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So I’ve just had a delightful trip into Nokia Care, where I’m told most people don’t like much.  I do wonder why, and upon noticing that the ‘please don’t abuse our staff’ signs are no longer up from last visit, perhaps things are becoming more fun?
Anyway, during my visit I was served by a fella who was also interested in the N9, and planned on getting one as soon as it was released.  What I learned from my visit, is that according to order records, the store will be receiving a whole bunch of NFC ready accessories around mid September.  This is one such link to inevitable release of the N9, having NFC itself, but isn’t anything solid.  It’s not unheard of for companies to release accessories well before the release of the device in which they are made, look at AMD for instance.  The good part is that after a bit more of a chat, I was able to find something far more promising.

After some innocent questions, I eventually stumbled upon the answer.  The Nokia N9 will be released in Australia on the 15th of September, according to internal files.
Now, that’s not helpful information for the rest of the world, but it is a start.  Once it comes to us people in the land of the future, it shouldn’t take too long to spread to everyone else.  I am still surprised that Australia isn’t getting the N9 six months later then the rest of the world like usual, but I’m not complaining.  Now to start counting down the days.

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It wasn’t long ago I had a little play around with Neverputt, a minigolf game recently ported to the N900.  There I mentioned that Neverputt has roots in Neverball, a very similar game with a slightly different concept.  It is of course good to know that I didn’t find Neverball for Nokia N900 nearly quite as frustrating as Neverputt.

Neverball has a fairly identical world to Neverputt, making sense since Neverputt is derived from Neverball.  The physics work the same, and the levels all appear the same.  The difference is that while Neverputt you control the ball with a golf club while selecting angles and power, in Neverball you control the ball by moving the floor, and that is done by moving the N900 itself.
The basic idea of the game is to simply navigate a course, collect a sufficient amount of coins, then reach the target within the time allotted.  The more coins you collect, and the faster you complete the stage, the more points you receive.  Simple but effective.  Perhaps it’s my lack of gaming skill coming into it again, but I did find controlling the ball very difficult to begin with, and moving the N900 all around conflicted with my CSSU portrait support.  After a while of playing around though, I did seem to get the hang of controlling Wilson somewhat as the difficulty increased, and I found that having the keyboard out while playing eliminated the games desire to try play in portrait.
Frame rates were fine, with out too many slowdowns, nothing game breaking.  Once again trying to change graphic options only causes the game to crash, much like Neverputt.  One of the awesome options here though is the ability to change the ball, away from a boring monochromatic beach toy, to things like the atom, Saturn, or even Blinky the pac man ghost.  Bouncing around the levels with Blinky made any fun had just that much better; perhaps it’s the emotionless state it gives me that makes it feel like I’m looking into a mirror.

Neverball may actually find some love with me whenever I need to kill …

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Sick and tired of that old boring lockscreen?  The one that only has the time, date and a slider?  Well, here we have a little mod that changes all that called QtLockscreen, a highly configurable lockscreen replacement.
QtLockscreen out of the box works just fine, replacing the boring old default one in all instances of its appearance.  The new look is much sleeker, and comes with media player controls, but that’s not the best part.  As with anything N900, the best part is that you can mess around with this as much as you want!  A word of caution though, as it doesn’t yet have a GUI to play around with settings, so its all messing with file code.  Being in the extras-devel repository, no one but you takes responsibility if your device goes nova.
If you are comfortable tweaking with some files though, go for it.  Everything can be played around with, from background images, fonts, sizes and more.  QtLockscreen currently works with the default Media Player, Open Media Player and Mediabox.  It didn’t work with any of the other media players I have floating around.  Another issue I had with it was that occasionally the old lockscreen would show up, but then after going back into standby and hitting power again, QtLockscreen made a reappearance.
Not exactly a staple app, but a very nice way to add a bit of a personal touch to that lockscreen.  If you want to try it out, have a read here first.  Now back to tweaking my lockscreen some more.

