Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

I totally agree. Forget how Apple or Google handle updates. It's irrelevant. What is relevant is how good both companies are about lining out device support the day a new update is announced

Hell, I'm struggling to think of a company that does not clearly outline device support when announcing software.

Nokia, your seriously PR sucks. How you've handled N900 launch and Meego/Maemo/whatever are a prime examples.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

This is actually the weakness of FOSS. The unconscious thinking that "it's okay to break compatibility because the source is out there" probably costs billions of dollars. It's just laziness, it's not a tradeoff that stifles innovation. I throw away code all the time; that's part of the process. But I treat public API's with a little bit more respect.

Let's coin a phrase:

"You don't have to love the code, but you better like the idea."

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Yes, I've been increasingly relying upon this over the past few months.

Based on the OP's emphasis on constructive dialog, I really didn't think this would be one of those threads, but I agree that I should be using better personal discretion going forward. In fairness to me, though, there have been a lot of threads with useful/constructive information that have gotten highjacked. I'm interested in MeeGo (for example) and the future of this forum and some of these conversations are getting drowned out or diverted.

Thanks for your efforts!

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

I think this is really a clean up by Quim :-) Thank. May be you should lock the thread "Nokia promises N900 will get MeeGo! Or perhaps not". I think since it will ignite the flame once more, there is no point for people to get even more angrier.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Great idea; however I quite don't see how this cleans up the FUD. Seems to have concentrated the FUD.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

It's a concentrated cleaning solution. Too much dilution, though, and it becomes ineffective.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Sure. Please note that no new update has been announced, though. We haven't even made a first Harmattan pre-release. And MeeGo doesn't exist today even in its most unstable form.

Weeks ago I said in the oldest 'Harmattan in the N900' thread that there were new things in the pipeline and that before a Harmattan alpha release (promised for 1Q2010, working on it) it was really premature to discuss or announce anything.

This is still the case. Maemo 5 is still a fresh stable release in expansion, with new updates to come and more software coming to Ovi and maemo.org. Harmattan/MeeGo are in pre-alpha state, we haven't even put together an early SDK for the most adventurous developers, we haven't given any hardware details about the next device...

One thing is that some users have a high interest knowing what all this implies in terms of N900 support. Another thing is to expect official announcements and promises at this point, considering that the lack of it is unacceptable.

I'm not arguing the right to know. I'm only questioning this situation in which experienced users demand an annoucement about a release that hasn't been announced, before even a first most unstable pre-release is available.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Works for me! ;)

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Touche Gil; what I meant by "update" was "new software." When Intel announced Moblin, they spelled out specifically what platform it was designed for (I should know, I work for them..). When Windows launches any OS, it's not long at all before they release system requirements. Apple is pretty blunt about telling PowerPC users which applications they launch will not work on their platform. Nokia has danced around the issue, by saying things like "N900-like devices".

Will I be upset if Nokia says "no"? Definitely.

Will I be upset at how Nokia is handling this whole situation even if they ultimately support Meego? Definitely.

In short, it's just a "yes" or "no" question. Really, it's that simple. I'd guarantee Intel would be in a world of hurt from customers if they announced a new processor without specifying what platform it would install in..

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

The second.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

I think a Q&A format would work better, and for that the easiest is a wiki where anybody can edit.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

common guy let just leave Quim do his job would ya? Stop trying to make him answering the question that doesn't really have an answer. Yes he work for Nokia but he isn't Nokia himself. I believe he'll not hide anything from the people here, i believe that he really have no idea about this MeeGO thing. Can't we just sit tight and wait until MeeGO OS become more Solid than now before asking him about it?

I also wandering about it too but just keep your mood cool for now and focusing on the applications and help developing more handy goodies software. It's not like we can do anything right now. We all may have our say! but saying too much is annoying and become a pain in the head.

Just keep it cool guys! and love your N900 :) i loved mine.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

In developer terms, Symbian had already navigation implemented and removing the payment step was simple. Maemo didn't have navigation implemented so no matter what new policies come, the implementation must be developed first.

Then you mention some bugs. It would be useful to have in that wiki page links to the bug reports that bug more N900 users. FUD says the Maemo team is not saying or doing anything about them, resolving everything as FIXED in Harmattan. It will help to refer to the concrete reports users have in mind when saying that, though.

