Except we all know it's not a solution.

Apart from the cost, already expounded by others here, what if you find yourself in some backwater with no cell coverage, or in a meeting room in some building's basement with no signal either ?

Both commonly occur in my work.

that is exactly the same as now with cell phones, but a hell of a lot of people are not stuck in caves and have decent coverage most of the time.

I live there.

And I work there.

At least, I did. Five years ago, both my house and my office building were in those dead zones about which Verizon enjoys making failed-clever commercials. No cellular network reached my house at better than a fleeting one bar at the end of the driveway, and my office--a converted coal bunker wherein some of the concrete walls are more than a meter thick--featured cell phone users just outside the doors the way other buildings display their resident smokers. Meanwhile, at my inlaws' house, it was possible to get a weak analogue signal, but only if you walked to the top of the rise at the very back of the property. My cellular phone at the time, which could go almost a week on one charge while making one 30 to 40 minute phone call a day in Los Angeles, couldn't manage even 36 hours at idle in my regular home and work routine.

Just five years later, the situation has improved. There's enough coverage at my house now that some visitors have successfully completed short phone calls--even from inside--and that's the worst of the lot. Both my inlaws' house and my office building have decent coverage now. I believe my new cellphone has a battery inferior to that in my old one, but yet I need only charge the new phone every other night rather than every night.

While I'm not excited by the HSPA support that will be coming in the next Maemo device, I can't argue with the logic of it. As qole pointed out, Scott McNealy and company have been speaking the future present for a long time now.* Combine that with ever expanding network coverage** and consider Nokia's core focus***, and it's unavoidable.

As for service costs, while Nokia is ever careful not anger its biggest customers, it's also not shy about backing potentially disruptive technologies. In time, perhaps one or more of them will shake the market up in ways that benefit end users. Maybe even in Canada.


* Shame about their sales numbers though, eh?
** Even commercial airliners may not be off-limits much longer.
*** No, not that. More general.


EDIT: This is way off topic though. So, where be the seeds of the apps that will shine on the next OS?

Wasn't sure wherever to start a separate thread or continue this one -- let the admins decide.

Killer apps page at wiki.maemo.org is slowly turning into discussion and I just wanted to voice my opinion and address some comments made there.

I'll start off with saying that for me the deciding factor was that the NIT is the convergence device. I bought it because I needed something compact to do the e-mail/IM/SIP/Skype on the go as I didn't want to haul the notebook with me, however I would NOT have bought it, had it not had the ssh-client and the fully functional browser, the copy-paste and not been able to play videos, run games and stream video/mp3 off my computer.

It is my understanding that the more different applications you can run, the more platform is popular, so you end up having one device doing different tasks, not many different devices.

I also think there's a difference of opinions on what a killer app is. I believe it's an app which makes the platform it runs on very desirable, the app that can impress, the app which can be used as a great marketing tool, but not necessarily a mass-market app.

So regarding Carman -- I'm not sure who's added it to the list, but I too think it's a Killer App. Many of NIT users are geeks, I dare to say most drive cars and it's something other people can be easily impressed with. NIT makes an impressive car gadget with carman + navigational app. I believe Nokia could spend far less to support these projects and thanks to it have a NIT appear in a movie/TV show than they would on the product placement.

I also wanted to comment on the maemo-barcode -- there's a popular application scanning bar-codes thru web-cam and adding titles to the database for Mac (Delicious Library) and while I would very much welcome same functionality on maemo, would be great of the maemo and DL databases could be synced.

That actually leads me to another point I wanted to make -- NIT is more often than not is not a replacement for the computer/laptop/cell-phone, but a companion. The better the integration between the NIT and cellphone/computer, the more useful the NIT is to the user, as it allows them to use their current data and gadgets in a new way. The more users' devices the NIT can communicate with -- more attractive it is for the user. There're very few apps which make NIT useful as such.

