PyGObject + Gobject Introspection) and have some exciting news!

I have been working on fleshing out a whole bunch of unit tests which exercise the entire GUPnP API. I hate a major roadblock in that PyGI did not support native callbacks! So, after a week or two detour I have implemented PyGI callbacks (which now work rather nicely, but need a bunch of stylistic cleanups and error checking before its pushed back upstream.. priorities!) as well as some working GUPnP demos.

My best demo so far is about 25 lines of python which:

1) Gets all devices on one network interface
2) Scans for all the services each device provides
3) If the device is GMediaRenderer and it provides an AVTransport Service (it does...) then it
3a) Stops whatever is currently playing
3b) Loads a new URI (hardcoded from my mediatomb server for now, havn't played enough with gupnp-av to dynamically get the mediatomb data -- for now!)
3c) Initiates playing

3a->3c have been tested using the synchronous GUPnP action api (send_action...) as well as the asynchronous API (begin_action.... end_action...) with callbacks!

Update: Seems this info is out-dated already, Zach has done quite some more after this.

It has already been reported that Video gaming giant Nintendo is looking into the possibility of copyright infringement over the use of emulators running various Nintendo games on high-end Smartphones and other unauthorized hardware.

As most of you should know by now, Nokia N900 is powerful enough to process and run numerous emulators including, Nintendo's Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, NES and SNES and allows you to easily play numerous oldie Nintendo console based or arcade games directly on your phone as it is clearly shown in the video recently published on official Nokia blog.

Unfortunately, Nokia N900 is unauthorized hardware and according to Nintendo,: Introduction of emulators created to play illegally copied Nintendo software represents the gre... .. .

No, Amazon has still not delivered my N900, which was pre-ordered back in September. But Nokia/WOMWorld made sure Maemo-Freak wouldn't be left out in the cold, and has sent me a loaner device to check out. It arrived at 1:45 pm, right after I returned from walking my dog, and it has kept my attention ever since.

I've officially had the device just a few minutes, but I'm totally impressed across the board with this beast. It is all I expected and more. I have to spend some private time with the N900 to learn all of its strengths and weaknesses, so I may become scarce for the next few days, but will keep everyone pos.... .. .

Firefox for Mobile Fast Flash in Fennec - http://dougt.org/wordpre... November 29 from dougt's blog » mozilla - Comment - Like

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Platform in Bugzilla
2009-11-23 through 2009-11-29

A Quick Look at Maemo Official Applications in Bugzilla
2009-11-23 through 2009-11-29

A Quick Look at Extras in Bugzilla
2009-11-23 through 2009-11-29

One of the biggest complaints that I have about the N900 currently is the lack of portrait mode for applications other than the phone. This is huge because currently, with the device stuck in landscape mode, it’s a two-handed device only. Sure, you can try to use it one-handed, but it’s clearly a terrible experience. Fortunately, Nokia has promised an update that includes at least partial portrait mode support around Christmas, so we’ve not long to wait.

However, if you’re as impatient as I am, you can apparently trick your N900 into portrait mode, as evidenced in the video embedded below. I have not been able to get the bug to work on my N900, but you may have better luck. Essentially, you’re supposed to launch the phone application (via accelerometer), and then slide the keyboard open while the phone is launching, then close the phone app just as quickly as you can.

You’ll notice, however, in the video, that the UI does not fully adjust for portrait mode, as parts of the homescreens do not show up, and various other parts of the UI remain hidden. However, it does give a good idea as to what Maemo 5 in portrait mode will look like. Here’s hoping that they add an onscreen QWERTY keyboard, ala Android, to make entering text in this mode even easier.

[Photo courtesy Guyver95's Ovi Share]

Related Posts

• The Nokia N900 Is Not A Phone
• How Would You Use The N900 In Portrait Mode?
• New Twitter Plugin Integrates With The N900 Phonebook
• Witter Brings More Twitter Features To Maemo 5
• Nokia N900 Preview: Things I Hate

Some of my favorite features on the Nokia N900 are the camera and sharing the media I’ve captured. Well Nokia just released a new video showing how it could be done with a screen that’s larger than a person’s hand! Check it out.

Click to view video

I know they’re just trying to demo the Nokia N900, but this video makes me want a 10 inch Maemo device! View more Maemo videos.

If you enjoyed this article, you might also like...

• Video: Google Maps Mobile on Nokia N900 Web Browser
• Video How to: Install .deb Files on Nokia N900
• Review: Simple Brightness Applet for Nokia N900
• Nokia N900 1-Minute Multitasking Demo

According to Reuters and a source with direct knowledge of Nokia's product roadmap, Finnish mobile-phone giant plans to offer just one new Linux powered smartphone next year but Nokia spokesman refused to comment on the company's future product plans!

