Re: When is maemo6 going to be released? will it support N900?
 

I keep thinking Nokia is moving too slow. A potential release of Maemo6 on spring 2011 is way too late! Considering the improvement we´ve seen from Androd 1.x to Android 2.0, and that Google is rumoured to be shooting for a late next year Android 3.0 release, I keep thinking Nokia may fall off the wagon if they don´t expedite dramatically their development.

Re: When is maemo6 going to be released? will it support N900?
 

Please see http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=31346

Re: When is maemo6 going to be released? will it support N900?
 

The changes Maemo6 brings are the biggest changes in Maemo EVER. If they can pull that off in under a year AND make that a mass-market product on the first try, hats off.

Re: When is maemo6 going to be released? will it support N900?
 

That's the problem. Massive changes between versions rarely work out. Think of something like Windows XP to Vista and you get an idea of the pitfalls.

Instead Nokia should be looking at the Android model. Sure Android has its problems but there's no shame in copying what works. Make small incremental releases which work on the previous device. Make a Maemo release every three months with 25% of what you want instead of one release in a year with 100% of what you want. With the latter approach I guarantee the following:

-It won't be 100%, it'll be 80%. Scaled back to meet deadlines.

-It'll still be late anyway.

-That 80% won't be what people want so you end with with maybe 50% of stuff people want in addition to missing the things people do want.

It'll also keep N900 sales strong since customers will be confident that the device is beign supported and it's getting new features all the time.

Will Nokia do this? Probably not, it's too alien to their thought processes.

Re: Harmattan on N900?
 

Btw, some folks on other fora have jumped to saying "since Maemo6 will support multitouch, it cannot be ported to N900". Sounds like a load of rubbish to me - I would imagine it would not be that difficult to have any multitouch thingies turned off and be controlled with the good old mono-finger methods. :)

Re: Maemo 6 / Harmattan on N900?
 

Threads merged, title adjusted slightly to (hopefully) increase visibility in search, and tags added to (again, hopefully) assist with search.

Re: When is maemo6 going to be released? will it support N900?
 

From the start of Maemo, Nokia apparently intended annual major-version upgrades to the OS. I find that to be a reasonably rapid OS release schedule. Heck, I still see Windows users bashing Apple for churning out Mac OS X releases that frequently.

The path is a bit rocky at the moment, with Elephanta skipped and Fremantle pushed forward, but there's no sign that Nokia intends to dally about in getting Harmattan ready. Meanwhile, the time and energy Nokia invested in getting SSUs working indicates to me that they have no intention of relying solely upon annual releases to get new code on devices.

As much as I'm looking forward to more minor-version updates to Maemo, I don't see the transition from Fremantle to Harmattan as the time or place for attempting the incremental change approach you propose. Swapping out GTK for Qt on a device while bringing a massively redesigned UI to the system and all apps may not be as hard to accomplish smoothly as the old libc5 to glibc change, if you remember that, but I'd guess that were it attempted, Nokia would wind up expending multiple times more effort on managing the transition than they did on actual design and code.

Re: Maemo 6 / Harmattan on N900?
 

It's an age long engineering dilemma, finding the right balance between the evolutionary and the revolutionary parts of development, and there are no guaranteed recipes - every project needs to make it's own calls.

Re: When is maemo6 going to be released? will it support N900?
 

Well firstly you're comparing desktop operating systems with consumer device operating systems. Certainly there's some converging going on but they're different things for different purposes.

Secondly the criticism of Apple is that they make you pay for each update not that they update too quickly.

The enormous scope of these changes is exactly why the odds of them trying to do it all in block in a year is likely to fail.

Each of those tasks (swap out GTK for Qt, redesign UI) needs to be broken down and managed. If they assign "Stable release milestones" on 3-4 month intervals and release that they'll be a lot better off even it's just the hardcore geeks taking those updates. They'll get a bunch of feedback on how things are going (particularly with regard to the UI) as well as a lot of real world testing so by the time the year is up the odds of them having something usable will be a lot higher.

Maemo6 as update for N900?
 

Hi there,

will Maemo6 become available as an update for the N900? As far as I know the N900 is Maemo5 based? BTW, what kernel version use Maemo 5 and 6? Kernel 2.6.x?

Regards
Malte