Features for next device
 

The Maemo/Meego series is getting closer and closer to being a general purpose computer. There are lots of sci-fi inventions that have been in the tech news lately: medical microscopes for cell phones that can diagnose disease, high tech particle or chemical sensors (you could ask what was in the air that made you start sneezing, is your water clean? How much sugar is in your blood sample?)

But realistically, what would you like to see?

My list:
* 1080 HDMI output
* Working USB (even if it's a community-supported hack.)
* Compass
* A little thinner and faster. (Current web browsing is not as fast as on a laptop)
* Don't remove/ruin any current features.

That's it! Until phones can diagnose medical issues or test air/water quality there isn't much left, IMHO, to catch up to desktop level computing.

Re: Features for next device
 

My main interest: Support the current hardware with stable software.

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mine is keep the portability feature! Smartphones are becoming bigger and bigger now by the time they wouldn't fit my pocket already then that's it. No more new smartphones for me... I'd rather buy a netbook

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Why not suggest scenario of practical applications that would use it first before adding sensors another sensor than what’s already in the high end phones these days.
Laser distance calculator ? :P

I’d rather have support in the software side. Realizable potential of more functions from software, either the OS or applications. And keep it from getting obsolete too quickly.

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I want to start the engine of my car and my motorcycle with my remote phone :D

For me the ideal screen size is 4 ", below is too small and above would be too big, so I was glad to see that Nokia has thought the same thing with the build of the N9 and E7, two phones that I already love :)

I also wanted to see the first resistive screen multitouch made by nokia, one day maybe...

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i like n900
better OS
more mem for OS
more ram
and better battery
and thats about it
fm transmitter and IR is what makes this baby special :P

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I want to make my mobile phone the center of my digital lifestyle. It is always with me and always on.

Terminal mode integration. I like where Nokia is going with this but I hope the platform is open enough for hackers to roll their own.

Home Automation: I want to have secure communications with my home network that lets me lock / unlock my doors. arm / disarm my security system and control my home media

Enough horsepower and IO capability to expand into light laptop work. We're already pretty close to this with N900. I want to have a dock that lets me hook up a monitor and keyboard for quick email / notes. Sort of like Palm's failed Foleo but with HDMI graphics.

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Bigger battery and ability to change batteries on the fly without rebooting. Could be thicker. The extra thickness with Mugen is OK.

Digital compass, USB OTG and HDMI-interface, ok, but generally hardwarewise I am quite happy with N900.

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oh I forgot ^^, I would like to see for all next devices a simple shorcut alarm button that allow somebody like my girl-friend for example to alert me and give her GPS position on my phone instantly by just press this button to respond quickly, lol.

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But please keep the 3.5 mm stereo-audio/video as long there is headphones and TVs (cheap hotels) with composite video. HDMI-interface alone would be a mistake, although it supports both video and audio.

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1. RAM
2. Introducing two-working states: normal and power-saving. In power-saving all application which are connected to X11 server should be pressed down and are not allowed to get CPU resource, even for timer/network-event.

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Largely that second state already exists, minus the timer/network-event constraint. It could be accomplished by halting the processes, which is effectively what Android and iOS do. I suppose if you made it an option...

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Bugfree sip client with the bug specified below squashed.

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My wish-list for "beyond N900":
5" WXGA (1280x800) Bezel-less, 24 bit Color Display
....~4.36" x ~2.45"; basically the same size as N900
....Can show 720p (1280x720) content natively
Haptic multi-touchscreen
4 row full QWERTY keyboard (5 row a plus)
Better CPU(s)/GPU(s)
Huge RAM & Storage
3G, 4G, etc. Must be usable in California!!!
1 easily hot-swappable uSD slot (2nd "internal" a bonus)
Easily swappable Battery ("Hot Swappable" a bonus)
A-GPS
6 D.F. Accellerometers/Gyros
Compass
Camera (Larger aperture and detector + more MPix)
ATSC tuner (or mobile equiv.)
AM/FM radio
.... include an antenna solution for when using bluetooth headsets
Lays flat to type
HDMI Out

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1GHz ARM Cortex-A8
PowerVR SGX 535
At least 512MB of RAM
1024x576 on a 4.5" resistive multitouch
screen as close to edges as possible, leave ~1cm wide space for the front camera, earpiece, LED, and sensors
4-row keyboard with dedicated number keys, tilt screen style, D-pad at the left side
powerful (but legal) FM transmitter
powerful IR transmitter
auto-open lens cover and 3x optical zoom (like in compact cameras)
8MP camera with Xenon flash
0.6MP front camera
max 15mm thick
TV tuner
HDMI out
32GB storage
microSD slot
MeeGo

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A non-we screw you warranty by Nokia will do it for me

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a free phone?
as ill never give nokia my money again!

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No, it doesn't exist. With locked screen N900 may consume a huge power from battery, for exam - in hildon-home. See https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10412

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At least 1GB of RAM.

... with well space-separated SHIFT/CTRL/FUNC buttons to use a left hand finger press simultaneously with right hand finger pressing some letter button.

... and receiver...

64GB storage

... located for simple access without opening of flimsy cover.

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Of course i didn't mention all the features like FM receiver, Bluetooth... basically it should have all the features of N900 and more. :)

Yeah 1GB of pure RAM would be awesome... so would be 4GB :) but 512MB would be enough for now... and for 64GB storage it would be more pricey. So I try to keep it somewhat realistic...

