Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Here you go qole :)

http://www.linuxuk.org/node/57

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

For anyone that want to view the keynote speech -

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?...00227081119637

I do warn you that my lovely high-def recording was butchered by google video. I would upload to vimeo or something like that but they have a 500mb limit per month and I have 65gb of video to first transcode, add slides and upload!

I'm still looking for a better solution.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Maybe Andrew Black would host some of your video over on maemobox.org?

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Make a list and I'll do my best.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

He was a really nice guy, fun to hang out with. And that's a good article.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Ah, but the 770 was not a phone... This is the whole point of this discussion: telcos don't care about Nokia developping a voip phone as long as it uses wifi. It's when it uses the cell network that they get touchy. Heck, even Apple said that they don't mind voip on the iPhone as long as it uses wifi only.

So, I certainly agree that Nokia had voip in mind when developping the 770. Nokia is a phone company, voip was a natural to them. And at that time it looked like wifi networks would grow to be a real alternative.

3 years latter and the picture has changed. It is now pretty clear that wifi will not be an alternative. It was easy to predict (and I remember I said so at the time): the telcos, most notably t-online, were already buying existing wifi networks (like in train stations in Germany at the time) and made sure that they were not cheaper than umts. Wifi has become a niche system, restricted to the odd internet cafe or to speed iTunes downloads at starbucks. And people want ubiquitous data, especially if they are going to use their device as a phone. So 3G it will be, and at the conditions the telcos dictate.


Only: I am not really sure what the point of the N900 is. Most recent Symbian phones (all E- and N-series) already can browse the web, get e-mail and have a built-in sip client. That sip client already can be configured to run over umts, btw. Even that (voip over umts) is old news, my N80i has been able to do that for 2 years. And it has the perfect ergonomy for it, because... well: it is a phone.

So: sorry, but I miss the point of the N900. What is revolutionary about it? It runs a free os? Heck, even the iPhone runs BSD and we know how "un-free" it is. It can browse the web? Duh. You can write software for it? Fantastic. It's got a gorgeous screen? So what?

I mean: I like my N810, it's a very nice little computer, but I am not really sure where Nokia is heading to. Actually, it looks like Nokia does not know where they are heading to themselves. So, please tell me: what is the point of the N900?

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Doubt all you like. The fact is that the model is being inverted. Eventually VoIP will be THE way to conduct calls.

Any company involved in this industry would be mistaken in assuming the current telco model will persist forever. The writing is already on the wall. And based on history, I don't see most of the telcos, especially those here in the US, demonstrating the sufficient agility to adapt with the user market. ISPs on the other hand, can and do. They lack the stifling legacy.

With few exceptions, the telcos are throwing token efforts at wireless change. I suspect a few CEOs are gonna wake up one day wondering "WTF???"

;)

EDIT: oh, and Nokia is no longer considered a mere "phone company".

As usual, you assume too much and too hastily. Nokia does know.

And if you have to ask the point of upcoming tablets, then I'm wondering how receptive you would be to any answers...

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

That is because the power was already low enough compared to the "idle" current of a laptop. For real mobile devices the number is ridiculously high and even the worst phone can do far better than that.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

in other words, ISP's deliver a utility, telco's deliver a service. the former is highly flexible, but income is soso, the latter is very rigid, but income can be quite impressive.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Right. My TV-set is made by Nokia.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

We'll start with "skeered". It means scared, only limited to fear conducted via the internet tubes.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Hosting isn't a problem, its the streaming at good bit rates.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

You just shrugged off the most disruptive part of the N900, as if it were nothing! All the phones on the market, including the iPhone, are not open platforms, not the way the desktop PC is an open platform. Even Windows and Mac machines are extremely open platforms, in the way that I'm talking about. You can write any software you want for them, and if it's good and if it does what people want it to do, people will use it.

This openess on the desktop triggers all sorts of unexpected results, because the vendors are not controlling the applications. So now, the RIAA and MPAA are going crazy trying to shut down millions of average teenagers and grandmothers casually downloading the latest music and movies. Telcos and cable companies are falling over each other to offer VoIP and IPTV services, because people are already helping themselves to these things in significant, scary numbers and they want a piece of the pie.

What I'm trying to say (and others here, too) is that the N900 will bring the desktop paradigm to the mobile market. The vendors will no longer control the apps, and all hell will break loose.

Well, hell for vendors, heaven for consumers.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Texrat, can you please do me a favour and avoid responding to my posts? Thank you.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

DVDs? I'd buy one (or two or three, whatever)...

