Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

You don't think mobile Internet includes email? It would be nice if Modest were fixed, so it could work as advertised. Oh yeah here on the box it says "Internet calling with web camera..." Cool! only that's not completely true, is it?

I dunno about you but my mobile Internet experience starts with typing something in... hmm, can't quite do that without falling over a long standing finger-keyboard bug in MicroB. (That Mr. Abel acknowledges on bugzilla).

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

It seems completely true from here. Absence of explicit qualifiers (such as "with other compatible software") does not negate obvious implicit qualifications. (At least I assume that's where you think it's untrue...)

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

It works for you? Cool, you have google chat on your device, let me fire up google chat on my desktop and you can explain to me how you got it working!

Or do you need compatible software *and* compatible hardware? Wow, that's kinda against the whole intent of the Internet isn't it?

I say it's not *completely* true because in actual use cases, it does not function. I include Gizmo in this, because when I tried it was unusable as a videochat device. With profound proprietary hooks like that in the device you better believe they should mark something on the box. Someone before mentioned the word "disingenuous"?

If you want more picky, the next column on the box calls it a webcam. Go to something like mebeam.com and tell me if the webcam works on... you know, the web.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Internet isn't an alias for 'world wide web'. That's just a single service. For a rough idea about how many there are, try 'cat /etc/services' on your Nokia.

Certainly email is a major, important part of 'mobile internet'-ing.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Ok. When I see articles talking about nokia porting qt back from april, and they own the gosh-darned thing, it doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to think they might be officially supporting it by now and not just as a "community project."


I was looking at the toolkits they have running on top of it (tidy?) and that's more minimal than what I expect. If I really wanted to build a very rich UI from complete and total scratch it's fine, but that is not what I'm targeting.



What if someone wanted to try installing it? Do most people keep extras-devel available all the time? :)

That's the hat I'm wearing right now for this project, so yes. However I'll want to run this on an n900, not an n8xx, so I want to know what is and is not going to be "officially" available. Sounds like qt isn't guaranteed to be well supported enough to use out of the box for fremantle and that's what I wanted to know.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Usually, 'unlimited' means 'limited but we won't tell you the limit'. If you'd download fullspeed (3.5 mbit) on 3G 24/7 you'd burn about 886 gbit (110 GB) a month. Try it out for fun and profit, but most ISPs will either: 1) contract you with a 'special offer' or 2) cap the crap out of you. You've been warned.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

I assume this was in response to the data services discussion. You are correct that the service is truly not unlimited. ATT caps their "unlimited" media net plan at 5GB as far as I know. Not sure about their other services. I usually only burn a couple hundred MB a month.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Considering that Nokia hired the primary Qt on Maemo guy to work for Maemo Software, I'd say they're putting plenty of money on it. Honestly, though, there are a ton of very talented people currently working on Qt for Maemo. Just because it doesn't happen to be "blessed" this time around, doesn't suddenly make it useless ****. Personally, if I were one of those people working on Qt, I'd be more than a little offended to hear somebody pass judgement about it without even using the damn thing.

The new Hildon isn't out yet, so the toolkits you see available now aren't the ones that will be available later. Again give it time and wait for a release that you're actually the intended audience of. :)

Extras-devel isn't the end of the world, and, yes, a lot of people keep it enabled all the time. Why don't you try it and see? I think you're likely to be pretty impressed by how well Qt works on Maemo at this point.

They'll push it to Extras when it's ready, of course, but perhaps you should consider actually talking to the people involved? They're listed on the Garage project page I linked in my last post.

See, now you're jumping to more conclusions based on assumptions and bad data. Python is a community-supported toolkit, and it's perfectly usable out-of-the-box (ever tried Canola?). So your argument that community is synonymous with "wont work out-of-the-box" is bunk.

Let's step back, try taking a look at what's available right now (which I think you'll find quite satisfactory), then maybe come back in a few months when the beta is out and see what you think then. I'm quite certain you'll be more than satisfied.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

So, nobody answered my question. Does that mean that there's no practical use for this SDK except to show that Nokia is serious about open source? Who are these platform developers? What exactly do they develop? Can you give me an example?

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

me, I will be playing specifically towards liqbase!

I will be getting it all installed this weekend hopefully.
I want to see how things sit and once I do that I'll do some testing with clutter on my laptop and see if its buildable on both.

of course it would be easier with a device, but it will do for now.

The alternative to diving straight in with clutter is ensuring my app as it stands builds (I dont think i can run it though, i've never been able to get it working in the past in emulation).

If I know it *builds* on the new device it makes life easier, but if there are missing libraries due to changes I will need to adapt and make ifdefs in code.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

People who develop platform stuff. Kernel, application framework, SDK, system libraries, etc.

Yes, there's plenty of practical use for this release. Both for people directly involved in development, and for folks interested in the architecture (upstream, etc).

