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The first ever non-apple application has been allegedly run on the iPhone. The people over at the iPhone DevWiki report. Watch out Nokia 770, soon the iPhone will be as hackable as you are!

At least, some day it will. This user, Nightwatch is using his own arm toolchain, so this isn’t like we have a nice Scratchbox available to install onto debian. But as time moves on, our own apps on the iPhone draw closer and closer.

Nokia must be responding internally to the iPhone mania. The question is, will it be a more advanced smartphone, or a phone enabled internet tablet? Scoble asked around and only got some smiles. Can Nokia really continue to push the Internet Tablet line, sans phone, now that the iPhone has set the bar so high? Nokia has some cool devices, good technology, mature development infrastructure and a lot of community based support and coding efforts. But relying only on wi-fi will not enable a truly mobile communications device. They have something ready to replace the N800. Will they strap a phone onto it? Will they dump Opera for Mozilla or build-out their Webkit browser? That would certainly be in the arena for an iPhone competitor.

For all the committed Nokia users out there, hating the iPhone buzz– if you haven’t seen this page yet, give it a look. Why? ’cause someone thinks that The iPhone is a piece of shit, and so is your face. Perhaps Nokia’s answer to the iPhone is already here, it’s just losing marketing game.

Apple iPhone: ARM CPU @ 667mhz [Samsung], 128Mb ram, 8GB Flash
Nokia N800: ARM CPU @ 320mhz [TI], 128Mb ram, 256Mb Flash

N800 has dual SD cards for more Flash, iPhone has no way to extend the 8Gb. N800 has a bigger screen, higher DPI but doesn’t have the light-touch touch-screen like the iPhone. I’d still consider getting a N800 to replace my 770 if the price drops. I’d like to use ITOS2007 and have Flash 9 available for browsing– especially now since Mozilla has just been released for ITOS2007. We’ll probally never see Flash in the iPhone, but who knows. I just don’t think Apple will do it.

Here are some more detailed instructions on getting Open Einstein built on MacOSX Intel, using the JAM complier and targeting the Nokia 770. I also built it for MacOSX, to run locally on my macbook.

After some trial and error, and some help from Paul G, I managed to build Open Einstein for both my Intel Mac and for my Nokia 770, using just my Macbook. I followed the directions to build at the Google Code site. I’ll have more explicit directions soon, but the code does build and run on the 770. And you don’t need scratchbox to build it! Excellent work Paul.

Here are some screen shots (click for bigger versions):

After Einstein was built, the directions for starting it are the same as before. The easiest way to control einstein is via SSH into the 770, so that you can shutdown all the Hildon interfaces.

Full directions to build this will be up soon.

Update: There is a new Einstein Platform 2007.7 User Manual at Paul’s Einstein Page.

Update 06/17/07: Here is the link to the original post over at atmaspheric. The blog is worth reading.

I found a cool video over at umpcportal.com, filmed by Jonathan Greene. He puts an iPhone, Nokia 800 and the N95 thru their paces while browsing the web. The video is nicely done and well narrated. It shows a lot more than my pictorial essay from a few days back. Worth a look at only 22 min long. You’ll certainly get a sense of the various levels of ease-of-use for these devices when browsing the web.

Some points that stuck me as I watched it:

At the 2007 Worldwide Newton Conference in Tokyo on July 8th, Paul Guyot announced that his most excellent Newton Emulator for ARM, Einstein, was now open source and available immediately on Google Code. His announcement to the NewtonTalk mailing list is worth the read. One improvement that sounds enticing:

“the heavy work done these past weeks allowed me to design a new experimental module where NewtonOS instructions are executed natively on ARM PDAs. “

There have been other improvements to Einstein since last year- the biggest (to me) is the ability to cross-compile and build Einstein on your Mac while targeting the Nokia 770. No more waiting for binaries to be released. The 800 was tested and the binary didn’t run– ITOS2007 has some different libraries (from ITOS 2005 and 2006), which probably caused issues. I’m attempting to roll a build for my 770 this weekend. We’ll see how it goes.

Here are my screen shots of my 770 from the release of Einstein last year.

Also announced was the release of Driver Labo, the wifi drivers for Newton by Hiroshi Noguchi. AFAIK, these are the only available drivers in the world that support WEP on the Newton. I had purchased licenses back when they were available, but since 2005 Hiroshi hadn’t ever responded to requests and pleas to accept payment for new licenses. As a result many Newtons can’t participate in locked-down Wifi networks. The release of these drivers as Open Source is a welcome event.

There is an overview of the WWNC ‘07 with some pictures of course.

I took some pictures showing the size difference between the 770 and iPhone. iPhone is really is smaller than you’d first think. Unfortunately, it also has a lower resolution screen than the 770. The zoom feature makes up for that somewhat (see the last picture in this post for an example of a zoom). It is nice that Safari always renders the whole page, so there is not any horizontal scrolling (unless you pinch-zoom). On the 770, boing-boing was wider than the screen and so it used a horizontal scroll. You can see that Safari didn’t render the flash banner add on the top of boing-boing. You can also notice in the first picture that Safari does a better job of using larger fonts- the smaller screen is more readable than on the 770.

The touch-screen on iPhone is remarkably different than what is on the 770- it only requires the lightest touch of a finger, not physical pressure. Using a stylus on iPhone doesn’t work- the screen is using the conductivity of your flesh to make contact, more like a touch pad on a laptop than a traditional touch-screen.

You can click on each of these to load a larger version in a new window.

The iPhone and the 770 both rendering boingboing.

Size comparison- stacked up.

The iPhone’s tabs - multiple windows open. You slide the windows left and right to go to each one.

Safari zoomed for the main column of text on boing-boing.

Posts that contain IPhone per day for the last 30 days:

Of course I wasted all that time yesterday snapping photos of the new ITOS’06 Beta when the classic Load Applet and Screenshot taker was ported and sitting over in the Maemo Garage. It works fine In 2006. After I took a few shots I realized there was no easy way to get them to my Mac, without having SSH or Xterm handy on the 770. So I ended up loading Opera, got on Gmail, and then attached them to an email to my self. That worked fine.

Screen Shot of the amazing FBreader, which is also already ported and ready to go.

Screen shot of me attaching my screenshots in a Gmail to myself.

Here is my Gmail, attachment laden and ready to send.