In the example above, even if the maemo-barcode is not syncing to a proprietary Mac application, it should still be able to sync the database from the NIT so the database can be browsed on the computer (where most users would want to have all their data accessible).

NIT also fails not being able to exchange the address book with the computer or cell-phone.

To sum it up, based on all of the above, my ideas of the killer apps are:
* An office suite which can at least read all current word editing and spreadsheet file formats (and write into some), especially the ones from OO and MS. Would be more convenient if it was one app/suite rather than a few different ones from different developers/UI.
* Bluetooth contacts exchange with cell-phones and PCs/Macs. I was actually shocked this wasn't possible with the current OS.
* Knots-based project -- a package of both client and server for transcoding and streaming media from Windows/Mac/Linux onto NITs with an easy setup/UI. This should be a single solution for all "server" platforms, clearly would be better if it used standard protocols. The argument for this is that lots of people have their music/video files on the computer, but unfortunately there isn't a single package to allow listening/viewing on the NIT. Another argument is that if Archos is stepping on the internet tablet grounds, Nokia needs to respond.
* Carman -- based on the point already maid previously, why won't the car be yet another gadget NIT can be integrated with.

I also think it would be highly beneficial for Nokia to have an alternative solution by TomTom or Garmin for navigation as well, especially if it could use the maps previously purchased for WinMo, S60 or PNA devices. Would be great if it could read and use maps from these and other major navigation software/PNA manufacturers.

PS. BTW, what's up with "not another multimedia player app" statement? Have you seen the iPod UI? Don't you think it's something which is worth doing on the NIT?

PPS. I have more ideas in multimedia and productivity areas, as well as in some niche areas, but they're more niceties rather than necessities, I'd go on if anyone from Nokia is interested.

Thanks for your contribution, stangri.

I agree with your Carman comment. While not popular, it does allow one to have more control over a car. Normally, one would have to buy an expensive kit (with hardware) for this. Those who are using the NIT for GPS (in car) can easily also include Carman. I bought the necessary hardware and received it today so cannot comment about it from first hand experience yet but the demos were promising. Problem is however, is the NIT good for GPS in car? The on-board N810 GPS has its quirks, and when someone asks whether the N810 is a good device I must, for sincere reason, tell that person about these quirks. Then the applications. There are 2. One is proprietary and limited. It does the job, and if you hunt well you can get a license pretty cheap. OTOH, the open source one is very advanced, but not user-friendly except for power users. It also requires an active Internet connection. The 'N900' will get the latter. Besides that, chances are Nokia might port their Maps application over to 'N900'.

I agree with your point about integration with the Mac application you named as example. It isn't always easy because of proprietary formats used and such, but in the end, this kind of integration is great, especially if its easy and flawless to achieve. Just like a UPnP A/V server for which the NIT would have support.

Also, an attempt was made to define 'killer application' in the specific wiki entry you were to comment on (we can also use talk page there).

So what's happening now? Will Nokia support anything?

BTW: That page also contains the "remarkable maemo projects" page. Is that dead? Why isn't something like that continued? Asking people for "cool projects" every now and then but coming up with a new request each time and not continuing the old ones imho doesn't make much sense.

So will the list of those "star" applications be changed? Will things that don't evolve be removed and new ones added? Just a personal example: I have been asked by Quim and Nokia people to move my software into the extras repo because of that list. Gpxview now is in that repository and so are my new projects. And now? That's it? You really shouldn't ask developers to spend time on a certain issue if you aren't intending to proceed anything.

These are official requests from Nokia and Quim even complained in the first posting of this thread about a lack of responses. Maybe this is due to the fact that Nokia doesn't seem to make much out of the results? Why should someone spend the time to list projects if the contents of such a list then just sit there and become outdated?

I really wish there were less requests like this and more effort to actually use the results of those requests.

The call for Fremantle stars was successfully completed on November 1st and we are discussing internally who are the candidates to support.

