timsamoff,

Nokia produced a linux tablet which means it can be used for whatever I want to do with it.
If I don't like something nothing will stop me from digging in and sorting it.

Of course, Nokia wants a polished user interface and front end - which they are going to reach, but that does not take anything away from the foundations its built upon.

I had the choice to dig in and get as close to the metal as I wanted with this device (i would have continued digging deeper if I did not get performance expected..) without being prevented by not having source.

In microsoft world if there is a bug it can be pretty much impossible to rectify: take as a small example random locks and slowdowns in vb.net code when no user code is being run.
How do you diagnose them? how do you trace whats going on or test hypothoses?

With my nokia tablet I can (on the whole) grab the source and follow the calls down and see whats going on and have a go at curing it.

>Nokia produced a linux tablet which means it can be used for whatever I want to do with it.

Exactly! And that's what I hope they will keep doing, with newer devices.. I hate it when they start thinking too much on 'use cases'. The use case should be not to add unnecessary restrictions, and not to "decide" what the user is supposed to do with it.

...and so we're back to the concept of separating code logic from the UI, ie, skinning. I agree with the comments made in that regard. It would be awesome if there were a desktop analog to CSS-- or, if CSS was just extended and embraced by application developers at large to the point that anyone could slap any interface on any app (or even OS), regardless of its intended platform or purpose.

when the hell did they say that?

i thought the focus of the tablet was internet, not multimedia?

right now, it as best makes for a poor pmp out of the box...

so in the end nokia wants to turn the tablet into a "me to" ipod touch. imo, bad bad idea...

Er, yep.. I also thought it was 'internet', not 'multimedia'.. personally I don't care about the latter. The former though.. to be networked everywhere, that's the thing. (And it's called 'Internet Tablet', not 'Multimedia Tablet' )

I'm just basing my concepts (maybe I should have added an "imho"?) on what is currently the trend for making money with handheld devices (e.g., iStuff, PMPs, etc.). Yes, this is an Internet Tablet. (Did you think I forgot or something?) Please refer me to the company that wants to make products purely for the philanthropic reason that a select few might have a cool toy that they can hack around with. Unfortunately, not many (if any) exist... No, devices such as these, regardless of what you might think, are made, in the end, for regular people who like spending money on gadgets -- regardless of what they can actually be used for.

Yes, it's cool to have Linux and a (mostly) open operating system to stick our grimy little fingers into. But, that's not necessarily the main reason why Nokia decided on Linux. And, yes, Windows (and, honestly, most other operating systems) are closed and impossible to tweak for world domination, but go to any corporate programming environment and guess what they're using... It's not Linux, that's for sure.

Tim

Tim,

you are right, Linux is not used that much in business code.
Its Solaris or Unix or AIX or something.

Or did you mean desktop toys?

Is that such a bad thing?

Ok, so I'm not one for sitting on the fence so here goes:

I for one would love to see a completely finger operated front end similar to the ipod touch. Who wouldn't want multi-touch, a rich UI and a device centered around content delivery be that music, videos or the Internet?

Lets be honest, if Apple had open sourced 95% of the ipod touch software I bet we would all of been praising them and buying them to develop cool apps for. The problem is they didn't, that doesn't mean the interface is bad and it doesn't mean Nokia should take some design hits from them. IMHO Canola is one of the shining lights of Nokia software and I'm sure they are keeping an eye on what Apple is doing.

Why can't we take the eeePC approach and give the user a rich GUI ala the ipod touch by default and for the more adventurous (via a red pill like mode setting) change the default to a full blown desktop like the ports penguinbait has been doing with KDE? Best of both worlds!

and i find myself installing canola, play around with it for 5 min, then uninstalling it again.

i prefer youamp or the built in media player over canola actually.

but then im also a old winamp user thats used to just dumping my music dir into a gigant playlist. i dont care much about perfectly correct metadata as long as its not so messed up that i cant find the song i want to listen to.

but then i listen to mp3s on my non-media phone using ad2p so...

i guess i use the tablet as a pocket computer, with a focus on rss, web and mail (and the odd game for when im bored).

hell, i dont even bother with full screen browsing (unless the page layout is so rigid that i would otherwise be scrolling sideways to read all the time) as it gets in the way of app switching.

and canola's full screen only interface irks me to no end as it does not fit within that way of using the tablet.

but then i also end up shaking my head at the people that say they need 3 digit gigas on their pmp to carry all their media files with them 24/7.

the most amount of mp3s i recall having is somewhere around 6 giga, and most of that was stuff i just had not bothered deleting...

Canola can be run windowed! Just do a
at the command prompt.