One of the ‘easter eggs’ hidden on the Nokia N800 was an FM radio receiver. The device shipped without any software to take advantage of the hardware, but the community came through with a solution to allow N800 owners to listen to FM radio through their device. While the Nokia N810 did not have the same little treasure, it appears as though the Nokia N900 does, and there’s already a solution to get it working!

Martin Grimme at Python and More has put together a package called n900-fmrx-enabler which enables the FM antenna when prompted, and then disables it again, to conserve battery. For right now, it’s no easy task, as the sound doesn’t immediately get output to the speakers, so Martin’s come up with a workaround. Unfortunately, this workaround sucks down the battery quite quickly.

If you’re feeling rather daring, you can install fmradio from the extras-testing repository, to give it a go. Is FM radio something you would use often, or do you think it’s rather silly, given the local storage and 3G connectivity that the N900 has?

(Image is from atmasphere.net and shows the FM Radio app on the N800)

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Apologies for the lack of coverage here – as I wasn’t attending, it was tough to keep up with all the photos, videos, and posts about the Maemo Summit. However, if you weren’t there, either, you can catch up on all the news in a few places.

For starters, there’s a massive amount of photos – most taken with the N900 – up on Flickr, tagged with ‘maesum’. The image in this post is actually taken by Mark Guim of The Nokia Blog with his N900, and it looks quite nice.

Also, Peter Schneider has loaded a few of the presentations from the Maemo Summit up on Slideshare, so that you can breeze back through them at your leisure. I definitely recommend that you spend some time here, as there’s some great information about Maemo and the N900 to be found.

You can also view the liveblog from the event, put together as a joint effort by MaemoTalk.com, AllAboutMaemo.com, and TheNokiaBlog.com. There is a separate liveblog for Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.

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Today in Amsterdam, the second annual Maemo Summit is kicking off! The Maemo Summit includes 3 days of nothing but Maemo -- the first day is organized by Nokia, while the second two days consist of community-planned events and presentations. You can check out the full schedule online at the Maemo Wiki, and no doubt we’ll have some updates along the way, as well.

The tag for the event is ‘maesum‘, so you can search Twitter or Flickr or YouTube to find updates, pictures, or videos from the event, which should help to make things easier to follow, as well. If you’re one for live coverage, our friends at the newly launched AllAboutMaemo.com have put together a liveblog, which will be updated periodically from various keynote speeches.

It also appears as though all of the attendees have received their very own Nokia N900 for review for 6 months, which is awesome! Our very own Texrat is on-site at the Nokia Maemo Summit, so we’ll have our own review posted shortly. Here’s an unboxing video in the meantime, from UMPCportal.com

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With the Nokia N900 getting closer and closer to being available to consumers, it’s no surprise that Maemo.org is beefing up its offerings, as well. In the past few days, we’ve seen the final release of the full Maemo 5 SDK, which actually includes all of the Nokia applications that will be installed on the N900 when it is released. This is a big deal for application developers who want to get an idea of how their application will run or look on an actual device. The SDK has been moved from Maemo.org to Forum Nokia, so you can pick it up there.

Also, Maemo.org has finally added a Maemo 5 downloads section, showing off those applications that have been added to the Extras repository and passed through the QA tests. As of right now, there are only 9 applications listed, including Ogg Support and OMWeather, though there will no doubt be more coming very soon.

What applications are you looking forward to?

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Ogg Vorbis is an alternative open source music format that supporters claim has a lower bitrate and superior sound quality than the standard MP3 format. Most of today’s popular desktop music players either directly support Ogg Vorbis or do so through the use of a plugin that is readily available. Unfortunately, by default, the Nokia N900 does not natively support Ogg Vorbis, but Tuomas Kulve is working to change that.

Tuomas recently announced that Ogg Support for the Nokia N900’s Maemo 5 operating system has been added to the ‘Extras’ repository, which will enable the N900 to play Ogg Vorbis music files easily. Currently, v1.0.5 of Ogg Support includes support for tags and correctly connects them to the built-in music player, but there are still other features that Tuomas wants to add.

You can read more about Ogg Vorbis on Wikipedia, and you can get more info about Ogg Support at Tuomas’ site.

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While most of us have already placed our pre-order for the Nokia N900 (click here if you haven’t), we’re still waiting for those orders to actually ship. In the meantime, Nokia has graciously posted the full user manual for the Nokia N900, so that you can already know how to use this new smartphone before you even get it.

The full manual – all 111 pages of it, is available here in PDF format. There’s also a quite active discussion about the findings within taking place on this thread at Talk.Maemo.org, so you can join in there if you have any questions.

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The Nokia Conversations blog, Nokia’s official blog, has posted a nice 6-minute video showing off the browser on the Nokia N900, which should hit the market sometime this month. The Nokia N900 uses a new version of the MicroB browser that previous Maemo-powered Tablets have used. This includes a Mozilla-based engine and full Flash support, among other things.

It’s not an earth-shattering video, but it definitely does a great job of highlighting the browser -- which was one thing that I actually hated about previous Internet Tablets. We already know that the new browser has no trouble rendering Maemo-Guru.com. What do you think?

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One of the things that really bothered me about the earlier Tablets, such as the N800 and N810 was the lack of ability to communicate with my PC. Sure, I can connect the device via USB and have it show up as a mass storage device, but there’s no ability to synchronize photos, videos, or music, nor is there an ability to store a backup of my device’s memory on my computer.

Luckily, there’s a group of Maemo enthusiasts who feel the same way, and have started work on a new ‘Tablet-Suite’ application, currently for Linux-powered computers, that aims to do some of these things.

The current version of Tablet-Suite is quite unstable, but serves as a way to manage device backups on your PC. You can initiate a backup, and then store the resulting file safely on your computer, as well as make other copies and restore the backup.

It’s quite limited, obviously, but the team has high hopes for this much-needed application. They’re taking suggestions/requests for v0.2 of Tablet-Suite, so if you’ve got something you’d like to see this application do, you definitely want to swing over and chime in. You can also check it out at the Maemo Garage.

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A new add-on for the Nokia N900’s Maemo 5 operating system has just been revealed, named Hermes, after the god of communication. Hermes for Maemo 5 enables you to synchronize your contacts list with Twitter and Facebook, bringing over various bits of information, including thumbnail photos. You can also use Hermes to add missing information for your contacts to the device’s copy of that contact, or vice versa.

The add-on is written by Andrew Flegg, who is well known in the Maemo community for his contributions. You get more information about Andrew here.

What other networks would you like to see Hermes connect to in the future? I would definitely like to see synchronization with Google, as well as with LinkedIn, personally.

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In my introductory post here at Maemo-Guru, I’m not exactly coming off on the highest of notes. Don’t get me wrong, I do like a lot of what I see concerning Nokia’s Maemo flagship device. Its just that I’m not head-over-heels excited about it… yet.