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Maybe. I have 65gb of video to somehow make available to the community. DVD's for a high def version may be an option either online on a download basis or physical with shipping paid for by donations. Lets see what happens.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Torrents, too, come to think of it...
(I'll go hand in my geek card now, for not thinking of that first.)

I think BT still goes fine here on U network, and I've got substantial 3AM bandwidth... UBERSEED!

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Very good point. In short: Apple sells you a unix iPhone but keeps the root password. To me this is unacceptable, and the main reason why I have a N810. For the same reason, I refuse to buy branded phones.

But first this is not new. Symbian and WinCE/mobile are also similar to the desktop paradigm. You can write your own applications for them. You can buy applications for them. The vendors do not control those applications.

(Interestingly, neither WinCE/mobile nor Symbian succeeded in creating a decent market for applications. In a fraction of the time, the iPhone did.)

Second, I am not really sure that the N900 will be as open as you think. Dr. Ari Jaaksi had puzzling comments on the "necessities for open source developers to embrace paradigms necessary to the phone industry like drm and closed source".

Furthermore, you have been intoxicated by the PC/windows/linux model. Everyone here seem to ignore that a smartphone may be a computing platform, but it is not a pc. The pc model emerged in the 90s, before the Internet was popular, and the technological choices which were made at the time reflect that (and we all know what disastrous consequences some of those choices had). A smartphone, with limited battery and computing ressources, always on connectivity, high hardware variability, high bug resilience and designed for a market of non-specialists implies different choices. If you want to make some money, that is. ;) You may want to read this article for details. It is mainly advocating the iPhone against the google Android platform, but the arguments adapt to maemo as well.

So: close, but no cigar. I still do not see the N900 being revolutionary at all. It is just another smartphone. One with great hardware specs, but htc already knows how to do that. One with a voip client, but this is old news. One which runs linux, but htc, motorola and google already do that. You have nice freeware for it (and my thanks go to those developers!), but no commercial applications, so the choice is limited and not really adapted to the general public. Sorry, I still do not see this as a revolution, a new computing platform or even a platform with any future relevance.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

a) The tablets (including an upcoming "N900") are not smartphones. AFAIK, Ari Jaaksi stated clearly it (the N900) will not have voice capability.

b) The whole point of Maemo is (again, I'm citing Ari Jaaksi) to bring desktop technology to the mobile device segment (which I think is the really revolutionary part here). If you don't like the desktop approach, then it's not the right toy for you.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Mr. Jaaksi said the code Nokia have contributed to Linux OMAP provides support for high speed packet data. He, and several other Nokia employees, very carefully and deliberately stated that Nokia have not provided code to support voice in this code drop. These same Nokia employees declined to say whether or not voice support for Maemo 5 would be added later.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

their focus have been corp roadwarriors, not media hungry teens...

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Now that's interesting. I remember having seen a short video from the Q&A after the keynote and I thought I'd remembered something like a firm "data only" in regard to Maemo 5... I have to admit, though, that I can't recall the exact question, so it's interesting to learn that this answer could as well have been about the one specific piece of code they added to the kernel.

If this is so... and if maybe there is voice in the N900... the whole thing makes less and less sense to me. What's the strategy then? It'll be just another phone, not even a good one. I'll buy it anyway, I guess, I'll have been waiting for too long.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

This is a nugget. So nice to see da Ville making an impact here too :D

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

I'm wearing out here, but I guess I should clarify a bit more. Symbian and WinCE/mobile are mobile-only OSes. Their application base is by necessity going to be limited, since developers can only write to that platform. The iPhone has some small advantage, since it is basically a stripped-down version of OSX. But all of these platforms are still not really good examples of what we will be getting here. They have small user bases, and developers have restrictions on what they can develop because of the vendors. The vendors on all these platforms really still do control the apps, no matter what anyone says.

The N8x0 (and even the 770), however, already can run many desktop Linux apps (via the Debian armel distro) without even recompiling. There are speed, screen size, and input issues with this current generation, but when the next gen tablets come out, with all the standard Linux framework in place to just run desktop Linux apps without porting or even much hassle... that huge user base necessary to make the desktop paradigm happen will already be there, in the form of the tens of thousands of apps sitting in the Debian (and probably Ubuntu by that point) repositories.


No you are wrong.

It was made very clear at the summit that the closed-source stuff will not be the stuff that hampers developers, it will be the "differentiating" stuff, the things that give Nokia a bit of a competitive edge. So it will be the high level zippy graphical fluff, not the drivers and the low level things that developers need access to to make cool new apps.