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I can deal with Apple’s just fine, as long as I don’t have to touch one, I am completely fine.  The trouble I have with the iPhone is that it feels like every man and his dog ‘must’ have one, or you’re just not cool.  What’s worse is that everything is now optimised for that little piece of fruit.  So what has that got to do with me, and how can we take advantage of it?  Macuco of course!

What is Macuco?
Macuco is a web browser, which emulates the iPhone browsing experience.  This is useful as it taps into all the hard work those evil corporations did, making their webpage’s work perfectly for those oranges.  Now, true enough that this makes many pages dumbed down, and the Safari browser of the iCrack just doesn’t come close to that of MicroB.
With that in mind, Macuco is a ‘sometimes’ browser.  A browser for when you want to check your Google calendars, and haven’t got it synced yet, or when you want to check your Gmail, or G+ and not mess around.  Or even those times where you want to stalk those photos just uploaded to Facebook of that cute chick you saw on the weekend, and not mess around with the silly layer thing Facebook does.  Macuco even gives links upon opening to some of the sites you would most likely use, and has great portrait mode support too (you would hope so).

Beyond just a few sometimes situations though, I wouldn’t use Macuco much.  But for these situations, Macuco is perfect for cutting down the clutter of trying to view an entire epic webpage on a 3.5 inch screen; and since every business out there isn’t cool unless they have optimised for the iDoesn’t, it does make those sometimes situations just a little better, without the hassle of needing your daily dose of fruit.

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A nice quick video has come up on YouTube lately showing off the upcoming Nokia N9.  Why is this one any different from the many many others that are swarming the waves?

Well, beyond the short sharp and shiny nature of this video, showing us all the great swipe-tastic features of our beloved Maemo lovechild, they slip in a mention at the end that Australia will be the first market to launch the device.  I find this intriguing, as although us Aussies down here may be a day ahead of the rest of the world, we are usually last to get our tech.  Take the N900 for instance, where they wouldn’t even tell us if it was even coming to Australia.  After 7 odd months of waiting, I finally got my lovely little device, but 7 months is a long time.

So there’s something to look forward to, an Asia Pacific launch at a decent time, although it still is up to carriers to release the Nokia N9, so they may still be pooping on my party when the time comes.
 

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I know that this Game Gripper for Nokia N900 have been around for some time and I’ve had mine as soon as I could manage to get one shipped to Australia.  But I just wanted to give it a quick spotlight, for those that aren’t aware of it. I enjoy the occasional game on my trusty N900, even more so when I know I have a charger on hand.  One of the best parts of gaming on my little mobile computer, over something like an iPhone, is that is has real buttons.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Now, given that it has real buttons, a smart bunch of fellas thought they could make a neat little overlay to cut down the clutter and give me a direction pad to boot.  All of this while still allowing me access to my charging port, and headphone jack.
Now all of a sudden my amazing gaming machine is reminiscent of a Super Nintendo controller, and my favourite games like Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Duke Nukem 3D and Super Mario War are awesome to play.  Not all games need one of these, but for the ones that can make use of them, and can remap their keys, these things are ideal.
Maybe it’s me showing my age, but who doesn’t like reliving their childhood through the games we played. You can buy the Game Gripper for Nokia N900 at Amazon for 16.99$.

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“We will support Nokia N9 for years and release several SW updates” is the twitter message that Nokia just put in their page. This means that if you buy Nokia N9 you will have updates for, at least, 2 years, according to Nokia boss: Klas Ström. This is not a simple message, it comes from Nokia and they are making a comittement on stading with a support to a solely device: Nokia N9, the only Meego Open Source Nokia phone.

The same person, Klas Ström, makes a “not to worry” message with this tweet as many people are disappointed with Nokia leaving Symbian and many more (essentially developers) would be if Nokia got off Open Source and focused on Microsoft Windows Phone only. This is also a message to investors that could be thinking that a better mobile would be coming featuring Windows Phone 7 Mango which could tell us that Nokia N9 wouldn’t be that good. Another thing one can be sure: You can install Meego on Nokia N900 and get it updated whenever you want. So Nokia is supporting Nokia N900 for years too!

