Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Harsh. Love your way or dealing with it though, you seem unfazed.

Apache alone destroys that. But the problem with "free software" is when it goes up against corporate software that's been established for a long time and falls a bit flat in some areas... for me, that would be Photoshop versus the GIMP's and the rest. Sure, they're usable, but not it's not the same. But... it's not supposed to be. In some areas, GIMP is better, in some others, it's not. But I wouldn't say "worthless".

If the lack of developers is the problem then... then the community won't polish Maemo 5. It needs to be said now. I can deal with reality better than fantasy.

I blame Nokia's push to the "it's the newest, most open, blah blah for developers" push that they got going on now that makes competent developers abandon prior iterations of their "open software" the truly depends on the closed bits way too ****ing much.

Fix that and people will fix the stuff Nokia can't be arsed to fix and then take that expertise to the next OS at their own leisure as opposed to always chasing the Nokia carrot and never fulfilling the full potential of any OS - past or present.

That's my take. You... keep developing. You're an asset and lifeline to this OS, community and agenda.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I think this is a pretty useful thread.
I'm beginning see more clearly why a lot of disappointed n900 users post on these forums.

As mentioned, a great many are carrying with them the experiences of past cell/smart phone usage. Of course, the best of these devices are very complete and polished for the majority of end-users. These devices are, in some cases, easier to design, while being harder for the user to screw-up.

I think this has been the status quo from the beginnings of cellular technology. Sure there have been enterprising hackers and tweakers who have worked around the fail-safe's and enjoyed a more flexible product, but these folks are not the majority.

Speaking for myself, a person who makes a living from tools and technology, I shunned all the "swiss army phones" just as I've shunned do-it-all tools. (OK I have a leatherman! :o) When I felt the need to have a cell-phone, that was all I wanted......a cell phone! I didn't want a bunch of inferior peripheral crap of dubious value. It only needed clear communication, good battery life and a fairly big contacts list. This I found, more or less, altough I can still find fault in just about anything.... when I want to!;)

The thing that irritates and bothers me more than ANYTHING is the device/vehicle/tool etc that is sealed from any corrective, customizing or repair approach that may be required or desired. (I can change a battery!!!) This really irks me!

Now when I saw the first pocket pc-phone I've ever bought.....the n900, I saw a powerful flexible device with a host of features to allow as unfettered communication as any device I've seen before! Like others have already compared it to, I saw a fresh, tiny PC with superb communication abilities thrown in!

Polish!!!
Man I planned to configure this little Hot-Rod Exactly the way I wanted! On my terms....

Do I like things with polish??? Of Course!

Will the n900 ever be polished??? Phhhhhtt NO!

Do I care???? With a community like this and a flexible, tweakable device like the n900? ....Naw!

I like the n900 better and better every time I polish it.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

then you must have heard from 5 steps?

M5 is huge leap from OS2008, you should know it too if you own both N800 & N900....

..and because of whole UI remake there probably wasn't enough resources for email, [insert any other unpolished item here], ...

e: simple illustration:
OS2008
http://talk.maemo.org/attachment.php...1&d=1205353156

M5
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2798/...ffe42e2077.jpg

ee: and btw I am waiting the device that made n800 look like sub-par....

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

You know, one thing that I think is really keeping people from developing for the N900 more is the horrible state of the documentation. It seems to be all over the place and near unintelligible. It took me hours to find a working example of adding my own category to the contacts list. It was even a colossal pain to install the SDK itself.

Then there is the reliance on Eclipse (Which is really just a piece of trash.), the fact that the environment variables inside the scratchbox are not automatically set up to actually find libraries on their own does not help either. When you try to compile on the command-line inside the scratchbox you end up getting linker related errors and have to play around with various flags to get your code to compile. This also makes it even harder to use some other tool to write the code (I'm an Emacs guy myself.)

In short it is such an annoyance that it makes me want to avoid spending time actually writing anything for the N900 because it feels like I have to pull teeth to find what I want from the documentation and pull even more teeth to get code that is otherwise correct to actually build. I have enough problems getting stuff to work at my job, I really don't want to be bothered with platform related issues when coding in my free time. I would much rather be dealing issues related to the actual program I am writing, rather than the tools and or manuals getting in my way.

It is really a shame that the current Maemo documentation is in the state that it is in because Nokia does have people on their staff that know how to organize documentation. Even without really knowing C or C++ I can easily navigate the Qt docs and find what I am looking for in most cases. I really can't wait for the port over to Qt to be finished since that will most likely address the problem of poorly organized documentation.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

N900 is excellent in many ways but it could have been much better with a bit more love from Nokia. But since its future path was cut pretty much at the beginning of its release by Nokia themselves, most commercial developers stayed away from it even before trying. Nokia knew that would happen but didn't care as no official MeeGo upgrade means N900 wasn't meant to live past 2010. Simple as that.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Even an inferior product like the iphone in terms of its hardware specs at each generation can be made to be amazing with a little love from the vendor.