No no no no no no! You're not getting it!

THE N900 WILL BE A HANDHELD PC WITH A HD CAMERA AND HDSPA MODEM, NOT A SMARTPHONE.

Of course, the vendors need to make money, so there'll be stuff for sale, and there'll be some vendor-provided services and stuff. But the desktop paradigm that we'll be getting with the next-gen tablet says that you're going to get all sorts of unexpected third-party stuff happening.

Anyway, I don't think I'm going to argue with you anymore. We'll just let time prove one of us right.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Maybe it's subtle. For instance, if you type fast with fingers on the onscreen keyboard then there are moments when one finger has not yet left the key and another finger is already on a key. Multitouch hardware could handle this and would make for a much better experience in this case.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Welcome to the club! :D

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

The "desktop paradigm" you've described is important, but it is important because it is needed to foster FUTURE software development designed with the NIT platform in mind. I certainly hope the primary goal of Maemo 5 is not to enable reuse of existing desktop apps (ugh!). The revolution of the tablets WAS that they hit that sweetspot where: 1) there is more mobility than a laptop (use it while standing in line kind of mobility) and yet 2) you have a decent Internet, online, experience nonetheless. Various aspects are arguably essential (and unigue) to the NITs - touch screen, optimum processing power/battery life tradeoff, UI, etc. Ported desktop apps would unacceptably degrade 2) and are not wanted.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Ok, reality time people...

The n900 is already "a day late and a dollar short"

The iPhone and Android are disruptive technologies, the n900 is a going to be late to the game and probably too expensive to be anything more than a niche like the previous tablets. Nokia may prove me wrong and debut the n900 for less than $400, but I doubt it.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Tell that to all the people that want OpenOffice or the Gimp on their tablet.

I hope you're wrong, but I fear you may be right.

As the euphoria of the Summit wears off a bit, it becomes very clear that Nokia has made a lot of vague teases and hopeful-sounding promises about the future, but not a whole lot of substance.

This is actually very much On-Topic: Dr. Jaaksi (et al) very proudly announced that they were dropping open-source code to coincide with OSiM and the Summit. But what exactly did they give us? Is there any hardware out there we can try out the HDSPA source code on? And what's with the "alpha-quality" wlan driver they gave us? Where's the real driver? You know, the one used on the tablet?

I'm being forced to trust that Nokia is going to Get It Right next time. Despite the fact that the IT was the most amazing piece of technology ever to be held in my hands, there is definitely the feeling that the tablets are amazing in spite of Nokia. I am still amazed that such devices came out of Nokia in the first place.

My conversations with Nokia employees and the presentations from some of the Nokia people made it clear to me that there's still a lot of the Big Old Corporation in Nokia, and the BOC is pushing back, hard, against the tablets and the whole maemo idea. I got the distinct impression that they're no Google when it comes to corporate culture. The presentation by the IT department showed that the tablets are used by a tiny portion of the Nokia employees, and that their internal attempts to use the tablets as a productivity tool have not met with a great deal of success.

Brontide, I hope you're wrong. I hope the new tablet's "shitload of processing power" (to quote, I think, Peter Schneider) and open architecture can make the impact that I hope will send ripples through the market. But the price has to be right, and Nokia has to stick to their promises, and most importantly, they've got to get it done fast. Time's winged chariot is right on their heels, and there's an avalanche of competition coming fast. I'm terrified that they're going to drop the ball here: some middle manager with a poor grasp of the situation and poor oversight from upper management is going to piddle away precious months making his people do the wrong stuff (this may have already happened, according to my sources), or some deal with a third party is going to fall through, or the telcos are going to arm-wrestle Nokia's money people to pull the plug on the whole project, or the marketing types, with no understanding of what this device actually is, are going to position the new tablet incorrectly, or they won't be able to get the price down to the point where it is affordable by the people who really need it, or, more importantly, the people who will be the best evangelists, ie the "hip" young technophiles...

Wow, this is a long post. I'm stopping now.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Wait wait wait-- that was publicly acknowledged??? By true Nokia employees???

If so-- whew! One more thing I can relax about...

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Texrat: yeah, there was some reading between the lines on my part, but it was pretty clear that they had tried pretty hard and had kinda given up. They even had tried putting their computers into little mailbox niches and then using the tablets as mobile remote desktops but, alas, it seems that the project was short-lived

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

i remember going to an evening with S60 event here in NY last year, proudly toting my tablet. The dismissive attitude displayed by the Nokians when I asked about tablet development told me all I need to know about where the N8xO series was in the frame of Nokia priorities.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Hmmm. Based on that post my relaxation may be premature (hee hee hee).

