These are the toys of Till (OSM2Go) and Kees (pictured, Council member). Nothing to do with the Fremantle developer units brought by Nokia to help Danish Weekend developers get their software in better shape.

The picture is mine and I wasthe one asking people not to take pictures. The only reason for that was to avoid those pictures flying through the blogosphere out of context and being finally sentenced as the NEXT MAEMO DEVICE LEAKED BLA BLU BLI. The evnt had free entrance and the room where the units could be used had an open door as well. All what developers had to do to use the units was to put the name on a piece of paper (white paper just for the record, not any NDA).

This is quite unprecedented but we thought the Maemo and Mozilla communities are trustable and worth experimenting with. About why not using them more widely, one of the reasons is that they are quite expensive to produce and they are primarily targeted to the developers paid full time to have the software ready, better yesterday than next week. I'm happy we could borrow them for the weekend.

I second this query.

Thanks

Well, there are also voltages and thermal management to consider, plus whatever peculiarities the OMAP3 DSP clock brings into the equation this time.

Speaking of power management, Igor had previously hinted at some sort of power monitor - was there any mention of that? The Symbian folks have had that for a while now...

So how about my questions about the keyboard ? :-)

Honestly don't remember how many rows

I think it was 4 - it was laid out as a straight grid though.
There were 2 shifted symbols per key, green and purple and these were used eg for \ and / pretty clear too.

There was a soft tab key on the screen that was pretty easy to use in the shell - clearly the symbol set wasn't designed with code hacking in mind.

Gossip over the weekend said that different locales would have different symbols on the screen - and not all would support 'arrows' - US developers beware!

The keys were nice to use and I found I could type quite quickly on them (and I'm an N800 owner who doesn't use tiny keyboards so not experienced with them). Overall they fit very well into the 'engineered' feel.

@qole.... I can assure you that nothing in that picture looks remotely like what we were given .... 'our' devices were (in my opinion) very close to things that could actually be sold.

Looking closely you could see a shiny smooth finish underneath - hardly any loose wires

And we trusted you too... no-one turned over the flip-chart to see what it said on the back

To be clear: there were essentially no restrictions on what we say.

Pretty much just "if you take photos or go around saying that you saw the finished article then we won't do this again".

So anything *anyone* from the weekend says is about the prototypes; and to my mind there's no point in producing a prototype if you're not going to use it to fine tune the finished product. So there *will* be changes.... and they may be significant.

There are clearly things that were not shown... like the task switcher.

There was only one device...shown.
Did it not look like something else... err .... sorry.
I don't know the nokia range well enough.

Same here... and OK...


see my next post

Err, no
Make no mistake .... they tipped their hand a *lot*
It's called marketing

But more importantly for us it is also called being incredibly open.

I have a question for anyone who played with those devices on the weekend.

Was there any feedback process (formal or informal) on either the hardware or the software back to Nokia/Maemo. And if so, can you give us a glimpse into what feedback was given?

Let me explain the very basic and quite logical principles of this experiment:

If we can bring developer units to a developer event in order to allow developers to understand better new Maemo releases and test their software in better conditions... Great. If as a side effect those fortunate developers can bring some feedback to the community about certain hot and apparently troublesome topics... Well, fine.

Following this path we can improve our developer channel and, indirectly, our community channel.

If by doing so though these developers start being inquired about consumer relevant details, or they plainly start speculating about future products, pictures or 'photographic descriptions' start circulating, the IT blogs capture some of that, the buzz increases and the gadget noise-makers convert a developer exercise in some kind of 'leak' or 'soft launch' damaging the real marketing activities of whatever future products.... Then the owners of those developer units won't give again a permission for such experiment (and to start with we wouldn't even request it since we work hard for the success of our products and we wouldn't risk again).

As a community member and as a Maemo user I understand other community members and users have many questions. The answers you are looking for are not in these developer units nor have been shared with the participants of this developer event.