Not true! The Fremantle team, lead by people like konttori, keeps working on new updates. Fixing, polishing and bringing new features to Maemo 5.

Of course we put a lot of attention on Harmattan/MeeGo/Step 5 since this is what we need to do in order to be and stay in the premier league.

Looking at http://www.octofish.net/bugjar/ we can see that 29 application/platform bugs were resolved as FIXED. It was 30 the week before.

A report of how many Maemo 5 bugs have been resolved as FIXED would be a useful fact, including of course the target release (Fremantle or Harmattan). More flesh for the wiki page?

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

This is granted! I don't recall anybody suggesting that this FUD was premeditated. This is why I think we have ways to clean it, or at least remove a lot of the unnecessary noise and bad mood.

Some posts here suggest that this FUD is some kind of useful lobbying to influence Nokia plans. Yes, a community like this can influence a company like Nokia. But at some point the community needs to evaluate how much worth is the extra noise and the extra bad mood around the same topics and how expensive it is for the community itself to keep this path.

The aim behind this thread is to improve the community mood, discussion levels and collaboration. To help shifting a trend that imho is going nowhere good, and is not helping to solve any problem.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

I applaud the way that Nokia addresses and fixes Maemo bugs (through user-submitted bugzilla reports), the whole deal would be so much sweeter if we could see these fixes sooner rather than later ;)

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

i hope the update is coming sooner this month.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Nobody is saying the expectation is unreasonable. Only the timing could be more reasonable.

For instance, "pretty much the same hardware" is a guess before the hardware details of a new device are announced. Yes, it will be based on OMAP3 but there are more elements in the hardware equation.

Again, please don't try to read between these lines. I just keep explaining reasons why it's too early for some of the questions you ask and why someone like me won't get into details in some discussions.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Sure, but at least I think something needs to be done when in a noticeable % of discussions I'm involved someone comes and says "all this is fine, but what about Harmattan/MeeGo in the N900", and then the discussion goes elsewhere beyond the point of the original topic.

Doing some work done in such context is more difficult and actually those interruptions possibly don't help making any real progress in Maemo 5, Harmattan or MeeGo. If we all understand this while discussing here, fine. If not then people like me will need to go and get some real work done in contexts less exposed than talk.maemo.org.


I honestly believe most of the 'N900 FUD' has lost track of itself and I consider it a cause in itself.

If someone thinks the only cause is Nokia not disclosing here and now a crystal clear plan committed about the N900 support then I politely ask you to look at the current situation and the implications:

Fresh Maemo 5 and Ovi Store getting regular news updates. No Harmattan / MeeGo releases yet. No next device announced yet. Early platforms plans already shared with developers, almost as soon as we have something solid to share. Increasing gitorious.org activity and MeeGo source code weeks away from a release.

plus...

Fierce and fast competition happy to follow all this activity and very happy to receive any end-user relevant news about current and future products in order to plan accordingly. Usually we don't get that much from them.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Confesssion: I haven't read all pages.

Question: Does moving all topics that might be labelled as FUD help Nokia focus on what the issues are by finding them collectively in one place or help them ignore users by giving them an entire forum to ignore?

Don't get me wrong, I agree that the sheer volume of these kinds of threads detracts from what very well could be useful threads, but to argue that it will help Nokia help us seems slightly absurd. Plus, I like playing devil's advocate every once and a while :-)

On a serious note, while Nokia's silence is annoying, the other end of the spectrum -- making a bunch of false promises -- seems far more bleak, and so I don't complain. Customer service on the other hand....

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

This is one of the improvement MeeGo will bring. OSS platform work totally detached from specific vendor plans. If MeeGo wants to have a roadmap with dates they are free to decide that, but a Maemo 5 roadmap with dates is another different story.

One day users will be able to run 'MeeGo unstable' in their devices with updates of whatever OSS components are there integrated. This connected with git repos, bugzilla, even variants with more experimental stuff... the real OSS deal.

Maemo 5 still has a mixture of open/closed & upstream/nokia/3rd parties that is difficult to separate at a release/repository level. Also the "hard" API layers of Qt and Web Runtime will make it easier tu run unstable OS while still keeping your chances of seeing your apps booting every morning and running properly.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

We can't happily add to our roadmaps technologies owned by others. In a normal world the first one announcing support plans of Adobe Flash in ARM platforms would be Adobe.

Actually we have a similar situation about other pieces of software owned actually by someone else (e.g. hardware drivers, very relevant any time a new device is coming).

