Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

Hmm. It's hard to believe that the power consumption of the touch layer would be particularly significant on a device that is likely to have a large, bright screen and a monster of a processor. Care to source?

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

Not necessarily a significant one, but the capacitive touchscreen require both a separate controller (which consumes power) and power for the screen itself.

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

What people are talking about is the power consumption of the capacitive touchscreen itself, and not the CPU time spent interpreting the positions.

Although I'm not familiar with the capacitive touchscreen power consumption, I'm pretty sure that the screen backlight must use much more than that.

Either way, resistive should be less taxing on the battery.

I've played around with the iPhone 3GS and although I don't like Apple (due to all the constraints they imply) I must admit their interface (software and hardware, including the capacitive touchscreen) works VERY well. No delay at all when scrolling webpages or menus.

But, I want a decent phone running an open OS, be it Android (preferably) or the Maemo (I didn't know Maemo until someone sent me and N900 link).

The N900 is (today) what comes closer to what I want. I'm just a bit reluctant about how is it in real life. Some videos show some stuttering when scrolling or playing games. Also not really sure how they implemented the "1GB application memory" as the hardware only has 256MB of RAM. If they are using flash memory for that it would be slow and would probably kill the Flash Memory due to multiple rewrites.

Multi-touch is not a required feature, but it's usability is great for zooming or rotating objects. I didn't like the gesture they are using on the N900 to zoom in or out on the browser. Also don't know how easy it would be for me (or other community developers) to implement a different gesture.

Hmm, I went off-topic here. sorry!

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

But I want a source of how much of a difference this makes. I mean, there has to be a source other than opinion.

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

Flash technology has advanced considerably in the last 10 years. With the size of the internal card in the N900 it would likely take several years (if not decades) of 24/7 writing to kill it by wearing it out.

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

Question... wouldn't X also need multi pointer support for multi touch support? That'd require X Server 1.7, which will be in X.Org 7.5. How does Palm Pre have multi touch?

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

AFAIK the Pre does not use X, it's straight webkit-on-framebuffer operation (=they did their own stuff wrt multitouch).

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

Hmm, I know they have advanced, but I'm still not confident about durability/reliability.

I guess I'm somewhat conservative on this. ;)

Take a look at this article: http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/article...090528/170920/

100,000 rewrites is not much in my opinion.

Supposing a perfect write distribution algorithm, we would have 32*10^9 bytes * 100,000 rewrites = 32*10^14 rewrites.

Considering a 10MB/s constant rewrite speed (which BTW would kill performance used as RAM), that would give about 10 years in durability if used under load 24/7. That's obviously a lot but we don't know the exact figures for the SSD used in the N900 and we don't know how efficient is the algorithm (specially if the SSD has less empty space).

Wish the N900 had 512MB (true) RAM :).

Answering "allnameswereout", yes I believe the new X server is needed for multi-touch. :)

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

Just to make a correction: apparently the N900 used eMMC memory. It seems it is a high-performance part:

http://www.micron.com/products/nand/managed-nand/index

Can't find anything about realiability though.

I think it won't be a problem in under 3 years of heavy usage, but still makes me a little bit worried :).

Sorry for going off-topic.

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

I've had swap turned on on my N800 since 2007, I haven't had any cards die. Nor have I heard of any 2GB eMMCs in the N810 dying as a result of that, either.

This issue has been beaten to death in the past, so far nobody has really managed to kill any cards.


It's not an SSD, it's an eMMC.

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

Hmm that makes me less frightened with the idea :). Thanks!

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

It doesn't work that way, the wear leveling is done on the level of the device (one of the advantages of it being an eMMC and not a plain NAND flash). It will shuffle blocks around reading and writing them in a manner that they all have a rougly same number of writes. The device doesn't even *know* about empty space (that's a filesystem level thing), it's all just blocks from it's perspective. Also note that wear leveling is just a part of the strategy, there are spare blocks, error correction algorithms, etc.

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

Maybe its worth noting that clutter technically already supports multitouch through clutter-gestures which includes support for pinch zoom and whatnot, so maemo5 supports multitouch already in terms of the software just not hardware.

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

guys.

if nokia or anybody else makes multitouch the default interaction mechanism in ANY OS then people will simply not use it.

there has to be a mechanism for off device development and i don't see most desktop or laptops even having touch with one finger, let alone multi.

sure - there might be some vulcan mind grips in the software but the developers who put them in will be doing themselves a diservice (especially with QT multiplatform development) if they rely on it.

/rant

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

A twitter message from Eldar Murtazin (Mobile-review):

Compared N9xx with Samsung Linux device. But they think is not ready for mass market, have to w8 until 2011. Even now S is better, like it

makes one wonder...:D

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

Yeah. The Russian dude with the stolen N900. Feel free to join the usual blather about it over here.

Re: Maemo 6 to get multitouch& gestures with Qt 4.6
 

I suggest just ignoring him. Basically.