For those who are fancy with Nokia Windows Phone, we already have a look on how would be that phone: It is Nokia Sea Ray that Stephen Elop presented in June. When will it come? Will it kill Nokia N9? Will it be a sucess? Will it fail? We have to wait to answer those questions. Will it be released in November? A Portuguese website called PT10G is saying that Nokia will release Nokia Windows Phone in November 2011 (before Christmas) so we can say that Nokia N9 will be making the sales by September this year.
 
 

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After the release of the Nokia N9 Meego 1.2 Harmattan, I was tempted to install the Meego 1.2 on the N900 device. After hours of trials and errors managed to flash the raw image and kernel into the phone’s EMMC. Which means now I’m booting into Meego without Maemo.
Installation guide would be provided but please be warned that ” ONLY FLASH IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING ” does apply here. It might brick your N900 and bring it to Nokia Care Centre for warranty replacement. I was lucky to be able to flash back to the Meego image and here is the preview.
Meego 1.2 Harmattan Pros:
New Interface. The interface flows gives a very new feeling and it is fresh but it has traces of Maemo. Multitasking button is similar to the one in Maemo. The switching between opened apps feels like the one in Windows 7.
Smoothness:
At some point the settings menu was really smooth. It was easy to scroll, responsive and there were no complaints about it. But you only get this half of the time
Meego 1.2 Harmattan Open Sourced:
For it being open-sourced, much modification could be implement and it could be something new.
Lock-screen:
The lock screen is something new, where you drag an icon over to an empty space where that space could be regard as a unlock space. It definitely differs from the slide to unlock or entering codes or drawing lines to unlock.
Meego 1.2 Harmattan Cons:
1. Still very buggy. Most of the applications seems to take awhile to load and settle down before you can start using. It started lagging after a few apps were opened to multitasked.

Call and messaging have to be ironed out. Can only receive messages after a phone reboot
Incoming calls couldn’t be received. Any incoming calls would crash the phone itself

2. I wouldn’t say this is much of a big con, but it still have traces of Maemo in it. Maybe is due to the community contribution but if Meego were to be somethine fresh, it would attract more people. For example, the browser used in it is Fennec from Maemo and the …

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The new Nokia N9 have been released today at Nokia Connection in Singapore. Nokia N9 is like a transformation from its N8, remaining an only touchscreen phone but this Nokia N9 has Meego and not Symbian^3. It’s a good news from Nokia as this is a Meego phone (for developers) and better than that we will have a Nokia N950 that have some hardware changes and keyboard specially sold for developers.
For developers these are the best news that could come from Nokia right now as they are investing on us by releasing a Nokia N9 and a Nokia N950. For investors these are also good news: Due to Nokia N9 and N950 nokia Shares up more than 3.5% (NYSE: NOK).
Here are the Nokia N9 specs:
Nokia N9 (consumer device) also known as Nokia N9 Lankku:

ARM Cortex-A8 OMAP3630 1GHz, PowerVR SGX530 with 1GB RAM
3.9? AMOLED 480 x 854 pixels with Gorilla Glass Display
Nokia N9 features an 8MP Camera, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, dual LED flash
Unibody Touch Screen ( Multi Touch )
Nokia N9 is MeeGo OS powered, v1.2 Harmattan
720p recording at 30fps
16/64 GB of storage
MicroSIM card support only
SNS integration
Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
TV-out (720p video) via HDMI and composite
Dolby Digital Plus via HDMI
The Nokia N9 holds Predictive text input (Swype)

Nokia N950 (Developer Device) Specs:

All the Same except for a few noticeable ones :

4? TFT 854X480 resolution
Physical QWERTY with slide tilt screen
Aluminium body, N9 is polycarbonate
No NFC
1320mAh battery compared to N9′s 1450mAH

For this Developer device, it is only available through this methods:

Nokia Developer Launchpad
Meego Device Program

Release notes for the developer device can be found here
Stay tune for more updates on this highly anticipated release of the new Meego handset by Nokia, the Nokia N9.
Source: Nokia N9 Blog