That page is maintained by the community and seeing the history doesn't look that dead. Anybody can propose new candidates and push it.

The Fremantle stars was a new call because it was not only about calling existing projects stable in extras etc but it was also open to new ideas feasible to be developed before the Maemo 5 release.

It was not only Nokia but the Maemo community who decided that it was a good thing to recommend everybody to move to extras: http://wiki.maemo.org/Task:Consolidation_of_Extras

The time you put pushing your application (and dependencies?) to extras was well invested. Your users will be happy and other developers with similar dependencies too. Perhaps now the quality of your packages are better?

Nobody proposed you to move to extras and get a prize or something. Now you qualify to become a Pearl and appear in the maemo.org front. The move to extras was not a condition to be a candidate for Fremantle star.

We never gave a date to announce results (unsure whether this is good or bad) but the deadline for proposals was only 12 days ago... The decision will be announced before the first release of the Fremantle SDK. We might contact privately some projects first to have an idea of the help desired and be able to do some planning/budgeting.

Whenever we ask, we use those results. But you might have a point and perhaps we should be more precise on the outcome of such requests.

Or what were you thinking? If you have more specific complaints (like this one) please share them and we'll try to answer.

It's often difficult to differ between those. The last request came from someone who seems to be the maemo.org webmaster. Perhaps i misinterpreted him to be related to nokia. Sorry for that.

?? The packages are the same, they just moved somewhere else.

I was just expecting something to happen in the public. These requests are pretty public. The project members reactions are all public. And that's how open source usually works. I am not used to see secret things going on in the background in this area. But perhaps that's how things just are if a big company is involved.

And no, i wasn't expecting to win a prize for moving my tools to the extras repo. But i also didn't expect to see it still listed under "not ready for primetime". And yes, this might be a wiki anyone can change, but the headline sais "Please do not list new proposals directly here". So i was expecting someone else to care for this page and the remarks people make on the talk page.

It's imho all a little bit vague sometimes ...


P.S.: A remark regarding those pearls: I really don't want to discourage anybody and especially not the people porting Xournal. But the diablo version still doesn't work at all and it is recommended to install the chinook version (incl. the fact that the average user will have to cope with a mix of repos for different os versions in order to do so). Furthermore it comes from the extras-devel repo. The download page itself states that you should disable the extras-devel repository after installation of xournal in order to prevent problems. What makes those pearls to be pearls? A good idea? Perhaps. High quality? Obviously not.

But being asked to improve minor things in my software (like changing repositories) and at the same time seeing this is discouraging.

P.P.S.: And one more rant please: Having a nice emulator as a pearl is something i really appreciate. But how many percent of the pearls are emulators? 20? A spectrum emulator might be technically a cool thing and the implementation may be nice, fast and clean. But isn't a pearl something the average user should at least be able to comprehend? How many people actually have access to spectrum software and are able to run it inside an emulator? As i said: One is nice and e.g. a gameboy emulator may be something most people can comprehend (even though i wonder how many people are able to pull a legal copy of the cartridges they own). But are the best programs for maemo really all emulators for such esoteric systems as the sinclair spectrum or the MSX machines??

I initially was hoping this "remarkable maemo projects" thing to result in one or two really outstanding apps in different areas. Like one all-purpose mapping application, one easy-to-use text editor, one great action game, one funny emulator(!) and so on.

I think that is the point.

Regarding the Pearls, they should be apps which work, not sure how they're chosen, but imho it should probably just cycle through all those in the repo which have screenshots.

otoh, the app you talk about shouldn't be in the repo/Pearl list if it requires installation from extras-devel and has anything to do with Chinook.

There's the next problem: Some projects like evince use screenshots from their desktop counterparts ... a strange thing for a "featured maemo application". Others are just very old screenshots. Both will confuse users. Since there aren't that much featured applications it should be possible to present them with recent maemo screenshots so users really get what they expect from the screenshots. Everything else is just confusing.