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So how do you lock it then?

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If you lock N900 then MCE signals X11 to switch off the light and ignores any KBD press until you unlock (or slide camera cover or ...).

But processes can still consume CPU resources and application may run with full speed. For exam, Java Script is stopped in browser only after 15secs... and it seems that sometime it fails to stop ... may be fixed in PR1.2, I didn't check.

N900 lock is pretty similar to generic PC lock but it should do more in system. It is an exact reason why iPhone or Android have better standby time for less battery - if you lock them it stops Java processing completely - single task systems!

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No, 512MB is not enough - Maemo/Meego are the generic Linux and it requires some memory for applications. Simple calculation - browser, gstreamer, e-mail - all may get 100MB+ size easily and add to it pulse/tone generator with slightly less memory. But generic PC has a disk for swap with 50-100MByte/sec write speed and N900 - flash with 19MB/sec write speed. Do you math here. Don't forget X11 and hildon-* apps.

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When did phones get hardware floating point math?
(GPU and DSP don't count unless math functions in the standard libraries support them out of the box.)

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egoshin. Then why does N900 have 256MB RAM and it's ok with it.
Add 512MB SWAP to 512MB RAM and wouldn't it be good? Unless MeeGo is a memory hog.

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It's not OK with it if you're missing calls due to excessive swapping activity. You can't even run the N900 with swap disabled. It would crash shortly after booting up (I tried this).

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10GB Ram
5 inch 400DPI screen
512GB SSD
3GHz i7
Ability to do things I want before I even think of them.
USB 4.0
20 day battery
5G network

Am I the only one who notices that people here will clamor for amazing specs, but then be frustrated with the outrageous pricetag?

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Here's my wish list:

* gyro so that we can run the cool fcam "lucky imaging" application.
* Full HD video recording.
* Higher resolution front camera. At least 800x600 pixels.
* Scratch resistant screen! Preferably resistive, but if that is not possible, then let it be capacitive.
* USB host for connecting external keyboards etc.
* More buttons to press when the unit is closed. You always find uses for these when writing programs. E.g. dedicated page up and page down buttons. Currently they are typically overloaded with volume up volume down.
* Make back side into a touch panel so that you don't have to smudge and cover up the front screen image with your fingers.
* Enlarge the touch screen outside the visible screen. Perhaps even on the sides of the unit.
* Long battery life.

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Agreed about the price, that's why 512MB RAM + 512MB SWAP suffices in my opinion. I haven't missed any of my calls because of swapping. and i do get them...

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That's a GREAT idea. I wonder if it could substitute for a D-Pad.

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Dual mode touch screen like in tablet PC ? Able to use finger touch as well as more precise magnetic stylus. We'll even have cursor hover feature instead of just clicking.

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I totally disagree. There should be NO screen outside the visible screen - NO BEZEL! It's a waste of space and makes the handset too big to carry. The N900 could have a 5" screen with the current form factor.

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That would be cool, but where would the camera and proximity sensor be?

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Actually, I wouldn't mind if floating point processing went the way of the dinosaur. 64-bit integers are faster, have greater range (in the sense of more states) and don't have the many rounding-related problems that floating-point math has.

Re: Features for next device
 

It does. The core of Maemo will cease sending events and wakeups to applications. Misbehaved applications can still screw things up, and usually hildon-desktop screwing up is the result of a poorly written plugin.

It can't -force- applications to stop, but it easily could be configured to do so.

No PC ever hits more than a couple hundred KBytes/sec when being forced to page. Depending on the flash it can be way faster, but swap is still ungodly slow compared to RAM.

So yes, more RAM. Always more RAM. Paging is the symptom of a problem, not a solution.

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MMC/SD type flash is typically a few magnitudes slower than harddrives at swapping...

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I think it has sense to clarify here - what do you mean with "core of Maemo". I did my own event logging and I know for sure that there are a lot of applications which don't cease an activity with locked screen. In my surprise I even see a frequent polling of orientation by MCE with screen locked and even without ANY application which requests this info. Damn!

I can do it. Kernel has mechanics - "cgroups". It is only need to be configured to have a right cgroup and I compiled my own kernel with it and tested. But I can't stop MCE.


You mixed paging with swapping. Both uses the same mechanics but swapping means - "swap out the whole application" and that enjoys the sequential disk writes with 50MB/sec bandwidth in contrast with random paging. You can measure it yourself, BTW.

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"Easily swappable Battery ("Hot Swappable" a bonus)"

Amen to this suggestion, but hot swappable is a must, not a bonus. It was suggested for the N900 but ignored. I predict Nokia will ignore the suggestion this time also. It's too bad, because in these days before batteries get really capacious, hot swapping would be a fantabulous solution.

(BTW: I find the N900 battery quite easily swappable already.)

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Swapping hasn't meant "write out the entire application to storage" since before www was invented...

Today when the kernel needs to free up ram, it has among other things Least Recently Used lists, whether the page is disk cache, dirty pages waiting to be written to storage, executable pages belonging to apps and libraries that can be just dropped from memory (and read back from the fie in question later if it's needed), or anonymous pages (pages that don't already exist on storage) that get pushed out to swap, doesn't make much difference...

Yes in the old days swapping meant writing reading entire processes from RAM, but these days it's just on-demand pagein/pageout of anonymous memory to a swap area..

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How?
Some kind of trick?