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Hmm, of course, it can't be short-lived, they now have a website with a wishlist and everything. So despite the fact that he sounded despondent about the success of the project so far, doesn't mean they're giving up, right? right? I mean, the wishlist page is entitled, "How is Productivity Bundle continued?" ... so they must be continuing... I hope...

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Was having a talk with Ricky Cadden today, said something that made him stop and think a bit as we were talking about the tablets...

...the OS is a means to an end. Its not the most important thing, as for a services company only needs to fulfill the niche of being an enabler for the services that tend to make people come back and purchase more from you.

...the hardware is a means to an end. Its not the most important thing, nor is it the bankroll. The browser's contents is the bankroll, and the hardware makes the OS a carrier to get people plugged into the services.

For a company that's used to control of OS and hardware as ways to keep people plugged into a service, its hard to change a corporate culture and business methodology that is built on that.

That's long term vision. I hope that avid tablet fans can start to see that.

Short term vision is aligning the abilities of the tablets with the capabilities of users, software, and a community of developers that wants their ego stroked moreso than the last community. If Nokia comes thru with this, then the long term vision is easier to achieve.

Without a vision people perish, same with products. The IT has gone for a long time with vision that wasn't well communicated, and therefore it didn't exist for the very group that was ready to push it as a solution. The change now is that there is vision, and organization around that vision. The hard part is selling it, and internally, Nokia has a job to do. Externally, this community has to see more than the electrons between its fingers and make this relevant to a wider group of folks. When those two sides come together, things like HSPA, hi res cameras, and multitouch won't matter. Nokia will be making funds off of selling a solution, and you will enjoy having a box to tinker with that has a vision greater than just your tinkering.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

I am not arguing. I never said that you are wrong. Neither one of us can predict the future. We just come from opposite angles. You obviously have faith in the platform and some ideas on its future. You think that the future tablet, the one you imagine with the knowledge you have, will be successful on the market for this or that reason.

I am trying to figure out how the future tablet will be, then to find in the products on offer (e.g. iPhone) or historical products (e.g. Zaurus) something as similar as possible, and then use what the market reaction is or was to this similar product to see what the future of that hypothetical tablet might be.


So what do we have?
We have the N810 that we all know.
We will have slightly more powerful hardware.
We will have an hsdpa modem in it. Apparently (you just said so), it will be data only.

What is closest to that? At present, I would say something like the eeepc. Runs Linux, is sold explicitly to browse the web, is sold by operators with a modem and a mobile contract. The eeepc is a fair bit bigger than the N810, but there are other, smaller micro-PCs in the pipeline. They are all the rage in Japan at present. A main advantage of the N810 over those machines is, of course, battery life.

There are also winCE machines more similar to the N810 specifications with a cell modem. They are almost exclusively sold in the Asian market.

The eeepc sells like hot cakes. The smaller machines not that well, due to a combination of high price and a keyboard which is perceived as too small.

As to "new desktop paradigms" go, the eeepc is in a better position. It does help in bringing Linux to the masses. Did we see "all sorts of unexpected third-party stuff happening" with it? Not for the moment.

This is what I fear for the N900 / maemo. Will it be able to create a vibrant software market? This is a recurring problem, it killed the Zaurus, plagues WinCE and Symbian, and has always be a problem for Linux. Linux compensates with a wealth of free software, of course, but is that sufficient? I'm not really sure.

The 770, N800 and N810 also did not manage to create a vibrant software market. Sure, one can port Linux desktop applications to maemo, but the reality is that it is lots of work to render them practical, and that not that many have been ported. I am still waiting for abiword to go out of alpha status. Would that change with an always on connection? I don't see how.

The iPhone is the only product which managed to create a software market (and fast on top of that). Of course, it helped that Apple had a distribution system in place. You should check the iTunes store to see what is available. Much would be worth copying / porting to the tablet. But who is going to do it when no money is to be gained? Free software has its limits.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Will maemo 5 still support N8x0 ? or i Need to buy a new N9x0? :)

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Well, that one's obsolete; it works with an old kernel version (that we're presently stuck with), and if it were to be kept, really ought to be ported to mac80211 anyway. But it is copyrighted code, as well as containing the previously proprietary information on how to run the wifi. Nokia leaned on them to produce a specification, and started writing completely Nokia-owned code for that specification, which they then can release under any license.