But without that vision and focus to carry it through, having lots of separate projects is not going to create that finesse. Its more of a patch up job.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Automatically comes with working for customers who constantly try to belittle your efforts in order to beat down the price. :D

Guess that's one of the reasons so many people still believe in free software being inferior - they expect it to be an exact copy of commercial software when it actually has the power to be so much more than that.

To be true, yes, there's a certain probability that this will never happen.

But I wouldn't give up all hope yet, as there's an even higher probability at certain developers growing bored of writing simple applications and looking for new challenges. Challenges that providing good alternatives for the closed source parts might provide.

This is Linux after all, and Linux developers are quite different from other app developers. They are bound to hack the core system after a while. :D

Not sure why they think that osbourning their devices over and over again is such a great marketing strategy. But I see it as an important task of this very community to get the word out there that Maemo is NOT dead just because the original initiator has lost interest in it.

Especially not with Qt being the future of MeeGo, which actually means we'll get lots and lots of applications that can be used with Maemo, too.

I'm pretty sure that's what most of the current developers plan to do, since they already know Maemo's potentials. It's really just the not-yet developers I'm concerned about since they might be thrown of by the current state of this community (aka all the negativity floating around right now).

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I've said it before. I personally don't think the N900 should even be considered Step 4 to Step 5 to a user device for the consumers. More like Step 3 to me.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Just going to issue a challenge out here...

What other "phone" out there can do everything the n900 can? (i say "phone" as the n900 is primarily a computer, with a phone secondary)

Hell, i can even remotely control my home computer (VNC) from my mobile phone.:eek:

With the amount of capabilities it has, if you wanted a "polished" product it would cost twice as much as it does now, and you'd be locked into the programs they provided (like the iphone). If you say "well, the community can replace anything they want with whatever they want" then you cut away some programming and reduce the end price, then the user "polishes" the phone themself, individually, according to their requirements. You can't polish a phone to suit everyone's needs, because i can guarantee something will piss someone off every time.

As i said earlier, if you want something changed - program it yourself (BECAUSE THE N900 ALLOWS YOU TO DO THAT)

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Other smartphone devices can run ubuntu etc although they are not built around it

Have you seen this for instance:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=53436

HD2 has Ubuntu and USB out although GSM voice is still being ported.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

He hasn't run away as well has he?

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

arm doesnt necessarily make it a phone, gsm radio more likely.

but now there are laptops with gsm radios so....the lines are blurred bigtime.

if placing and receiving gsm based audio calls is your primary use for a mobile device, no, the n900 is not the device for you.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I think the G1 can run a Debian instance too. Not sure about the high end Android devices like the HTC Evo 4G, Droid(s), etc.. though.

The way I see it there are two things happening. Computers converging with mobile devices and smartphones increasing getting computer functionality. Basically computer functions being found more in phones and phone functions being found more in computers (mainly for the mobile data).

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Yeah sorry, I retracted it as soon as I posted it, my point was its a device power optimised to be a phone/mid first not a computer. Which is why I think its a fairer comparison.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I am curious about what happened with the survey for n900 owners a few months ago, was that a survey for things they want to implement for "us" or was it for things they wanted to make sure they wanted in the future tablets? I think that may answer a question or two on how Nokia is committed to improving our experience.


When i bought y phone I definately understood that this was going to come with software that wasn't going to be the most "polished" but I bought it anyway because of the features and I was sure that with time this device would only get better and better. I hope I was right.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

And the counter challenge is, how may people want that device, vs the one that can do 80% of what it can do, but does it with a better user experience?

And how do we attract developers to this small, niche market when they can tap into the huge market of people happy with the 80% device?

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

x86 Moorestown, with embedded win 7 etc, will prove that there is a market for the desktop experience. People just dont want to comprimise with Linux, or Arm or a shoddy to non existent appstore. And they sure as hell don't want to hack or mess around with terminal. They want instant gratification and who can blame them?

If windows 7 x86 phones were out there with a mobile optimised app market they would sell well (even the n900 was proof of that in the UK). Not sure about beating iphone though.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Developers who are interested in solely making money would have never been interested in Maemo simply because there's no way Nokia could've pushed enough Maemo devices out there to rival Android or the iPhone. Even if Maemo was a perfect copy of the iPhone (hardware and software wise).

The only way to attract developers is to:

a) provide the marketshare
b) provide easy tools to use to make said applications

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

This is so so true and the very reason that Meamo has failed, you can thank Nokia for this as they never pushed Meamo but came up with Meego instead screwing up any kind of future development that could or would have taken place for Meamo..

