Google have announced the winners of their Android developer challenge. Most of the apps are location based and/or social network-ish and combine map, camera and location. Makes me wonder where the Maemo equivalents are.

Well, if your GPS takes a couple of minutes to get a location, GeoClue's immature and doesn't seem to be gaining any ground and you've not got any other form of location service; location based apps aren't really very useful.

Oh, and the camera's crap.

I was quite underwhelmed by all of those apps. I think ShapeWriter was the only one that I would bother loading... and the only reason that won anything was it used some graphics capabilities of the platform.

Mostly, staggeringly useless programs.

It's not that they're useless per se, the problem is that there is only room for just a few of those apps. It's no use to have a social networking app with none of your friends on it, or a location based recommendation app that can only tell you where the nearest McDonalds is. Wait until Facebook makes one, or recommendation system as well done as Last.fm comes up. Then it would make sense.

Nokia's got some catching up to do. Good or bad those applications show more polish and integration than almost all of the firmware included software that Nokia has developed.

Some of the ideas are pretty cool though, the location awareness apps are nice (we should push location information availability in our IM), I, and others, thought the barcode app was pretty cool so started making our own (maemo-barcode).

With the location aware IM stuff, you do need a critical mass of users, but it would be useful at the next Maemo-summit to be able to find people wandering around the streets with their N8x0s (i.e. we would be the group). That does assume people have a connection though, which might be rather dear.

Ah well, cool if not particularly implementable on our devices

Just being able to do a google local search from wherever I am is what has me excited. Even at a fixed computer it's pretty awesome. It's actually found me a couple really neat little restaurants with simple searches like "bagels near here." It's actually impressively good at getting stuff besides big chain restaurants too. A lot of the apps are going to end up gimmicky of course, but there will be a couple real gems I think. It's just a matter of good APIs and developer-hours...

One of the winning application 'GoCart' will have a equivalent soon on Maemo ...

Building upon standards at least increases a chance that the critical mass of users will be reached sooner, because people completely unrelated to maemo will participate.

There is, for example, XEP-0080: User Location. It can provide GPS-like information like lat/lon, but also less exact string values like the country or city you're in (or both, of course *g*).

As with many exciting XMPP-extensions, it's not really used today (I'm not aware of any client that makes use of it, at least), but still it would be better to use XEP-0080 than re-invent the wheel.

Nokia Chat (S60), for example, is XMPP-based. Some Jabber desktop clients at least have XEP-0080-support on the roadmap.
Now imagine what would happen if Nokia Chat/S60 would add XEP-0080 and XMPP in the tablet's Telepathy-framework would, too:

Via Telepathy, location support would be part of Gnome 2.24 and enter the desktop more or less automatically. Probably developers of other clients wouldn't want to fall behind and put it higher on their lists. That's how you reach a critical mass. But what does Nokia do? They add location features to their S60-Chat-Service, but do not use the standards, so nobody outside the small group of S60-Chat-users will ever be able to use it. And I bet if they ever integrate location awareness into the tablet's IM, it will be non-standard and incompatible even to their in-house-development for S60 phones.

EDIT: After writing this, I found some infos from mailing lists that suggest that at least the telepathy developers think of integrating XEP-0080, based on geoclue information. This could mean that Gnome and the tablets can share location information. - If the usual Nokia madness makes them deliberately exclude S60 phones from this network, they should seriously consider going out of business.