If you mean model as in "female" I would say you're on your own, but if you're serious and you mean model as in "electronic device" you can be helped. After you get things set up by going down the rabbit hole of threads like these (non-trivial)...

link 1
link 2

...you can then do what I do and use your n800 with an ugly looking Python app like the following:



I use to use irreco, but I ended up having to grow my own in order to have Total Control.

The comparison is interesting in its differences. I'll give some comments, based on talks I had with no-geeks and casual observations:

-music: yes.
-video: apparently, people like to show others that their device can play videos in the first week they bought it, and then never use it any more. They find the screen too small. (Unless it is erotic/porn, then the ability to show it around wins).
-social: people who need that (but aren't they geeks then?) already do that from their phones
-notes/reminders: non-geeks use post-it.
-skype/IM: yes. Also video please. IM: most people I know use msn.
-read sent word docs: yes. Excel too.
-news: a little bit.
-games: a big yes. Please note that the iPod is silently advancing to a major handheld game platform.
-reading pdf: no.
-navigation: not as much as you think, and very gender dependent. Maybe an artefact of the fact that I know many people who almost never drive a car, though.
-camera and share pictures: they like to watch your pictures, but never upload any. When they send pictures, they use e-mail (and don't understand why sending pictures which are 5 GB in size is a problem).
-location awareness stuff: no. strong hostility.
-remote control: no.
-presentation control: I do not know.


There are other things I noticed:
-digital calendars appears to be only used for work, and then the people use the one they got from their job (e.g: blackberry)
-synchronizing various lists of contacts (e.g. cell phone and i.m.) is a problem non-geeks would like to have solved.
-mobile e-bay is a surprisingly common need.
-non-geeks hate menus. They want buttons or the screen equivalent.
-e-mail and sms are still THE major application
-videophoning is very attractive to couples in long-distance relationships (don't ask me what they show each other, I have not asked)
-games are a VERY big yes. It is always the first question asked. Most non-geeks associate any hand-held device with a game console.
-coolness and personalisation are important.
-music is much more important than video. Teens use youtube as a free music player. They don't even watch the video.
-reading text is a mixed blessing. Some (younger) people want to take downloaded texts with them to read, other refuse to read any text which is not on paper (they even print their e-mail to read it). Probably also linked to eyesight.


As to mobile web usage, I have not find out how people use it. I'll have to watch people using their iPhone to find out. But I can already say that non-geeks are not good at panning, so screen size is a problem and like animated sites so performance is also a problem.

Cool. So let's compare this to my observations (Not that this serves any particular purpose, but it's fun anyway. We should have a new thread about it.)

• music: sometimes (see below: depends on device size)
• video: a lot. Also, "how do a get this film from DVD to my device?" is the question I hear most from my friends.
• social: no
• notes/reminders: hardly
• skype/IM: yes
• read sent word docs: yes. a lot. also excel.
• news: a little bit.
• games: no
• reading pdf: sometimes, not as important as MS office, but almost
• navigation: probably really gender dependent.
• camera and share pictures: a lot. (ab)using whatever connected device as a means to upload images from their cameras is big thing.
• location awareness stuff: theoretical question - don't know of any location aware applications, so far.
• remote control: no.
• presentation control: no

Other things I noticed, grouped by Jerome's points:

• synchronizing various lists of contacts and digital calendars is something people would want, but don't even try anymore because they all had highly frustrating experiences in the past, including total loss of data.
• mobile e-bay is (unsurprisingly) never mentioned.
• People feel comfortable with all kinds of UI elements they already know. This does include menus. More exotic things frighten them away - this even includes such simple concepts as the grid layout for icons in S60 phones (or the iPhone, for that matter).
• e-mail and sms are still THE major application
• videophoning is something they want to know to work (they all try this with every device that's theoretically capable of it), but never ever use in real life.
• games: not at all.
• coolness and personalisation: irrelevant
• video is more important than music on devices with decent screens. People who want mobile music usually have tiny music players for this purpose even though their larger cell phones (or other gadgets) could serve the same purpose. You dont take your cell phone with you when working out. (Overall, expressed in hours of weekly use, music is more important.)
• reading text: not that I'm aware of any relevant influence here.

Based on people from 25-45, medium to high income, ~ 2/3 male vs. 1/3 female, various ethnical backgrounds, eduction average to above average, non-technical, by and large rather hedonistic and living for the day.

Quick update for all those that write in this thread about OS2008 to OS2012: As part of the Maemo re-branding exercise earlier this year (which led to the fabulous new maemo.org logo), we at Nokia decided to discontinue the terminology of OSxxxx in consumer marketing. We will simply refer to Maemo X with X referring to the major release number. So, instead of OS2009, we will call it Maemo 5. This change will be implemented in our web presence when we launch Maemo 5 (also known under the pre-launch name of Fremantle).

At the same time, we will rebuild our digital marketing presence and put it under maemo.nokia.com (only news for those that weren't at the Maemo Summit).

Peter

The suggestion at the summit was things like GtkMenu would become finger friendly by default. What that means for other controls, I don't know.

Having a different UI has one clear benefit and one corresponding downside:

• Applications have to be rethought to look consistent on the platform.
• Applications don't have to be rethought to run on the platform.

So you can end up with a mishmash of quality, and sub-par UIs using different controls.

It'll be interesting to see when the alpha SDK gets released (oh, come on - pleeeease) what the new widget API is looking like (if we see it straight off).

