Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

I have been in an out of this thread as it has developed. Please forgive me if my question shows some ignorance of what has previously been discussed. Is the following statement accurate given what you all now know at this time?

Thank you.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

I was wondering if there is going to be another device from nokia with maemo 5?

Larger screen? More tabletized?

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Another maemo 5 device this late seems like commercial suicide.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Why not.... I am sure the next meego device from nokia is going to be atleast 6 months away. Why release another hardware with a different form factor and maemo 5 with all the updates to the os to fix major bugs?

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

From our point of view MeeGo is the new maemo and therefore meego.com will be at some point the new home of this community. We are working on it (your participation is welcome at the meego-community mailing list).

(By the way, meego.org was taken and insanely expensive. If someone buys it for the MeeGo project we will use it immediately.)

Said that, the destiny of maemo.org depends on the Maemo community (yes, you). In the meantime we keep funding the hosting and nobody is thinking of unpluggin servers or taking radical measures to stop anything here.

About the council, ask the current candidates. :) Nokia has nothing to say about this. The community created the council and the community is the one deciding what to do now and in the MeeGo context. fwiw we supported Jaffa's idea of an elected body representing 'the community' towards Nokia and somehow we think the core concept might make sense at MeeGo as well. Said that, the MeeGo project is fundamentally different since it is aimed to be an open project participated by individuals and organizations. The purpose of a Council for MeeGo needs to re-evaluated.

We keep funding the maemo.org pro development team, reviewing contracts every 6 months as we have been doing since we started 'liberating' these *master roles. Note that the maemo.org development team decide their priorities and tasks through a public process, so it is also up to them process to decide where to invest their time. Now they are finding their counterparts in the Moblin project and the Linux Foundation, and we all will need to find the place for all of us (Nokians included e.g. Tero and myself). Giving roles implies giving admin rights on tools and servers, all this is based on trust and this takes a bit of time, as sysadmins know.


Welcome to open source and open development. Actually the Maemo team and now MeeGo are just putting some toes of one foot in the open pool, so get used to this. Public roadmaps will tell you about features you currently don't have in your device, there will be always something apparently cooler making you think if you are buying your product in the right time.

"Harmattan" with Qt officially supported were announced in June 2008. Harmattan based on Qt and the cross-platform strategy with Symbian were announced in July 2009. In the Maemo Summit (still before sales start) we gave more details about Harmattan, Qt, the changes and the transition path. This forum, Planet Maemo and the tech media have been reporting about this horizon of changes that was coming.

MeeGo is a culmination of that, but in terms of technical changes affecting N900 users or Maemo 5 application developers it doesn't bring much that wasn't already in the pipeline (Qt and Web Runtime API, with its consequences).

But really, all this is good news. Like any structural change it gives some short term noise, insecurity and hassle but I'm sure it will pay off. Maemo 5 is great and the Fremantle team keeps working in updates. But if Maemo 5 and its linear evolution would be the only plan of Nokia, then I believe that N900 would have reasons to worry about the future.

By the way, the basics of the Fremantle game (except Telephony) were mostly announced in the Maemo Summit 2008 and the first release (totally targeted to hardcore developers) went out in December 2008 (with the announcement of lack of support for OMAP2 devices = N810 and N800). That also created a hassle in the community, but if we wouldn't have made those steps at that time then you wouldn't have got the Maemo 5 you are enjoying. There was plenty of signal-no-noise feedback got during the Fremantle unstable phase that helped improving the stable releases you are using. We are taking the same open approach with Harmattan and even deeper (thanks to http://maemo.gitorious.org and MeeGo). Don't feel part of a problem because already now you are part of a solution.

Up to the GTK+ and Hildon maintainers in the first place. They are the first ones to decide whether it's worth the effort of aligning the GTK+ approaches of Moblin and Maemo, get the Hildon libraries running on top, try or try not to work on adapted bindings to give to GTK+/Hildon apps a MeeGo native look&feel...

GTK+ and Clutter are maintained as official platform libraries in MeeGo but the API is not supported officially. This means that the APIs are there to be used but the project doesn't make any promise on maintenance, completeness, quality, API management across releases... This doesn't mean much if there is a good community maintenance. For example, Python has been never officially supported, and I bet the average user of a Python apps in Extras is not aware about the support status and probably not even aware whether the app is based on Python or not. That could be the case for GTK+/Hildon apps in MeeGo, but is really not up to the MeeGo project.

fwiw the Maemo team is in talks with the GNOME Foundation to bring more GTK+/Hildon apps to Maemo 5 and to help on the kick-off of the 'GTK+ community support'. We started the talks in the context of Harmattan and we are just continuing in the context of MeeGo. We hope to get something concrete to explain soon.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

I'm definitely waiting for the next Maemo/Meego device - preferably with a bigger screen, but this is a kind of question that you just won't get an answer from the forum. It's way too big a business secret to just go shouting about.

Meanwhile, go check out the LG GW990. It will run Meego. It's certainly a good alternative if Nokia can't come up with a bigger device by the time it's released.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

We never ever speculate about devices before they are launched. Not even at a D-Pad or stand level. ;)

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Hmm... Are you sure that's what people are saying, and not:

"We were expecting the next step to be the fifth of five steps on the way to a fully polished mass marketed Maemo. Instead it turns out the next step will be a first wobbly step on the long way to a fully polished MeeGo product, why? "

Now, I admit, MeeGo is a nice goal but somehow it feels like we're jumping from the Maemo beta to the MeeGo alpha build without having a proper RTM in between. And knowing this, some including me expect that Nokia will be focusing on adapting Harmattan towards the MeeGo frameset, which means breaking up and putting together stuff in new ways. They will simply have more to do than in a purely evolutionary update. The end result will probably be better. But they have to focus ahead and not on making things backportable. In the mean time, they will fix critical bugs on our current platform, but not add anything that doesn't fit into the MeeGo plan. So GTK+ applications will be EOLed while they rebuild the same applications in QT.

Now, the fact that they are going to develop these on the N900 platform is very positive for the more adventerous Maemo users. Very. But for those would only rely on officially supported firmware updates, IMO, there's a risk that the N900 will never be much better than it is today. For those who "consider it a phone", that means, not really all that good. =p For those who consider it a computer, it still means it has all the potential in the world, it might get an even cooler OS in a year or two.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Looking forward to this. Seems there are a lot of interesting apps there, including video editing, word processing, and many miscellaneous to explore such as keyanu.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

I think that if MeeGo will be still in alpha when the first device is launched Nokia and Intel would be committing commercial suicide and kill the project in its infancy.