In particular, how about Mer? . . .

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

You can go to http://maemo-sdk.garage.maemo.org/ and get the release candidate SDK+ running in your PC with the Fremantle rootstraps. File bugs if you find any problem (including documentation not good enough for starters). Open a thread here giving your impressions.

It would be good to have feedback from application developers using the current official SDK. What is better, what could be improved, what is missing.

If you never used the Maemo SDK before you are encouraged to start with this one instead. The content is just the same and the entry level should be much lower. Still not the best and easiest tools for newcomers but they will come as well at some point.

Even power users willing to follow the Fremantle release themselves can try installing it now and see how the newborn looks like in your emulated environment. The sooner you get familiar with this the easier will be for you to install applications as soon as they come and help testing them.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

When ???? :)

Christtmas gift?

:-p

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

The issue is software. It's a matter of protocol only, not hardware related; there's simply a dearth of proper software on all platforms except the tablets. Since the desktop client doesn't support video at all, it should be unsurprising that it does not support it with a specific remote endpoint. I'm not sure what you consider the "whole intent of the internet", but I don't see how this is against it.

While the native software was, AFAIK, only able to support video tablet-to-tablet (due to complete absence of jingle-video support in other software, including Google's own) till last year, with rtcomm comes SIP video interoperability with 3rd party software (including eyebeam and x-lite), so it's definitely fulfilled now.

So using Google's protocol, and having no interoperability because Google can't be troubled to implement their own protocol, is "profound proprietary hooks"?!

I say it is completely true because in actual use cases, it does function. I don't include Gizmo in this, because I don't use Gizmo; Internet Call works fine for me, and I think the use cases in which it doesn't work are not reasonably inferred from the marketing statements.

Well, picky's good, but I'd rather be correct; I'm actually gonna go for both here, though. Webcam is a word, and as such it has a meaning independent of its etymology. Generally, it refers not to videoconferencing at all, but to live uploading of images (or, lately, streaming) for viewing over the worldwide web (which, BTW, is a concept of interlinked hypertext, and doesn't properly apply to a Flash-based star-topology service). Still, proper webcam functionality also does not exist out-of-the-box on the tablets, which is actually a stronger argument that "webcam" is misapplied here. (Basic webcam functionality is available by third-party software, of course, e.g. motion.)

Clearly, though, the problem is an abuse of terminology, rather than intent to deliver a genuine webcam defeated by bugs or incompleteness.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Hardware faults, absolutely. For instance, my N800 is currently undergoing warrany repair for the touchscreen sensitivity issue and will eventually, hopefully one day find its way back to me. That kind of thing can happen to early adopters, no biggie and not your problem.

The software side isn't so black and white though. Let me pick one of my personal pet peeves as an example (no, I'm not going to touch the GPS topic with the proverbial bargepole): the hardware keyboard language switching bug (2501/3407). This is a feature that definitely doesn't work as described in the documentation, looks like a software bug (although if not I would like to know before the warranty runs out) and probably not that hard to fix at that (but see below). Would it have been preferable/more reasonable from your point of view to return the device immediately or report the bug along with any relevant information I could find and wait for a fix as I have done?

In any case, at least now we know where we stand with respect to firmware updates for current devices. Disappointing, but a better position to be in than last week.

Yes, definitely. In fact I'd love pointers to where I should start looking for fixing the above bug, but the only reference to a specific package (hildon-input-method-plugins) is to something that doesn't even exist in binary form yet, including Fremantle.

Don't we all. Anyway, I think I've vented enough already, I'll shut up now :-)

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

It seems to me that when considering a realistic timeline for the release of this device, a better option than HSPA would be LTE. It'd really suck if I go out and buy an HSPA device only to find a LTE edition to be released Q4 09 or Q1 '10. In the long run, LTE would be much better and be supported by the most networks (in the US anyway).

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

I think you're being just a touch optimistic about LTE deployment. If we're talking a Summer 2009 release, then it's gonna be, what, 2 years before you get any decent sort of coverage with LTE? Whereas with HSPA you get strong coverage in practically all metropolitan areas and slow, but available coverage almost everywhere else right now. Really, what's the real advantage going to be with LTE? It's not as if we're maxing out 802.11g in any way shape or form now.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Agreed, LTE is just too far away for serious consideration. It would be great if the Maemo5 device could support HSPA+ which apparently is a software upgrade to the existing ATT HSDPA network.

link: http://www.electronista.com/articles...plus.now.live/

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Maybe your just being a touch optomistic about the actual release date of Maemo 5. Recent analysts have been *claiming deployment in some areas as soon as late 2009. There was very limited Wimax availability at the time it was announced as well (I'd say there still is). I really think (I'm sure you'll disagree...since I don't remember you really agreeing with well...anybody:rolleyes:) that it's the better choice (even if you can't use it for a few months) since you'll be more limited with HSPA than LTE with regards to speed, carrier, bandwidth, max downloads, etc. And I think it's going to happen sooner than you think because big companies like Verizon have so much of their future vested in it.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Mind backing that up with more than just forum speculation? The beta release is scheduled for March-May 2009. Don't tell me you seriously thing it'd take another 6-7 months after that to kick a device out the door.

