Major, and avoidable, recent mistakes from Nokia

Randall Arnold, one of our Maemo Community Council representatives, has post a new blog article outlining his view on many of the missteps Nokia has made with Maemo recently. Dealing with issues such as Harmattan branding, lack of communication at a corporate level and the privacy-busting "MyNokia" SMS (amongst others), Randall clearly lays out some of most eye-watering mistakes which could've been avoided.

The community discussion on talk.maemo.org is interesting, and is summarised later in this issue.


Despite MeeGo, is Nokia getting more closed?

In addition to Randall's list above, a number of senior (that is, old ;-)), maemo.org community members are expressing similar thoughts about openness, Nokia and MeeGo. Amongst others, Stephen Gadsby, Ryan Abel, Attila Csipa, Faheem Pervez, Andrew Flegg, benny1967 and Reggie Supilido have all expressed some form of disappointment with how things seem to be going. Mostly, the feeling of general malaise can be focused around two points: a feeling of having the collective wisdom of the last 5 years of Maemo be ignored with the focus on MeeGo and the "big reveal" mentality for something as fundamental of the basis of the handset UI (bugs which included screenshots of the UI have now been locked down). Stephen expresses it as eloquently as ever: Stephen also points out that the activity of Nokians in the community has reduced over the last five years, after a peak in around 2008. Familiar names like ragnar, Igor Stoppa and Eero Tamminen are seen a lot less frequently these days. People are busy, this is understood - of course; however if things take (say) a week longer, but you carry the community with you, isn't that a price worth paying?

Two of the names above are your editors; but this growing feeling is being expressed increasingly frequently.



In this edition...

1. Front Page
   • Major, and avoidable, recent mistakes from Nokia
   • Despite MeeGo, is Nokia getting more closed?
2. Applications
   • Extras enabled out-of-the-box on Nokia's next device?
   • Pelota Fifa Widget shows World Cup scores as they happen
   • Hermes updated - now with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Gravatar and find-as-you-type matching
   • Chromium removed from maemo.org repos, due to ongoing legal action
3. Development
   • MeeGo Community Builder taking shape
   • Clarifying differences between Qt and "MeeGo Touch" framework
   • Packaging Java applications for Maemo
4. Community
   • Discussion around Texrat's list of "Maemo Missteps"
   • Why community testing of PR1.2 didn't repeat that done for PR1.1
   • MeeGo evangelism fund
5. Devices
   • MeeGo-Harmattan (probably) has a better name coming to reduce confusion
   • Possible N900 successor leaked?
6. Announcements
   • AutoDisconnect closes "idle" radio connections
   • Show WiFi signal strength in summary bar
   • AutoComplete Editor allows tidying up of suggested words