Thread: Neo900 - finally a successor of N900
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joerg_rw is offline joerg_rw
2013-09-03 , 05:43
Posts: 2,222 | Thanked: 12,651 times | Joined on Mar 2010 @ SOL 3
#287
Originally Posted by TheLongshot View Post
I've been reading this thread for a couple of days, and while I have a lot of love for my N900 and the OS running it, one of my concerns with this project is whether the software will be able to keep up to really make this worth it.

My main concern is the MicroB browser, which seems to struggle more and more with modern web sites. Anything that uses a lot of Javascript libraries really slows down MicroB, and there doesn't really look like there is a proper 3rd party replacement, given that most browser developers have abandoned Maemo.

A secondary concern are clients for online services. Given that they regularly change their API, it can be a struggle to find who is still updating their client. I've had to switch my Twitter client a couple times this year, and the one I'm using right now the developer has pretty much said he's stopped all enhancement work.

While putting some fresh hardware into it might give some additional life to the platform, I really wonder if it will be worth it, particularly since some of the platform's issues will still be outstanding.
I'm not going to elaborate about microB's FOSS engine now, nor about RAM being main bottleneck that slows down browsers massively.
Just so much: of course nobody considers development of new software (versions) for a OS with a limited and shrinking number of devices it can run on.
Don't you think this might change when there are perspectives for the OS to develop and flourish thanks to brand new hardware available?
And actually, what would be the alternative? You're free to get a android or fruitphone any time. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about a device that could run maemo5 too, but will happily run on android or debian or gentoo or SHR or QtMoko or any distro you want to port to it, if that serves you better. You can dual-boot and who knows, maybe some mad hacker even makes XEN (or any other virtualization) work on it. Then look at the 'alternatives', for example the Zoom-II which was not half as useable for actual daily phone purposes, but iirc cost 3 times as much. And it didn't really come with any dedicated OS that it supported. I think our Neo900 looks pretty shiny in comparison.

/j
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Last edited by joerg_rw; 2013-09-03 at 06:15.
 

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