By "it" I'm assuming you mean the N810W. It's a niche product, and not really much of an argument for launching your platform's primary product with a dead-weight data modem. You think there was a bad reaction when people found their email client didn't really work, how bad do you think it'd be if you had to wait 6 months for that much-touted cellular connectivity to work?

Perhaps when it's actually rolled out, but until it is it's another WiMAX situation. That's one thing for a niche product like the N810W, but completely another for the platform's primary device. Anyway, what makes you think the next tablet after RX-51 wont have LTE?

Can you try to argue your points without making it personal? It really doesn't help your case.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

The remark seems to have made the case I intended.

But, regarding the speculation, I'm sure you know how to work google and have your own trusted IT news sources so I'll leave you to that. But, you might want to check into the new LG handset chip for LTE that was recently announced and the Verizon announcement from Dec 9 stating it plans to begin deploying LTE in 2009. Specifically, look into discussions by people who I'd say would have a better knowledgea about this than you or I. Namely, the executive vice president and CTO of Verizon Communications stated, "We expect that LTE will actually be in service somewhere here in the U.S. probably this time next year."

I agree that people might not appreciate not being able to utilize all of the devices capablities right away, but this happens all the time. For many phones GPS or other features are turned off until a new ROM is produced. I understand your point, but on the other hand software such as email is a little different than a hardware feature.

By the way. I was right... I was making a joke because I knew you would disagree.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Well, WiMAX vs. LTE is not completely settled yet, and with the HSPA+ upgrade path, I just don't see LTE being a more broadly compatible choice than HSPA anytime soon. Moreover, it's my understanding that dual-mode LTE/UMTS solutions aren't readily available any time soon, so an LTE device would probably be a long time in even catching up to the N810W in terms of possible geographic coverage.

Anyway, no matter which decision would be best, Nokia's made it quite plain that the decision has been made already, and that HSPA won.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Either you have something to back up your claim of Q4 2009 or you don't. My trusted sources would indicate a release date much earlier than that. So it seems we're at an impasse.

In that case, you meant to use one of these: :p ;) :) and not :rolleyes:

All you proved is that I disagree with you, which stands to reason when you make rather extreme claims about release dates and put forth somewhat specious arguments as to why your way is better than Nokia's way.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

It occured to me that you missunderstood me. I was stating that LTE is supposed to go online in Q4, not the N900.

The LTE discussion was all over the IT headlines a few days ago. It's not a lack of a source, it's simply a matter of the fact that I'd assume you already have a trusted source for your news.

Here is number one in my google search about LTE and Verizon: http://www.networkworld.com/news/200...c=netflash-rss

I don't really feel the need to prove anything to you. It IS my opinion that LTE would be the best choice in the long run. I don't think nor would I expect Nokia to always agree with me. As an aside, I also see it as a reasonable option that they could release a version with LTE support later on similar to the release of the Wimax edition when the LTE becomes more established. Also, I expect the N900 to be delayed, the reasons for which I won't discuss right now.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

That would explain it. Apologies for the misunderstanding. :) In that case, I wouldn't worry overly much about a 6-month-later tablet release.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Sorry. It's my fault since I wasn't clear. I suckered you in on the defensive by my mischievous remark and confusing wording.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Point taken, well for the community supported version it will either need to be available in source form (or as a Nokia provided binary) and if the latter and it's still broken it will be on the list to be replaced.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Nokia has invested in LTE technology on the network side, sooo... do the "math". ;)

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Before LTE we get HSPA+ (Evolved HSPA).

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

I think you are trying (hard) to twist the argument to suit your initial point here. Lets be objective and accept deficiencies where there are - even from the marketing speak point of view.

The way you write that last paragraph about webcam and etymology and word definitions and all that - its befitting a Washington polictical spin-master indeed - so high-brow and twisted I couldn't understand the intent ofthe statement itself :D

Kudos!

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

(apologies for cross posting, thought this was relevant for the followers of this thread.)

For those of you interested in the project to amongst others, bring Fremantle components to N8x0(w) (and possibly 770 - we had X working + hildon booting last night) and continuing to have active OS development for these devices, we're having a bootstrapping meeting Sunday to get the project kicked off.

There's need for all sorts of people, ranging from artists(themes, icons, artwork), packagers, general developers, people with interest in user experience on tablets, to kernel/initfs hackers - and all of these exist in the tablet community.