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The Ovi Map N900 have been enhanced for quite sometime and now the community is happy to bring you some of these features such as turn by turn navigation with voice guidance. Tutorial after the break.
TURN BY TURN NAVIGATION WITH VOICE GUIDANCE TUTORIAL:
I would recommend you do all this through SSH on your N900. Tutorial on how to SSH your N900 is here.
Warning : This script have been tested and use it only when you know what is the content all about
For those who want to try the fastest method can always download this script from here.
If you are going to use this in your car, get an N900 car holder and an N900 car charger to go with it. They ship for free to everywhere.
For those willing to do the long way on your phone or through SSH on your Linux/Mac machine, here are the ways step by step

Change your device language to English (USA)
Go to terminal and login as root using the command “sudo gainroot”
From now on is all command lines :

apt-get install espeakgui espeak libespeak espeak-data wget unzip
cd /usr/share/nokia-maps/html
mv index.html index.html.nokia
gzip index.html.nokia
wget http://www.pittnerovi.com/jiri/hobby/electronics/n900/maps.tar.gz
tar zvxf maps.tar.gz; rm maps.tar.gz
cd /home/user/MyDocs; mkdir navigation_sounds; cd navigation_sounds; wget http://static.s2g.gate5.de/maploadervoice/english_us.zip
unzip english_us.zip
cd /usr/share/nokia-maps/html ; ln -s /home/user/MyDocs/navigation_sounds/english_us
nohup ./speak_02.py >/dev/null &
wget -O /dev/null http://localhost:9999/hello ; wget -O /dev/null http://localhost:9999/:g5ann_001

Start your Ovi Map now and you should hear a voice telling you welcome to the enhanced Ovi Map.
 

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For those who always wanted remote control Nokia N900 through their Linux or Mac machine can always opt for the SSH method.
You would need to install the following in your N900 device using the Application Manager:

You would be prompted to enter your password. Enter the password of your choice and remember it or take it down somewhere safe for future reference. After installing all this package, go to your Status Menu and you would be able to see a SSH column like this:

You would see SSH STATUS: OFF if you haven’t turned it on. Just click on it and you be able to SSH into your N900 through WiFi. For example SSH-ing using Terminal in Mac and Linux machines:

On the first line you would see an error. This error is caused by not turning on SSH on your phone.
Once SSH is turned on then you could see that you can connect to your phone. Usually the command is
ssh root@”ip address written here”

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Now there is a new Foursquare app for Nokia N900 for those who wants to check in anywhere they go. Pretty much new and still in development plus it is a bit buggy when I was using it to review this Nokia N900 application. Here it goes for the review of FourCircle
Features:

A simple interface for those who wants a fast check-in. Takes a short time to load.

The check in interface. It shows you where are the check in points nearby you. The nearby estimation is way off I would say considering my nearest point is 3km away when my closest is like 2 metres away. I hope they can take a good look at this. But you can still check into the place you want.

Ranking that shows your current point accumulation

The ranking board system. Somehow I feel that it follows the interface adapted from iOS device Foursquare app

GPS detection is not accurate and other features such as Tips Nearby and Recent Check-ins require some in-app bug fix

The Tips Nearby seems to be working properly for awhile.

This was the bug I encountered with Recent Checkins. I pressed the button once and it wasn’t responding and it didn’t give any response too. Realised this event when I wanted to switch to my SMS. So i think if this bug is fixed this app could turn out great. Score: 6/10

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Always needed an easy way to install your webOS games on Nokia N900 without going through all the commands? Now for those who have the .ipk files for the corresponding games should get this webOS Games Manager.
What it does?
An automatic installer and uninstaller that uses your .ipk files and install the game and applies all the necessary tweaks and creates a desktop launcher for you. It also restore/back up game saves
Cool features:

Easy install/uninstall
Applies all the necessary hacks
Multitouch dependant games such as N.O.V.A and games that requires you to move and shoot are adapted for keyboard controls.
Simple procedure for adding new games
Can choose installation directory

How to install?
Install “WebOS Games Manager” from Application Manager or from the terminal [ apt-get install wgames ]
How to use?

