Nokia will be making Windows Phone 7 devices by the truckloads, if you had been harboring dreams of an Android intervention, deal with it. The internet is virtually up in arms against the move, Nokia enthusiasts who had been waiting patiently for Nokia’s Qt, Symbian and MeeGo strategy to pan out have been woken up to an alternate reality. Even Nokia’s stock price is down 9.19% at the time I write this, in stark contrast to what they would have expected.
Nokia and Microsoft have just announced their partnership, Nokia will be using WP7 as its primary smartphone strategy. What happens to Symbian? Nokia says they plan to ship a 150 million more Symbian devices. What happens to MeeGo? It looks like its on the back burner now, barely hanging in there. ‘MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year‘.
A very promising press release hit my inbox today morning, the Myriad Group has announced Alien Dalvik, a solution that will let users take advantage of applications made for Android devices on their MeeGo smartphones. According to the press release, Alien Dalvik ‘enables the majority of Android applications to run unmodified, allowing application store owners to quickly kick start Android application store services by simply repackaging Android Package (APK) files’.
The best part about the solution is that Alien Dalvik applications will appear as native and can be seamlessly installed on devices, as you can see from the demo video below, they appear just as any other native Maemo app would. Myriad Alien Dalvik is slated to become commercially available later this year on the MeeGo platform with support for other platforms to be announced in the coming months.
The press release only mentions MeeGo, however the demo video has been shot on the N900, running Maemo 5 and other documentation also mentions it, so chances are N900 owners might get some love as well. Alien Dalvik will also be demonstrated publicly for the first time on the Nokia N900 at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from February 14th-17th at the Myriad hospitality suite located at The Avenue, Stand AV91.
Myriad claims that the Alien Dalvik solution will let Android apps run on non Android smartphones with the same speed and performance as they would on a native Android device. ‘A very tight integration to both the Android SDK and the MeeGo SDK (QTCreator) makes it very easy to modify, package and test applications. Most Android applications can run unmodified as the vast majority of Android APIs are supported and tight integration with the QT framework leads to a seamless user experience.’
The bottomline is, if the solution can do what it claims and Nokia can churn out a great looking UI for MeeGo, people will stop their demands for a Android or WP7 device from Nokia.
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Mozilla has just rolled out Beta 4 of its Firefox browser for Maemo and Android devices. Beta 4 promises to be noticeably faster, improve start-up and page load times and responsiveness to panning and zooming.
Also advertised is compatibility with 100 add-ons to customize the features, functionality and look of your Web experience. According to Mozilla, tests on JavaScript benchmarks show Firefox 4 Beta is faster than the stock Android browser; roughly three times faster on Kraken, about twice as fast on SunSpider and slightly faster on V8.
Other advancements in this release include increasing stability, reducing installation memory usage, improving readability with zooming, and fixing some keyboard issues. The latest beta is available to download from the Android Market and if you use a Nokia N900, visit this link to get downloading.
Despite Mozilla’s claims, the browser doesn’t feel as fast in the real world and I found myself going back to the N900′s stock MicroB and the stock Android browser on my Galaxy S.
The world’s first national MeeGo Summit is taking place in the beautiful city of Tampere on April 15-16 and if this interests you, you will be pleased to know that registrations are now open. The MeeGo Summit FI will be a developer oriented 2-day summit packed with MeeGo and Qt sessions and showcases, along with a coding competition aptly titled Meegathon with hardware prizes from Intel and Nokia. There is also the obligatory after party.
Valtteri Halla, Director MeeGo, Carsten Munk and Thiago Macieira will be keynoting, you can find the rest of the detailed program here. Other activities include:
You can follow updates on Twitter or Facebook. If you would like to know more about MeeGo Community activities, look this calendar up. Via @mwkn.
The N900 recently became capable of Packet Injection, and this mean that the popular network security tool Aircrack-ng just became a whole lot more potent. While this means that you can now use your N900 to crack WIFI networks, cracking a WIFI network of someone other than your own can still land you in jail.
Meanwhile FRuMMaGe on the TMO forms has ported his shell script to work on the N900 which automates many of the functions of the aircrack-ng suite, making it much easier and faster than using aircrack-ng directly to compromise WIFI networks. He is also working on a GUI for the script which will make things even more easy.
