It looks like the news made it to Engadget, as expected...

Hi,

I have never bought a pda or equivalent thinking I was going to be able to upgrade the OS for the life of the device.

I do know there have been representations of this being available for the IT but at the same time, but as other have said, if it does not happen, your device works as well as it did.

One of my favorite devices is my TH55 Clie and it has been out of production for years and still does what it was designed for today as it did when first bought.

Yes, it would be great to have updates forever but just not practical.

If you dislike the direction of things, speak with your credit card and buy something else.

Enough people do this, it will make statement.

My post here is not to say the arguments in this thread, both sides, are not valid.

I just have a different look on the subject.

David

I find it soo paradoxical that Maemo community (ok, _some_ people in the community) feel so betrayed when there is some closed code somewhere. Yet In the other end we have Iphonelinux team that has reverse engineered a 100% closed system with no docs, and is already booting Linux on it.

"Bwaa, the wifi driver is closed, we can't maintain a community edition"
"Ok, heres a open wifi driver"
"*crickets*"

Would the same thing happen if charging would suddenly go OSS?

If, in fact you have something like MER or deblet already pretty much working from the already open bits, you are going to be in a much better negotiation position to discuss howto redistribute/open up the remaining legacy stuff.

Okay. Let's bring some sanity into this thread.

1) It's pretty decently understood how to get this information out of whatever chip takes care of it. You can find small utility programs laying about for that.
2) Nokia has actually been quite nice and provided a hald-addon-bme, in a nice seperated deb. Show your model number and you can download it. I used it in Deblet. It plugs in even my own custom compiled HAL, and shows itself as a battery like on any laptop PC.
3) http://wiki.maemo.org/Objective:Maemo_variants

From here:

Quote:

This early release comes with an invitation to build variants based on Maemo 5 compatible with existing hardware like the N800 and N810. Maemo SW can't promise commercial quality for such configurations but through maemo.org we are able to collaborate at a community level with technical support, license changes and code.

--
Quote from Peter@Marketing:

"
Actually, we will be supporting this community project. We don't just send an invite and then disappear.

We have various things that are being worked on right now to help the community such as defining license terms in a way that the community can build and use variants. We also made much more components open source than ever previously in order to support this activity. There might be still components that the project need in order to succeed and we will try to make them available too."


Have you any idea how much of a favour Nokia is doing for us right here? They're actually saying, - yes, we're interested in helping you out, yes, we'll look at what (you say) needs to relicensed to accomplish this goal. What we really need is to get organized and get started and start finding out how much we need Nokia to do.

I'm sitting neck deep in hildon building right now, and I'm quite happy with the things Nokia has open sourced just now. A community edition is -definately- in reach. They even did us a huge favour and ported hildon-desktop (diablo UI) to maemo 5 APIs (we owe a guy there a good couple of beers).

They'll even release OHM, as a replacement for closed MCE and DSME. So, things are definately going in the right direction. No, a 100% open source distribution probably isn't possible, without tiny binary blobs that would probably be redistributable/"only usable on tablets.". But that's a quite minor thing compared to what Nokia has released to us.

We'll release some more information on the Mer project and how to participate, soon enough once the dust has settled.

But for now, look at http://picasaweb.google.com/meizirkki/NokiaN810Mer , http://bsd.tspre.org/~stskeeps/mer-loadadv.png , http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Reconstructed , http://wiki.maemo.org/Mer_Blueprint , http://launchpad.net/m-r and
http://jaiku.com/channel/reconstructedPOC - it really is possible to get things running in a sane manner.

first off, the iphone is the media darling. do anything with it and you have instant status in the tech world.

end result, more interest and more eyeballs.

second, unless nokia brings out a surprise in a ssu, there are some closed source parts that either have a bothersome bug (connectivity applet not seeing saved networks) or cant be tinkered with (browser ui, basically the software giving the tablets a reason to exist in the first place).

funny thing is, had nokia left us with chinook, im not sure as many would be calling foul...

Man, as long as it runs Python & pyGTK, has a nice high-resolution screen, couple-days battery life and fits in my pocket, I don't care if it runs by magical fairies.

I'm keepin' my N800 running Bora, TYVM. I don't see an advantage to any of this other fancy stuff to justify buying a new device, especially if it costs me in battery life.

I'm still shocked my touchscreen still works and has never need recalibration. Palm sure as hell never could manage that one.

Hmm, Diablo is significantly better, why not upgrade?

Why is the world would it cost you battery life?

You do realize the OMAP3 is significantly more efficient than the OMAP2, right? It consumes almost exactly the same amount of power as an OMAP2 for 2-3 times the performance. Which, of course, means that for any given task you'll be getting to idle 2-3 times more quickly on OMAP3 than when performing that same task on OMAP2, and that means your CPU will be spending significantly more time idle (and, thus, not consuming power).

With ARM CPUs, your goal is to get to idle as quickly as possible (race-to-idle) because when you're at idle, the CPU is off and not consuming power (in fact, the OMAP3 consumes even less power at idle than the OMAP2). So assuming power consumption per clock doesn't rise, you'll get better battery life from a faster CPU that spends more energy for shorter periods of time than a slower CPU that spends less energy for longer.

Let's not open that can of worms, OK?

This is completely wrong of course. Go read bug 677/2006 where a long-standing (since Mistral at least) critical (crashing the entire machine and corrupting data) bug was fixed practically as soon as the sources became available and made thousands of 770s usable again even after Nokia had officially abandoned them (guess what, you still can't get an official Nokia firmware image containing the fix - it's either Hacker Edition or patch-it-yourself).

Thanks to everyone involved BTW!