I agree that balance is the key. However you can't deny that the balance is tipped towards power more than battery life. People were raving about the new Snapdragon.

It is a similar war in the automotive industry: efficiency versus speed. Some want speed. And some want an economic car.

However the N900 is more like a race car. If you wanted a phone with great battery life, a Symbian phone would do well.

Seems to me that step 5 of 5 has a few areas that need to be worked out:

1) Resource management. There will always be a finite limit on memory and cpu, and with multi-tasking OS, both are easy to consume, but not so easy to manage.

On the memory side, it is all very well having swap, but as soon as you get into swapping, you end up with lag and stalling and staring at an unmoving screen for minutes (worst case). Going to a console session to kill a rogue process.

On the cpu side, it seems all to easy for apps to get into a cpu consuming loop (like microb at engadget.com seems to), which drains the battery if unchecked.

I think a real fix to this is something not all that achievable with the current platform. The haters will hate this, but the way iphone os 3 doesn't do multitasking, and the way ios 4 does do "multitasking" is actually a pretty good idea. It says "Yes, you can stay in memory, and be served cpu cycles, but at any point I may ask you to exit, and you must save your state, exit gracefully, and when restarted carry on where you left off".

This isn't something that linux apps do, and if they could, it would lead to a more stable setup on a limited resource device.

On the cpu side, it is a case of better managing cpu cycles. The solution here is less clear, because an app using a high amount of cpu is sometimes a good thing - like when watching a vid with a codec that isn't accelerated. We *want* the cpu to be commited to the video to get good playback. Whereas some dodgy javascript on a webpage should not be allowed to steal excessive cpu.

But how would the OS work this out? Again, this isn't something that can be done without apps cooperation. Certainly you should at least be able to say "if this app is in the background it should be niced down out of existance, yet this app can consume whatever cpu it wants in the background or foreground" - yet still place upper limits. There are always exceptions to this rule - consider microb at pandora.com - we want commited cpu even in the background, and we wouldn't want this app to suspend ever. It is difficult to imagine a regime that would always work for all apps all the time, without human intervention.

2) Battery. This in part is the same as (1). Part of the battery problem gets solved by better cpu management. But if we want all the things that make this platform cool - the always on, always available option, then battery needs to be better.

3) App Store. I have no need for it - the whole app store frenzy brought about by Apple annoys me endlessly. But apps beget apps begets sales, begets commitment etc. The Apple ecosystem is successful because people can make money out of it. This means that developers will commit resources because they can get a return. This in turn leads to secondary marketing (we have maemo app for that), and so greater exposure. This leads to more sales, and interest from businesses who are happy to loss-lead if it gets them sales for their primary business. This would be businesses like banks and TV channels etc who are willing to develop free apps to get people to buy whatever they are selling.

Get these things right, else all the touchscreens, video playback, form factor, gyros, compasses etc won't matter because no one will purchase the unit in the first place.

Great post, paulkoan.

I just have to hope that Nokia has learned from the prior 4 steps and step 5 will get more right than the prior steps.

I agree that there should be better CPU management in Maemo. Much better to be honest. And Apple's approach to multitasking is very good, however the point remains it will not be true multitasking.

Saving your state is good, for a paused game maybe. But what about a process that for example checks e-mail. How would the OS knows whether the process that is hogging the CPU is useful or not?

You do not want the CPU to save the state of an unzipping process? However a process that checks for e-mail every second could be closed till the OS recovers and then opened again.

The only possible way to implement this is having someone decide whether a process could be closed or whether it is necessary.

An app could be flagged with importance on coding ex:

1. Never close unless it is really necessary (like a browser).
2. Close only if closing those with flag 3 didn't help
3. Close and save state if CPU usage is constantly up.

And someone (a physical person) needs to control that these flags are not misused. Which will then put up the credibility of the realness of an open OS. So I do not think that this is possible. Since it is open, anyone can post anything. Unlike Apple which control their apps.

A user could intentionally post a virus, although I do not believe anyone from maemo.org would do this. Maemo repositories are somewhat controlled, but you can install from other sources.

Preventing rogue apps is difficult with an open OS.

i hear a lot of talk about compasses. i am trying to seee the use for it. is it mainly for joggers or hikers and things like that? ort is there som eother use a compass could have. i know its off topic but curious. also.. when ever i use one of the gps apps like google or ecoach ( i love ecoach every time i jogg i use it) it gives me north south and all that. so whats so special about the compass that the next device should have it?

the advantage of the compass is that the screen will rotate and orientate itself based on your position. So you turn south and now the map rotates and points south with you. n900 does some kinda trickery to get it to happen "sort of" in ovi maps w/o a compass. my guess is that based on the direction your heading the gps knows which was is north from that and it re-orientates the screen but with a real compass it happens automatically because, well, there's a compass haha.

Consider this. You are somewhere you are unfamiliar with. You get your GPS and there is a map with your location in it. Which direction do you start walking in?

Of course you can work this out, perhaps by looking around at street names, or looking at the sun's position, or perhaps you have an innate sense of direction.

Other than these, it would be far simpler if the map you are looking at automatically oriented itself to the direction you are facing. To do this it needs to know which way you are facing. To do that it either needs a compass, or it needs to to move for long enough in one direction in order to get a bearing.

It works even when you can't get GPS signals. It doesn't require you to move, and isn't affected by position ambiguity.

Perhaps this could be part of the .desktop file associated with an app. I think if you made the default to kill an app if it doesn't have any indication of how it should be treated in low resource situations, then this would encourage developers and porters to define a resource profile.

A bit like the optifying process that happened for maemo apps.

apple releases a phone in a year since 2007, nokia releases a phone almost every month. but look at their difference.