More information can be found in this thread

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Not to point to the obvious here, but the US lags behind Europe (esp. UK) with respect to mobile broadband usage (or so we are told). Hence why the iphone sales in europe were much better once the 3G version arrived.
I reckon it is more likely to have an n900 then an n910x when whatever x is (looks like it isn't wimax) given in europe the investment of the 3G infrastructure the providers have.
(I believe that the old iphone caused problems because stations had to be retrofitted with edge technology, when they were already HSDPA (or what ever 3.5G is, I get confused with all these names!)

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

I completely disagree. I found Benson's post to be very objective. What he appears to be "trying very hard" to do is enunciate clearly in order to avoid misinterpretation of meaning and motive. Looks like the latter fell short with at least one reader... :rolleyes:

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

The first iPhone, exclusively sold together with a ATT contract, allows max EDGE which is an extension to GSM/GPRS and slower than later released HSDPA standard. The first iPhone was not sold in Europe. In Europe many telcos have already rolled out HSDPA before the first iPhone was released. The iPhone 3G can be bought without a bundle because of legal obligations in [some] European countries. However, the App Store does not include the tethering application because ATT does not allow this. As seen on a recent presentation by Nokia, Nokia has a market penetration of ~ 50% in Europe and Asia; in US only approx 10%. The upgrade path after HSDPA and HSUPA is HSPA+ which is rolled out in Australia, and now also starting to be rolled out in Sweden and Denmark. After that its time for LTE deployment.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

It was sold in Europe. Not very successfully, but still...

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Okay. This is the same BS Sharp pulled with the Zaurus SL5500. "Look, look, cool geek device". Then, bam, discontinued. "No worries" said the community, we can use the source from the Open version of the Qtopia project... except what actually happened was:

1) Trolltech carried on on their own merry dance, did some cool things with Qtopia - even released a ROM for the SL5500.... except there was no software available for the ROM because the ABI was broken.

2) Sharp released most of their source, but left various parts closed (e.g. the SD Card driver) which then basically screwed the community. A lot of hacks went in to then support the legacy driver in later versions of community OS projects.

3) Opie was born - a forked Qtopia... except it never really worked properly. There were a lot of driver issues and general weirdness. They also based it on a version of Qtopia that didn't have the Sharp 3.10 ROM changes in to, and it was annoyingly missing key features because of that.

4) Sharp released a backport of the SL5600 ROM and labelled it 3.10. At first Opie used the same basic ABI and it was cool, and apps could be shared. Then Opie moved to the more modern 3.X line of GCC, and the 3.10 ROM was orphaned - even though it really was the better ROM IMO.

5) Another X based version of the ROM with whatever GNOME had as their older mobile platform was released and was completely incompatible with everything else.

The community was fragmented. The OS stagnated because the binary drivers became a really big issue in keeping the platform alive.

This is exactly what i see the N8x0 platform turning in to. Sucks. If I wasn't using the N800 for doing some mobile Mono based dev work, it would be on eBay as I type. I'm simply NOT willing to go through the total ******** that goes along with this situation. Give me a development platform I can install on my operating system of choice - without using a VMWare or similar emulation layer, and things might be different. However, being a Windows (day job) and Mac (home) bod, I'm not happy to use LINUX. Thank goodness Mono is now usable!!

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Having seen the N97 being shown recently at the Barcelona event - a N9xx that used the same hardware design would be really nice. Pocketable, touch screen designed for fingers. Qwerty keyboard. Nice camera. Nice multimedia. Imaging, an N970, N97 running Maemo! That would be interesting.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Except we don't have binary drivers, Nokia is dedicated to providing support to the community edition and Maemo is way more open than anything Sharp ever shipped.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

And the Zaurus community is still alive and supported by the Angstrom distro (based on OE). The Sharp Zaurus sl-5x00(D) now has a 2.6.x kernel (despite all the Sharp release kernels being 2.4.x) and afaik the c7x0 devices now have some working hw acceleration (again working from no docs).

This is GPE, nothing to do with Gnome, except that it used an X server rather than drawing directly to the fb like Qtopia/Opie did.

Re: Maemo 5 Reveals its Features
 

Ehm, that is exactly what the N900 will have: pocketable, touch screen designed for fingers (Maemo 5 will focus on this), qwerty keyboard I admit we don't know, nice camera *check*, hs*pa *check*, nice multimedia *check*, and probably quite some diskspace as well. Imagine a N900 being a lot like N97! That would be interesting!

I don't understand why you're so excited about Mono. I rather see full Java support.

You're right that Sharp abandoned the Sharp Zaurus 5500. But this was also simply too slow, and there was still community support. Regarding N8x0 the only thing which slows down a community edition is the WLAN driver (which is now although incomplete also open source). Something like PowerVR is a bummer, I admit, but the way I see it Nokia is learning from the past so I give them the benefit of doubt. Besides that, I simply welcome the better performance. Welcome? I'm rooting for it! :)