Jaffa, I have no doubts that new applications will look slick and fit in with our expectations nicely, but for the folks building and devloping existing applications using the standard UI frameworks, will they be compilable and run with minimal modification.
It was whether we are going to continue with X but have a compositing manager available so "old style" apps can run.
There has been a lot of discussion around from people in this thread and others that they are nervous they will lose the utility of the apps they have now and my question was an attmept to clarify that.

Also, without the SDK we are restricted from what we develop - is it worth continuing to build applications using the frameworks as they stand now, or do people enter a holding pattern waiting for the SDK (as you are..)

From my personal perspective, I dont care and will port to whatever, I'm hoping that the principles I am already building should be transferable to the new frameworks and I can ease up on the hacks I've needed to insert to get it running

On a side note, Jaffa you mentioned last night that I was building emacs or my own OS, I'm not - I simply have tools and capabilities and expectations of this platform that I simply cannot achieve using the standard tools.

I would love to use the widgetset of vogue or canvas library as required to do what I do, but I simply can't right now.

Having kinetics and a touchable UI is adictive and gives me much more power of expression than using GTK and suffering enormous performance limitations.
(of course GTK has features and benefits I still don't have - related mainly to the shortcuts I've needed to make)

Its bloody hard work though, I didnt come here to write my own widgetset and framework, but simply dug in and built from what worked well.

*I* am continuously shocked by how much code I've done and would love to bring it back into standard, I ponder every day whether my YUV hack could be slid underneath x11 itself and get a native global speedup for everything, but know nothing about the deep internals to even know if its possible.

Indeed. Nokia aren't saying on that yet - what they have said is a suggestion that, wherever possible, existing APIs in the widget set will be maintained. At the lower levels, we're not going to be getting rid of X.org, DBUS, ... any time soon.

Indeed. It's very difficult to motivate myself to play with Clutter when the work on using it with Gtk+ isn't really available yet. So, I'm concentrating on tooling (Valable hacking, or Pluthon tutorials).

I did? Think that might've been someone else :-)

my apologies jaffa,
I just re-read scrollback - it was johnx and generalantilles

Just a note before I reply specifically. I'll say it again; non-geeks want to do the same things that geeks want to do, they just won't tolerate a high threshold. If something is cool and it is also easy enough to do, everybody, even non-geeks will do it.

The perfect example that comes to mind is text messaging. It was around for a long time in the form of desktop Internet IM. (What's your ICQ number?) But it has become a big part of mobile providers' income model these days because it is easy enough to send a text message from your phone that lots of non-geeks do it, because everyone realizes that sometimes it's better to text than to talk.

I believe that all of these features, if they get easy enough, will be common on future handheld devices.

I've also shuffled your comments around a bit to make them easier to address.

Part of the problem right now is that it is a pain to transcode video to work on handheld devices, and it is expensive to buy it, especially since you would only want to watch iPod-encoded video on a handheld device; it would look crappy on a bigger screen. Also, Internet video in general just looks crappy.

But, when handheld devices can easily play the same video that plays on big-screen TVs, and it is easy to move video around between devices, and the video looks nice, you'll see everyone watching last night's episode of Lost on their handheld devices on the way to work on the bus.

My contention is that everyone will use the social networking side of a mobile device if it is easy enough. A quick glance at your handheld will tell you (roughly ) where your friends are, what they're up to, whether they're interested in hanging out tonight... The text side of this should be fairly seamless. E-mail, facebook, IM, they're all part of this, and it needs to be rolled up into a good interface.

I think the GPS / location awareness stuff is too invasive at this point. People will become more comfortable with it over time, however, especially if they feel secure knowing that only trusted friends can see their location... But that's still pretty far off, yes.

If it gets easy enough... you'll start to hear reminder alarms in every pocket

Do you find that people want the contact list syncing thing for non-work purposes? The future I envision will have everybody tied together via social networking apps, and contact details will be embedded in these networks, so we won't need the same level of contact syncing.

And don't tell me it isn't going to happen. It's happening already. I send an e-mail to someone with a GMail account, and suddenly they appear on my Google Talk contact list...

I think voice communication is important. And VoIP, to me, seems the most sensible, not just for future maemo tablets, but for all handheld devices. Why have one network for voice and one for data? It should be all part of one big happy Internet.

As for video phoning, it is one of those applications that just has never taken off. I suspect we'll all want the option of video, but we'll rarely use it (except, well, in the situation you gave above ). I think as it gets easier to text message people, even voice communication will drop a bit. We're seeing that already on mobile phones.

Well, everybody gets different documents sent to them. The point is that it shouldn't be hard to read stuff that people send to you.

Again, this is one of those things that hasn't really taken off yet because it has too high a threshold. Recently, people started getting handed free newspapers at the station in the morning here in Vancouver, now suddenly the bus is full of people reading the newspaper (celebrity and sports news, mainly, but still). Before, I rarely saw people reading the paper on the bus.

I hope that we can get this worked out. I want to see people use less paper, and ubiquitous hand held devices with nice big easy-to-read screens seems like a good solution.

Threshold issue again. If you make it easy to share, store, view, and get prints of your photos and videos, and they're decent quality, everyone will be using it.

That's very interesting. Online shopping while sitting on the bus... Why not? I think we'll see the web evolve to meet mobile needs when more people are using it from their handhelds.

Sigh, yeah.

Most people do not see mobile devices as games consoles - however the expectation that there are decent playable games on them is high.

My phone can do it, my pda can do it.

My nokia unfortunately seems to lack many new games - the last built for the device game I played was numpty.

I think people are scared because of the graphics, its such a shame because the raw power in this platform is amazing.