So what now?, as Meamo we are stuffed basically and have to wait untill Meego catches up even let alone becomes a viable OS.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I know the Nexus One chroots Debian.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Well Maemo is suppose to be QT Compatible with Symbian 3 and Meego. Hence (if it works) is any program developed in QT for those platforms works on Maemo (and vice versa any development in QT for Maemo works in anything else QT compatible).

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

My point never was that Maemo on the N900 was a perfect product.

My point was that Nokia supplied a fully functional peice of software

As i've compared it to already, a laptop comes out with Windows on it, bundled with IE, solitaire etc. I don't use IE or solitaire, so i install firefox and left4dead2 on there. The N900 is identical - except with maemo, not windows.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

They're maemo and MeeGo...

"Meamo!" sounds like what Zorro would say to catherine zeta jones... after she slaps him for looking at her dirtily...

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

ysss, I think I'm going change my signature to what you just said. lol

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Yes i can agree if your right but what is supposed to be and what is actual are two different things.

Why do we have all the problems we have if they are actually compatible with eachother, so now we know Meego is the future then why did Nokia give out a lame excuse for a Meego OS?, obviously a first attempt at the Meego OS so where is the compatibility occuring here?.

@ lordfury007 , My point never was that Maemo on the N900 was a perfect product.

My point was that Nokia supplied a fully functional peice of software

How can you say this ??? is this some kind of sick joke? lol.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

According to Nokia the N900 is so so perfect ha ha, now they might want us all to believe things are so right as they never give us anything but useless upgrades and keep us completely confused.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Right now i really want to be Zorro with his trusty sword in hand right in the middle of the Nokia stable in their development dept lol.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

And accomplish what? Offend their ears with another "meamo" chant?

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Oh now let me think... they are probably comparable with our useless football team, old haggered and damm useless lol so to scare a few of them off indef for them to get younger more competent staff would be good for starters ha ha.

What ears? they would be off with the sword of course lol. :D

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

You're new to the troll game, aren't you?

Anyway, as it stands... if it's not a product for you, then why invest so much anger into it?

I know, I know... the irony of my own statements don't escape me.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Troll? huh since when i be one of them? and do you actually know what the "lol" stands for? who is angry here huh, not me that's for sure as i am more than happy with my N900 especially after what i have achieved with it.

Gerbick you could not be further away from your own statements.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Better get the popcorn this looks to be fun lol.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

So wait. If you're happy with the N900, then why the swordplay/threat to Nokia?

No popcorn necessary. I'm trying to figure out your new vector as of late... and decided that it was too erratic to pin down.

So, I'll dismiss it instead. Glad you're happy with your N900, keep up the good work on the posts.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

It functions fine for me - i can make and recieve phone calls, text messages, emails, can surf the internet, connect to wifi and bluetooth, play music and movies... and thats with the base software.

Face it - this phone does more out of the box than any normal laptop, yet you wouldn't complain if a laptop had less functionality than this, straight out of the box.

What you are looking for, is something that does everything for you, exactly the way you want it to, and you don't have to put any effort into it at all.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Zorro is a heroic charector from a series of movies and i was playing the heroin as a joke, why you have to be so serious man lol (reminds me of that yank tennis player John McEnroe lol) anyhow i am sure you mean well, maybe you should consider a job with Nokia as a security guard at the devlopment dept :p.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Well i would never say it does everything i want it to do but there again what mobile does?, i am happy with mine but i had to do a lot of work to it myself to get it there no thanks to the maker.

If your happy then great so no further comment.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

Marketing hype.

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

What's lame about MeeGo? It's not finished yet. Does that make it lame? It's way, way too early to pass judgment. Lame or not remains to be seen when devices running final versions hit the market. Since it will be basically a full-stack, open mobile Linux OS (similar to Maemo) I doubt anyone who likes Linux will consider MeeGo lame.

As for compatibility, read my previous sentence and think Qt.

The base Maemo OS is fully functional and quite nice. Excellent UI. 'Fully fuctional' regarding the included or available apps depends strictly on your expectations and needs. For me they're almost 100% functional. The only things really missing is DocsToGo Premium (coming any day now) and bluetooth printing (Mace is working on it).

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

I never quite fully understand where this "the n900 is not the device for you" come from.

If a device (N900 or not) is capable of doing task A, as well as B, C, D. Then why would me wanting a device that's capable of doing task A would exclude me from choosing a device that can also do B, C and D...especially when I don't mind paying more for features that I don't need (after all, who really use 100% of the features of any tools, devices...etc?).

Re: Is the N900 ever going to be a polished product?
 

It's not that wanting to have task A will make a ABCD device the wrong one to get (as long as you're okay with paying for BCD without ever using them).

It's wanting to have task E (MMS), F (10 racing games to choose from), G (everything pre-installed) that makes the ABCD device the wrong choice. In that case one should rather try to get an AEFG device.