Copy your .ipk files into MyDocs/Downloads directory in your phone. Create this folder if it does not exist. Make it capital D
Run WebOS Games Manager from the menu, select game and install

Screenshots :
 

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Today, I would show you guys how to install the Meego 1.1 on the N900 on an external memory card. We have already looked here on how to Install Meego 1.1 on Nokia N900 for Mac. You would need a 4gb MicroSD card and also it must be class 6 or higher. I am having a class 4 MicroSD card and it seems quite unresponsive towards a lot of stuffs. Here are the steps for installing it using Windows. Currently I’m running Windows XP SP3 32-bit.
You would need to download the correct files and corresponding kernels from http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/releases/
meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.0.20101001.1-vmlinuz-2.6.35.3-8.5-n900
meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.0.20101001.1-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2
Download the Win32DiskImager.exe program: https://launchpad.net/win32-image-writer/+download
1. Unzip the meego-handset-………mmcblk0p.raw.bz2 file
2. Run W32DiskImager.exe
3. Select the MeeGo image file (note you must write *.* in the file name box to see all files)
Note: Do put in .raw at the back to write the file. For example:

4. Select the drive letter which corresponds to the microSD memory card.
5. Click the “Write” button to byte-copy the image to the microSD memory card.
6. Now pop in your MicroSD card and close the back cover. YOU NEED THE BACK COVER TO BOOT UP the MEEGO.
Remember the kernel you downloaded? Now it is time to use it to load your Meego. You would need to do this everytime you want to boot up Meego.
First cd (change directory) to where you first installed your flasher-3.5
For example cd ”C:\Program files\maemo\flasher-3.5″
Remember the quotes are needed to specify the whole directory
Then type in the following command

flasher-3.5.exe -l -k <kernel> -b

Where <kernel> is the location of your kernel file.
Wait for the message “Suitable USB device not found,waiting” then turn off your N900 and hold onto the button “U” while connecting your N900 to the PC using the USB cable. Your MeeGo would be booted.
We will be looking into more stuff about Meego during this weeks. Also, check this Nokia N900 Otterbox case with discounted price – never forget about protecting the N900.

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Hey guys is been long since I gave an update on an alternative OS for the N900. Today, I would show you guys how to install the Meego 1.1 on the N900 on an external memory card
You would need a 4gb MicroSD card and also it must be class 6 or higher. I am having a class 4 MicroSD card and it seems quite unresponsive towards a lot of stuffs. Here is the Steps for installing it on a MACOSX. Will update on the Windows and Linux part next weekdays.
You would need to download the correct files and corresponding kernels from  http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/releases/
meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.0.20101001.1-vmlinuz-2.6.35.3-8.5-n900
meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.0.20101001.1-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2
Insert your MicroSD card with the adapter into your Mac and run this on the MacOSX Terminal
diskutil list
??This would be the example

/dev/disk2 would be my MicroSD partition in this example
Then type this

bzcat <raw_image>.bz2 | sudo dd bs=4096 of=/dev/diskX

Where X is the number of the disk where in this example it is 2

Most of you or maybe all of you would get this Resource busy error. To solve this you must unmount your /dev/disk2 using this the Disk Utility app.

Select the SD card and click Unmount. Try again the command and you should have something like this

Where the square thing would blink until the whole process completes. And you would receive this message

475136+1 records in 475136+1 records out 1946157057 bytes transferred in 2606.033611 secs (746789 bytes/sec)

or something similar.
And also you will get a popup message of The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer. Just click ignore.
Now pop in your MicroSD card and close the back cover. YOU NEED THE BACK COVER TO BOOT UP the MEEGO.
Remember the kernel you downloaded? Now it is time to use it to load your Meego. You would need to do this everytime you want to boot up Meego.

sudo flasher-3.5 -l -k <kernel> -b

Where <kernel> is the location of your kernel file. For example this

Turn off your N900 and hold onto the button “U” while connecting your N900 to the Mac using the USB cable. Your MeeGo would be booted.
 
 
 

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