Nokia's Linux based operating system is seen as key for Nokia to gain back ground in the coming years, something that market has been waiting for a years, a real game-changer that will help Nokia to finally turn the tide of smartphone war in their favour and many analysts and industry players have expected the firm to roll out numerous Linux models already next year.

Anyway, the first information about the slimmer and keyboard-less variant of the Nokia’s flagship device has made the rounds throughout the internet rum... .. .

Now, I wish this was enabled  in N900 filemanager and mediaplayer music views directly... But in any case, I found a nice little utility called Petrovich that lets you share any individual file with the sharing framework (bluetooth, service plug-ins and email). Nice!

Not that this should really surprise anyone who has been in the Maemo community for a while, but ‘sources close to Nokia’s 2010 roadmap‘ have revealed that there will only be a single Maemo device released in 2010. Of course, this device will likely run Maemo 6, the next version of the Maemo operating system, and will hopefully add some hardware improvements over the N900, such as support for AT&T’s 3G network, perhaps a higher resolution camera, and at the very least a bigger battery.

Don’t forget, though, that this is an un-official rumor – Nokia has not confirmed it, so take it with a grain of salt. However, ever since they first launched the 770 Internet Tablet, Nokia has only released new Maemo-powered hardware roughly every 12-18 months, with the exception of the N810 Wimax edition, though that hardly counts as ‘new’ hardware.

What improvements would you like to see in the next Maemo device?

Related Posts

• Spotify Support Coming To The Nokia N900
• New Twitter Plugin Integrates With The N900 Phonebook
• Witter Brings More Twitter Features To Maemo 5
• Maemo Will Soon Power The Nseries
• If You Love Ovi, You’ll Hate The N900

Now that the N900 is (almost) here, many people ask me if I’m going to release a new version of Vagalume for Maemo 5.

Progress in Vagalume has been very slow this year, partly because of all the work we’ve been doing in Hildon Widgets.

Fortunately, the next Vagalume release will be out very soon. And yes, I know I had already said back in May that it would only take a few weeks, but this time it’s true This version is already working (you can grab the code from the GIT repository and compile it) and here’s a screenshot to prove it (click to enlarge):

And, as I promised back in May, this time it comes with support for Libre.fm.

On another note, this weekend I’m flying to Barcelona for the Maemo-Barcelona Long Weekend.

I’ll talk about GTK and the Maemo 5 UI, and my fellow Igalian Felipe will also be there, explaining how to port GNOME applications to Maemo.

In principle all training sessions are going to be in Spanish, but we’ll be around the whole weekend in case you want to talk to us.

You can see the agenda for the weekend here.

And that’s it for the moment. See you in Barcelona!

It was over eight years ago when I wrote application last time. Since then I had my hands in countless programs, libraries etc. but never wrote something new from scratch. Until recently…

Some time ago Mickey Lauer presented his module player for iPhone. I like the idea and started thinking about creating such one for my devices. After some discussions about Modland music collection with him I started coding.

To make things as simple as possible I used Qt framework with Phonon for playing (GStreamer modplug plugin underneath). Current version maybe is not so beauty but it is usable and works fine. Application will be GPL — I used code from Qt demos, read random snippets of code from other programs etc.

Things already implemented:

• playing local modules
• fetching modules from modland archive
• author/song selection
• playing next song on song end (with looping on author)
• seeking
• volume change (will probably get removed from UI)

Things to do:

• error handling (especially fetching related)
• download progressbar
• playing counters
• favorites
• playlists
• small screen usability (stacked windows/tabs)
• and others…

For readers: what is a real name of Lord Performer? :D

---

All rights reserved © Marcin Juszkiewicz I wrote module player in Qt was originally posted on Marcin Juszkiewicz website

Related posts:

1. Released sources of my Protracker module player
2. Very small test of Maemo media players
3. BUG has arrived

As Andre mentioned, me being back part-time to the technical side of Bugzilla and taking hacking work off his hands already paid off — some minor, yet much needed Bugzilla tweaks finally went live. While Andre can keep fully concentrating on the growing number of community bug reports, due to a growing community.

The first task turned out to also require quite some cleaning-up, fixing and Perl compatibility coding, to get the maintenance branch back into working state. Once I won the fight with SVN, the requested changes were done quickly.

Firefox for Mobile Official Fennec repository available for N900 - http://stechz.com/2009... November 30 from Benjamin Stover's Blog - Comment - Like