Upgrading the kernel in a standard x86 product (e.g. your laptop) is not exactly the same game than going through the same kernel update supposed to run across ARM / OMAP cutting edge devices with all the drivers in good shape.

In a normal world Nokia would only need to care about taking or licensing those kernel or drivers, but the mobile hardware platforms still don't belong to such a normal world. Hopefully MeeGo will help here, and a lot.

In a MeeGo context it will be clear that companies like Adobe, TI, etc are the ones having the initiative about their support towards that platform. In the Maemo 5 case the story is more blurred and the consequence is us not being able to handle such information easily in roadmaps.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Definitely!

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

that made no sense. repeated rants wont apparently be removed so those will be available somewhere @ tmo. and rest of your arguments render useless along with that.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

I want. So better luck next time making such harsh aggravations.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Currently the N900 USB detached connector is treated as in warranty case by Nokia Care.

This is about hardware & customer care, and this is all a guy like me can and is willing to discuss here. I hope it was clear though. :)

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

First of all I want to say IU have not followed most of the post on this thread. For me I am not that concerned weather meego makes it to the N900. I got the device because of its advertised set of features. I would rather have most of the bugs fixed. and some things like turn by turn and if possible more portrait support in apps. My concerning is about the future of maemo project as a whole.

It would seem to be that after the initial optimism and excitement that followed the launch of the N900. The news of maemo merging with moblin to form meego is a big anti climax and it further again put a big question mark in Nokia's commitment to maemo (or meego). Currently the mobile space is very crowded and no other OS space is as competitive as the mobile phone space we have android, Iphone OS, windows Mobile, WebOS, Symbian etc all craving for developers mind share. For an OS to survive in this space it needs consistency (among many other things) and solid support and backing of some Big Tech company who is ready to go all the way. They also need to be stable toolkit and sdk well documented which developers can work with when porting their apps. The situation with maemo or meego is so confusing and I really dont see developers wanting to spend their time on that platform. One day we are all looking forward to maemo6 which was suppose to be the last step toward having a consumer ready maemo device. Next thing we know Nokia announces that its scraping maemo and merging it with moblin to form meego. Hence its like Nokia just hit the reset button and everything is back to square one.

For now we are told that meego is just a branding and would infact be maemo6 so they wont be much change to the maemo6 road map. But what happens after maemo6 what are the plans for maemo7 or 8 seriously no one can tell. Right now the Mobile platform with the biggest momentum is android not because its the best but because its has the full backing of google which has been following a consistent road map. Even symbian is safer to develop for than meego. because even though the UI is going through a Revamp The roadmap is clear and has the full backing of Nokia. Meego is a case of the more you look the less you see. Even maemo core developers are not certain about the future of meego.
This does not mean that meego would fail. I dont think so. I think the community would always step up to the plate and as always provide all the apps and cool tools which would make it a compelling device. But I seriously dont see meego making it mainstream anything soon. Not many developers outside the moblin/maemo/linux community would want to bet on it.The much needed commercial app developers ( and even some community developer) would become frustrated and /or confused at the constant shifting of goal post. I love maemo and I want it to succeed. I would defo get a meego device if it is released this year. But I also want a device that is mainstream, I device which could compete with android in term of developer mind share. I device with an app for everything. not just a geek niche device where the community would have to carry all the burden of developing apps for. For me that is the bigger picture that concerns me about meego.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Sure, and MeeGo should be as open as Fedora (or your free distro of choice).

Still, are you aware of any Linux OS promising compatibility of new releases in current ARM devices? Because pointing to usual practices in x86 distros doesn't really help understanding what is going on in the ARM side. Get a glance looking at

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Architectures/ARM

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

@qgil

Thank you for taking the time to respond quickly to questions on this thread. It's greatly appreciated.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Yes, that was the intention of the Council. Still, how this would work in practice for this specific case, with the current topic and the current council?

Texrat, you are putting a lot of effort in this thread and in many other hot topics threads. How would a better collaboration with the council help you?

In some cases sharing more information internally helps. We have done it for specific events with a clear purpose and short term deadline, trying to avoid NDAs as much as possible. But here the situation is different. We have several topics crossed in discussions and most of them would require an NDA for a wider purpose and a longer period if we want to move to an internal discussion.