Moreover, they did something which was not necessary to solve a problem akin to the HSPA issue you mentioned: Now they have an alpha driver relying on a new infrastructure. So in practice, it's not useful until the kernel gets updated. So they actually backported mac80211 to our kernel just so this released source could actually be used. (And this mac80211 backport may also help with USB dongle support.) This effort, by the way, gives me hope for getting a somewhat Maemo 5-esque release on the N8x0; they're actually using something like N8x0/Maemo 4 for their current development.

Getting the rights to the existing driver and GPLing it would not, IMHO, go as far as what they have done, so I question how well that evidence supports your conclusion. (Though not the validity of your eventual conclusion.)

There's a mixture of hardware and software that goes into the tablets. While it seems they slid a bit on the N810, the hardware on any of the tablets is first-rate vs. non-NIT competitors. And while I can see plenty of faults, plenty of things it would seem like they could have done already on the software side, they're not that bad in perspective. It seems to me that they're coming under "fire" for a combination of not getting the HW+SW to market fast enough, and not being open enough with the SW now.

But I think, given the quality of Nokia hardware I've seen, and what we do know of the N9xx so far, that as late as it will be, it's still going to be out front as far as hardware. (The N810W's a different story. The more I think about it, the less I can see them selling...) And because it's shipping late, it's not surprising (though no less disappointing) that Nokia's not open enough. But they've made some pretty serious commitments (notably with open alpha SDKs, and some devices for developers during that time) that make me think it's going to be hard to help expanding on the success of the N8x0. When you look at it that way, I see them trying to get stuff cleaned up and ready for an upcoming release, so it's understandable that a lot of things aren't released yet, or are still alpha or otherwise non-useful.

I think when it comes release time, the software will be as finished as Diablo (rather than Chinook), and the hardware will be unbeaten; I think with the always-on data built-in, it'll have a lot broader market appeal, and I don't see any other devices coming through between now and then with a big enough breakthrough to leave an abnormal portion of the market saying "Man, that N900's sweet; now I wish I hadn't blown my year's gadget allowance on this xPhone. Oh well." The Googlephone, while perhaps not in the expected state of perpetual beta, isn't that radical a game-changer, and I don't see MIDs getting very much better for performance-portability-price product than they are. The Pandora (did y'all hear? It's shipping with an Angstrom-based system) will stay a niche gamer and hacker device; it's biggest effect (and possibly the biggest threat, if Nokia's stupid) will be draining off some of the hacker/developer community, which will not be entirely offset by taking Karel Jansens away. (This is exacerbated by the reaction against HSPA, which the Pandora does not have.) But the effects of that won't be immediate, and Nokia will have the chance to get some of them back.

Will it be an earth-shaking revolution? Probably not. But I've felt the revolutionary nature of the tablets is overrated for quite some time. I think it will be commercially a bigger success than any of the tablets so far, and I only see one opportunity for them to really shoot themselves in the foot WRT the platform's continued success.

One thing that will really help is to make Maemo run on Pandoras. They'll (presumably) be out there in reach of most potential developers before the N9xx will, so you can either lose some developers from Nokia hardware and Maemo, or you can have more leaving Nokia hardware but staying with Maemo. It should be clear that it's very much in Nokia's interests, if they want to sell devices running Maemo, to keep the developer community working on Maemo. And this non-3G, niche device is not a serious sales threat to the N9x0, either.

I can see the potential for the Pandora to be the de facto SDK dev board even without Nokia backing, if they do ship soon enough, but it would be really smart for Nokia to get behind this and have someone working on getting an alpha SDK running on the Pandora to minimize the number of people who jump to Angstrom, etc. (In case anyone wonders why the Pandora instead of the cheaper Beagle: It's potentially less intimidating (though probably not to useful developers), it's self-contained, it has a touchscreen with no hassle, and (the big one) it serves as both a dev board and a pocketable end-user device.)

Bottom line: I agree it's hugely important for them to get it right, but I feel they have less chances to go horribly wrong than some do. Maybe I'm just a bloody optimist, though, and you guys will be right...

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

Fingers?!!!!!??????!!!!!!

Who would want to touch a €400,- device with greasy fingers? That's what a stylus is for. And using two styl- ahm, two of these things probably looks more than chinese food than anything else.

Re: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
 

I, amongst others, asked this question. The public reply from Peter was that we'd *really* want to buy new hardware anyway. There was no public answer to the question of whether the N8x0 PowerVR drivers would be released so we could also use the ui-which-uses-clutter-but-isn't-clutter-based ui on them, however this would really make sense, so I'm optimistic.