FRuMMaGe‘s script features:
As well as WPA specific functions such as:
It also is capable of the following functions, but these have not yet been tested extensively since porting:
If this aspect of the N900′s prowess interests you, he has a complete tutorial up which you can follow here. Hat tip to @mwkn for the find.
PS: As FRuMMaGe put it, ‘Use at your own risk and only for legitimate purposes. (And no, desperately needing to check your facebook while in a local internet café without paying is NOT a legitimate purpose)!’.
TwimGo is a popular Twitter client by Tommi Luakkanen (@tlaukkanen) for the Nokia N900 and has also recently become available for Symbian based devices via the Ovi Store. In its current iteration it is written in Web Runtime, but the upcoming version 2.5 has been rewritten with Qt Quick or more specifically Qt QML.
The end result is that the app now has a pretty snazzy UI, complete with all the bells and whistles that is no slouch when it comes to performance. Here is the video courtesy @mwkn:
The new version is not available for download just yet, but you can follow the developer for the latest @tlaukkanen. This version of TwimGo should also come to Symbian based devices once Qt 4.7 rolls out.
Finding the right frequency for your FM transmitter is always a pain, specially when you visit new cities. Fortunately a Qt based utility called E.F.F.(or Empty Frequencies Finder) from BLIZZARD will now put an end to that problem, making EFF a must have for your phone.
E.F.F. (Empty Frequencies Finder) is a utility that lets you choose a range (87.5 FM – 108.0 FM) to scan from, for empty/unused frequencies, using the receiver of N900 and headphones as its antenna. For example you can use this utility to find empty frequencies, so you can easily transmit from your N900 to your radio. If you are not satisfied with the emptiness of the frequency scanning results you can select between modes, to find a better one.
Th app hasn’t found its way to the repositories yet, but you can download the .deb file from here (direct link) and install it manually. You will need to plug your N900 headphones in so that the app can use them as an antenna for the radio. Your N900 also must be running the PR 1.3 firmware.
I would love to see this utility come out for Symbian^3 devices as well, may be Qt can help.
Hat tip to the ever useful @mwkn for the tip!
Like all touch based devices, the N900 also packs a proximity sensor to kill the touch screen sensitivity when you are making calls. But when you are not making calls, it is still running with no action assigned to it. Fortunately MohammadAG was upto the task and has created a shortcuts bar reminiscent of the Xpress Music devices like the Nokia 5800 which you can bring up by holding the proximity sensor for 1.2 seconds.
In addition to the shortcuts, a long press on the media player icon will bring up media controls. The app is available under the package name MediaBar and you can follow this thread for support and requests.
SMS Spam is a glowing menace, but if you own a N900, you won’t have to live with it anymore. Giovanni Cognome‘s Auto Remove SMS written in Qt and C++ lets you delete text messages based on their text, sender or the received date. The application is a free download and even has a background version that can be scheduled with the Alarmed app to auto remove SMS.
AutoRemoveSMS should be available in the extras-devel repository, if you don’t know what that is, read this. If you want to install it directly, use the links below.
Download (install): autoremovesms.install (click from the N900′s browser to begin installation)
Download (deb): autoremovesms_0.3.3_i386.deb (The actual app, you can download this on the computer and then install on the N900, but this will you will not be notified on updates)
[via: @alextootchie]
Today is the ‘unconference’ day of the first ever ‘MeeGo Conference’ and thus much more relaxed. The last two days have had the Aviva Stadium abuzz with packed sessions, lots of energy and a ton of chatter about the future of MeeGo. Add to that that every attendee of the MeeGo Conference is being given away a MeeGo touting Lenovo IdeaPad and you can image what the atmosphere is like.
But instead of trying to convey what is going on in words, here are tons of pictures from day 1, 2 and 3. Time to put the ‘a picture speaks a thousand words’ proverb to the test.
Find the entire set on Flickr, or watch the slideshow below.
At the MeeGo Conference in Dublin the second annual MeeGo Conference was just announced. Going forward, we will be seeing two conferences every year with the 2011 edition coming May 23 – 25 in San Francisco. MeeGo has two major releases every year and from now on we will have a conference after each release.
By that time we should have also seen Nokia’s first MeeGo device and a great place to measure developer interest in the new platform. Around the same time, May 30 – June 1 2011, the world will also witness the MeeGo Summit in Oulu, Finland. Many details are not available yet, but if you are interested in MeeGo, better put those dates down.
Keep an eye on all the MeeGo events here.
