Thread: Dr. Ari Jaaksi on Maemo 5
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2008-09-23 , 21:17
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#384
Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
But first this is not new. Symbian and WinCE/mobile are also similar to the desktop paradigm. You can write your own applications for them. You can buy applications for them. The vendors do not control those applications.

(Interestingly, neither WinCE/mobile nor Symbian succeeded in creating a decent market for applications. In a fraction of the time, the iPhone did.)
I'm wearing out here, but I guess I should clarify a bit more. Symbian and WinCE/mobile are mobile-only OSes. Their application base is by necessity going to be limited, since developers can only write to that platform. The iPhone has some small advantage, since it is basically a stripped-down version of OSX. But all of these platforms are still not really good examples of what we will be getting here. They have small user bases, and developers have restrictions on what they can develop because of the vendors. The vendors on all these platforms really still do control the apps, no matter what anyone says.

The N8x0 (and even the 770), however, already can run many desktop Linux apps (via the Debian armel distro) without even recompiling. There are speed, screen size, and input issues with this current generation, but when the next gen tablets come out, with all the standard Linux framework in place to just run desktop Linux apps without porting or even much hassle... that huge user base necessary to make the desktop paradigm happen will already be there, in the form of the tens of thousands of apps sitting in the Debian (and probably Ubuntu by that point) repositories.

Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
Second, I am not really sure that the N900 will be as open as you think. Dr. Ari Jaaksi had puzzling comments on the "necessities for open source developers to embrace paradigms necessary to the phone industry like drm and closed source".

No you are wrong.

It was made very clear at the summit that the closed-source stuff will not be the stuff that hampers developers, it will be the "differentiating" stuff, the things that give Nokia a bit of a competitive edge. So it will be the high level zippy graphical fluff, not the drivers and the low level things that developers need access to to make cool new apps.

Originally Posted by Jerome View Post
Furthermore, you have been intoxicated by the PC/windows/linux model. Everyone here seem to ignore that a smartphone may be a computing platform, but it is not a pc. The pc model emerged in the 90s, before the Internet was popular, and the technological choices which were made at the time reflect that (and we all know what disastrous consequences some of those choices had). A smartphone, with limited battery and computing ressources, always on connectivity, high hardware variability, high bug resilience and designed for a market of non-specialists implies different choices. If you want to make some money, that is.
No no no no no no! You're not getting it!

THE N900 WILL BE A HANDHELD PC WITH A HD CAMERA AND HDSPA MODEM, NOT A SMARTPHONE.

Of course, the vendors need to make money, so there'll be stuff for sale, and there'll be some vendor-provided services and stuff. But the desktop paradigm that we'll be getting with the next-gen tablet says that you're going to get all sorts of unexpected third-party stuff happening.

Anyway, I don't think I'm going to argue with you anymore. We'll just let time prove one of us right.
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Last edited by qole; 2008-09-23 at 21:22.
 

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