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I’m back from MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin, found out few things so I can share with you. Let’s start with position of Nokia N900 in MeeGo world.
As I’ve already mentioned Nokia N900 won’t move from Maemo 5 to MeeGo, official statement is that N900 is base for development for ARM-based devices, but it’s not meant to be available with MeeGo for end users. There is possibility that this modification will be made by community, not internally by Nokia. Fair enough for me if such thing is considered anyway.
Apart from all of commotion around new devices and including MeeGo in many different appliances I’ve noticed that N900 takes some attention. I’ve found Comarch’s stand with presentation of tools and applications for many platforms, including N900 – TADEK (Test Automation in a Distributed Environment) that is rather not so interesting for end user, and Drafter (kind of shared, virtual whiteboard for live conferencing) shown on two N900 devices connected to one WiFi network. I liked this live drawing and sharing, it looks promising and I see many uses, not only in business for conferencing from anywhere, but also for regular, everyday, normal people to share thoughts with friends with something more than words.
I’ve also visited some sessions related to mobile Linux in general, not only MeeGo itself. One of the sessions touched our common problem with battery life and energy saving but in very technical way. If to believe in what was said (and if I got all of the things correctly, I’m regular developer, not some Linux kernel expert ) power saving may be done on few levels in Linux and it should initially be done by developers, low level optimization in system kernel and few additional tricks in applications. Since I think that kernel level tweaks are mostly well used I think that everything that remains lies in hands of application developers.
While most of the conference events were focused on what’s about to come with MeeGo, the N900 was still present almost everywhere and still gathers quite a lot of interest. New possibilities …

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Long awaited Nokia World 2010 finally happened in London some time ago. Nokia fans expected a lot since there were a lot of unconfirmed news from Nokia, like Nokia N8 multimedia smartphone release info, our (I hope) most awaited succesor of N900, Nokia N9 or Nokia N98, another member of N-series. How did Nokia meet these expectations? Lets have a bit of review.

First of all, Nokia indirectly confirmed that Qt framework will be most significang for Nokia application developers. The use case (in sense of development) still doesn’t touch specific extensions like MeeGo Touch library, but still such competition as Nokia 2010 Hackathon gives quite clear view on what Nokia is about to do in this area.
Nokia N8, long awaited, widely advertised multimedia device was announced in different area. Nokia executives are convinced that Symbian is still most succesfull mobile OS, from developer point of view it’s a bit different, but for now just let it be. Just have a look at ‘official’ unboxing videos with presenter customized for everyone, like hot Suzy, nice and specific Brenda or geek-type Ryan. Currently preordered Nokia N8 is already being shipped to customers, so I think we will have real-life experience and user feedback really soon.
Unfortunately we still don’t know how N900 successor will look like or what hardware will it have inside, nevertheless we can still have hope that all of this MeeGo stuff is not only about netbooks. First mobile phone with MeeGo on board is announced to be released next year. We can expect great improvement in hardware and pretty nice user interface, but hard facts are still missing, everything we can actually rely on lies in leaks and gossips.
And as for me, I was away for some time, but now I’m getting back to partially normal life, so I’ll try to keep you informed about what happens around our favourite piece of hardware and I will share my findings from last few weeks.
–
MJ (back from sick-leave)

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FeedingIt is a very simple, very good RSS Reader. It is really easy to do the setup, and the feeds are shown very clear and well-arranged in a list. And the best thing, you can use it in portrait mode, which makes reading comfortable, especially on trips. Switch between the stories only with a finger wipe. It´s almost like reading a book.

First, after you installed the program from the Maemo download section, you have to add your favourite feeds in the setup section “Organize Feeds”. Tap on “Add Feed” and set a name for your news collection. Now you will be asked for the URL of the RSS feed, and your done. You can rearrange your feeds in your own order of interest or importance, edit or delete them, as you like. The main screen shows you now all your installed newsletters. Tapping on one, opens the news list of your chosen RSS feed, from where you start reading tapping again on one article. Once the article shows up, you can turn your phone into portrait mode and scroll to your news with your finger, like I mentioned before. I like this very much.

You are also able to import your feeds of interest to your N900 with OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language). For not so skilled users, as I am, this means just that you can add your feeds downloading a file from a specific location, either local or over the internet.

Credits for the author Yves Marcoz for this application.
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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Once every few days devel and testing catalogues give me a piece of software I want to have or at least I want to see how does it look like. This time I’ve encountered a neat surprise, concept of UI for Maemo 6 in Widgets Gallery application.
First view gives quite good idea of what will Maemo 6 look like. Statusbar on top is organised in the way we got used to, with homescreen icon on the left, close/back button on the right and drop-down menu in the middle. If to belive in this concept, new UI will support landscape and portrait mode in every phone orientation (even upside-down). Widgets seem clean and fairly easy to use on touch screen. Changing orientation keeps approximately the same size and order of UI elements, operating with fingers is easy and it’s possible to freely use one hand in portrait mode.
If we look into the backend of Widgets Gallery, we will see that it’s based on libdui, Harmattan UI framework built on top of Qt 4.6, which has been recently released to open source. Library looks quite mature and gives all of elements theoretically needed by any application and may be good base for upcoming Nokia mobile devices.
As a concept the Widgets Gallery still has some glitches which you can find if playing with it for too long, but shows consistent way to take advantage of Qt framework and all of its features.

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Yesterday, as every day, I’ve launched app manager to check new updates and take a peek into new software. Suprisingly i’ve found Maemo 5 update available Over The Air. Small research around the web gave me idea what is it all about.
First system update I’ve noticed before was PR1.0.1, also available via app manager but it was rather small and its main purpose was to prepare device for bigger PR1.1 update. Situation looks similar this time, PR1.1.1 is fairly small, list of changes isn’t astonishing, stability fixes, more support for OpenGL, fix for battery life issue etc. These facts may lead to conclusion that soon we will get a bigger update, most probably in the next few days.
But for now lets get back to reality and what we already have. Update shows on the list as Maemo 5 and it says it’s 16.2 MB download. Nevertheless you will also need around 42 MB of free space on rootfs, if you have applications from testing and devel catalogues you may need to free some space. After preparations update takes around one minute, reboots and it’s done, you can check product info to be sure.
In short the current update isn’t major breakthrough. I think we can take it as announcment of upcoming Maemo 5/PR1.2 release.

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Unbelievable! Over 300 developers have been given a Nokia N900 pre-final production version for a 6 month loan. Just two questions, where and why?
The first one would give you a clue for the second one. Where? On the Maemo Summit 2009 that is taking place in Amsterdam which is an annual get-together of the Maemo Community (this is the second one). Technology enthusiasts, apps developers, and platform developers meet to network, share their latest innovation, learn about future trends and just have fun. The Nokia N900 built on Maemo 5 is in the spotlight of this year’s event (more info about this event, click here).
So now you can guess why? I hope that these like guys take advantage of the situation that they have on their hands by creating the most wonderful apps we can expect from the Nokia N900.
If you don’t believe in this news, you can see it with your own eyes (through a YouTube video)

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The Nokia n900 is now available for pre-order in the USA for approximately USD50 more than its symbian sibling the Nokia N97.
http://www.nokiausa.com/find-products/phones/nokia-n900#/main/landing