First I don't see the point of such internal discussion since a big part of the problem we can solve is here in the public. Second because the current council members might not be council members soon, which is an additional reason to keep the discussion in the public continuum.

But Texrat, don't get me wrong. You are doing an excellent work trying to connect everybody's interests and fun to discuss and do things together. If you have a concrete proposal the council can push here and now I'm all ears.

Is starting that wiki page too little? :) The average Talk user is not following this thread post by post anymore and yet here there are some helpful Q&A embedded...

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

It's a good start. :)

Then we have something linkable and can direct users to it.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

And you tell me this now while I'm trying to install a functional Linux OS in the Nokia Booklet with its GMA 500 graphics card...

Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#Linux to get again a glance of the wonderful world of mobile platforms. Even Intel has to deal with some interesting situations there.

Again, MeeGo will help on this in a way that even big Nokia alone couldn't push...

Actually it's ARM, TI, Qualcomm, Marvell etc the ones in a similar position than Intel. Please go convince them about the greatness of open source and we all will have easier lives. Again, this is an essential element of what MeeGo is about.

Actually developers are basically happy about the MeeGo (and Symbian) cross-platform strategy around the Qt and Web Runtime based API. They also have plenty of questions but maybe they are in a better position to see and understand the ongoing work, so they seem to be more accurate in their questions and more patient with the official and unofficial answers.

I believe that developers in general are putting more their bets in this platform, now that the MeeGo initiative is public and the commitment of two big companies like Nokia and Intel + Linux Foundation is there.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

>> If you came up with something worthy but you can't do it yourself - just ask the community, we're much friendlier than you think.

Turn by Turn Satellite Navigation please

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

this will be really bad the day the first iPhone stop getting updates. Because that day probably only 3GS from current models will get the new update.

and the trick is impossible for nokia to master along the path (=frequently creating new models to about each category) they have gone until now.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

But to whom will it bring those improvements?

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

that must be linked to maemo.org front page with font size 250 in order to get people to there....

or then the link must be brought to the attention of greeters etc, as widely as possible. No way >50% of people are willing to spend 5 minutes searching stuff from wiki.. not talking about users manuals etc.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

In my opinion, there was no "real explanation" as to why Symbian phones can and Maemo phone can't. Put yourself in the shoes of Joe the End User. Here is his friend with a Nokia phone that can do free turn by turn navigation but poor Joe can't because he got the last Nokia phone with Maemo. Just imagine what is going on in his head : :confused:. Nokia's fault or Joe's fault I can't tell.

PS: By "real explanation" I meant something that end users will be able to digest. Remember that "but it is a different OS" might not be a good explanation for somebody whose definition of a different OS is Windows XP vs Windows 7.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

OK this thread at present contains 156 posts.

Should we now decide what needs to be done?

What's the consensus?

Shall we all agree to initially create an official Nokia announcement page and maybe "what we know so far?" e.g. Maemo 6 = MeeGo, uk firmware update.

When people start posting the inevitable "what about maemo 6/ MeeGo?" in a thread at least we can reply with "go to this link - it will tell you what we already know and show the official Nokia announcement page"

It might work or may not - let's try something just now and see how it goes.
No doubt further "tweaking" is required but it's a start of something constructive.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

I apologize. I didn't mean that I expected you to make a statement on this. I thought we were talking about dealing with FUD. I figured that this was a concrete example of FUD on tmo and tried to give an example of what the wiki might look like. Apparently I missed the mark.

I will reiterate my concern though: There are now 2 forum moderators (you and some IT guy at the "official" nokia forum) that have said Nokia Care is handling it as a warranty issue. Forgive me for suggesting that an official press release would go much farther allaying FUD than a couple of quotes by Nokia employees on a forum.

I've gone many rounds with multiple companies where I was told, or emailed, or had a forum quote only to be told that person was wrong/mistaken or doesn't work here any more, or that wasn't approved to discuss that. A real press release will have been vetted by lawyers and approved by higher level officials, etc, and have much more meaning.

I'll butt out now.

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Maybe we need to layout a roadmap for creating the roadmap page :-P

Re: Cleaning N900 FUD
 

Sorry, I can't push a press release but I can tell you that this is the Nokia Care official policy. Confirmed by the official source inside Nokia. You can quote my name as Maemo Devices interface with the Maemo community. Any Nokia Care point has ways to check this and find me if really needed. Asking their immediate manager should be enough, though.