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Getting bored with the old look of your SMS and chat screens? If so, open nature of Maemo allows you to tweak the look to your own preference.

Configuration files for Conversations And Contacts themes reside under the /usr/share/rtcom-messaging-ui/html/ directory. Backup the files if necessary.
First make your own theme with html-css-javascript or find one that suits you made by other enthusiasts on Talk Maemo or here.
In case if you downloaded the theme, unpack the downloaded archive to any directory, for example, ~/MyDocs/theme
cd ~/MyDocs
mkdir theme
Then, copy all files in the archive to the directory mentioned above:
cd ~/MyDocs/theme
sudo gainroot
cp -f * /usr/share/rtcom-messaging-ui/html
Because many downloaded themes include only files for SMS interface, copy them for chat interface:
sudo gainroot
cd /usr/share/rtcom-messaging-ui/html
cp -f MessagingWidgetsSMSConversation.css MessagingWidgetsChatConversation.css
cp -f MessagingWidgetsSMSConversation.js MessagingWidgetsChatConversation.js
cp -f MessagingWidgetsSMSConversation.html MessagingWidgetsChatConversation.html
Finally, reboot your phone,
sudo gainroot
reboot
Or kill the process:
sudo gainroot
killall rtcom-messaging-ui
 
Enjoy your new interface!

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Ever wanted to have a graphical button to reboot your beloved device? Well, today I’ll show you how to add one to your powerkey menu!
Note: the tips we go through involve editing a low-level system file and imply that readers know what they are doing.
Adding the Reboot button:
First, we would want to go root:
  sudo gainroot
Next, let’s modify the sudoers file to allow us running reboot:
echo “user ALL = NOPASSWD: /sbin/reboot” > /etc/sudoers.d/reboot.sudoers
Update sudoers:
update-sudoers
Now, we would want to create a d-bus service.
[editor] /usr/share/dbus-1/services/reboot.service
Replace [editor] with whatever editor you prefer, for example, leafpad.
Paste the following into the file:
  [D-BUS Service]
  Name=com.misc.reboot
  Exec=/usr/bin/sudo reboot
Save the file and exit the editor. Change current directory:
cd /etc/systemui
Open up systemui.xml file in your preferred editor:
[editor] systemui.xml
Paste the following anywhere between the <powerkeymenu> and </powerkeymenu> tags:
<menuitem priority=”750″ name=”Reboot”>
   <icon>general_refresh</icon>
   <callback service=”com.misc.reboot” path=”/com/misc/reboot” interface=”com.misc.reboot” method=”reboot” bus=”session”   autostart=”true”>
   <argument type=”boolean”>true</argument>
  </callback>
</menuitem>
Note: some of you may notice that a reboot entry is already defined in systemui.xml. However, it utilizes osso-powerup-shutdown and preforms a very brutal shutdown. Rebooting with sudo reboot will gently shutdown all software and sync your filesystems, which is safer. Let’s just say that there  was probably a reason that the default entry was commented out.
Save the file, exit the editor and reboot your N900.
reboot
Enjoy your newly added Reboot button which will perform a safe reboot once pressed!

 
—
Source: Talk Maemo

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They say history repeats itself, and in the coming weeks and months in particular we will all find out how true that is.  Nokia, a company which went from a simple goods supplier of the Finnish Army, to the most dominant mobile phone company in the world may just come full circle.
Nokia showing off Windows Phones isn’t anything new, after all we have already had a glimpse at the Sea Ray, a Nokia N9 which simply runs on Windows Phone.  But if you are to believe Stephen Elop’s ignorance when he asked everyone to put away their cameras before he showed it, it was not an official unveiling.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Well, that all changes soon, the good people over at Techie-Buzz have found an invitation for a joint Nokia-Microsoft party on August 17th.  Reports also state that this event will be held at GamesCon in Cologne, Germany.
Looks like all of the hard work on Nokia’s part has come down to this, all of the flip flopping, double backing and confusion.  The fruition of a plan beginning with a burning platform, and the future of a company has come down to this.  Soon we will see if Microsoft really is the future of Nokia.

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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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We all know the decisions of Nokia and Microsoft, we know that MeeGo is not main Nokia smartphone operating system anymore. I was also thinking that Nokia will abandon Qt at all and it will become one of many forgotten mobile technologies. Apparently I was wrong, at least a bit.

I’m aware that porting libraries between platforms is quite common. Programmers want to have their favourite tools in palm of the hand, so that we have for example java and icedtea on N900. This time Qt (currently owned by Nokia) is going to Android. I’ve seen few projects trying to make this port but none of them was big success. Finally I’ve found ?Necessitas, you can check it out on Qt labs blog.
This makes me feel better, when Nokia-MS fusion (I know, cooperation not fusion) came to reality I was a bit confused what to do with my newly acquired Qt certificate. but maybe with Necessitas I can move (as programmer) to another platform without need to develop bunch of new skills and maybe soon we will have more Qt applications ported to Android and some of Nokia products will prove itself useful.
I’m waiting for something more than recently released alpha version, which still may be buggy, but I have great hopes related to this port.
–
MJ

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During last few days Nokia came up with few interesting, yet disturbing decisions. Cooperation with Microsoft, huge change in smartphone platform plans, sudden change of heart with MeeGo platform, so what can we expect with N900 and Linux smartphones from Nokia?
Let me start with quote from one of my favourite computer games:
The village is dying. The signs are everywhere. Withering crops… dying brahmin… sick children.
There is hope, however. A slim hope that few know of.
First of all I’m having mixed feelings about strategic cooperation with Microsoft. First of all switch in management, new CEO – Stephen Elop, originally president of Microsoft Business division, this was first sign of upcoming changes. I’m not saying that Microsoft is the greatest evil on whole world, but after acquiring such manager it was unavoidable that Nokia and Microsoft will cooperate soon. On the other hand I’ve seen emphasis on MeeGo during conference in Dublin last year, cooperation with Intel and AMD seemed quite steady.
Second thing is status of MeeGo, I feel that it will remain in the same state as Maemo from the very beginning, it will show up on one phone, most probably the one that leaked some time ago in pictures, mostly because of all of Windows Phone 7 strategy for Nokia smartphones. Let me remind you of some old Maemo devices, like Nokia N770 (internet tablet), which came with Maemo 1 and 2, next device Nokia N800/N810 with Maemo 3 and 4. Why this inventions were not continued on other devices? Same thing happened with Maemo 5, in my opinion pretty nice system for mobile phones, if it were continued and furtherly developed it could be really succesfull on newer phones, with more features, it could even compete with other popular platforms. But no, Nokia starts with something new, releaases on small market and finally abandons it.
Now I’m really loosing faith in Nokia. The hope I mean lies in our hands, in what we can do now, I think that giving N900 and Maemo 5 maintenance to community was the best thing that could have happened. Now we have the power …

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Few days ago Dave Neary, guy involved in MeeGo development, made quite extensive review of current MeeGo status, inside the project and outside on market. For full article read The MeeGo Progress Report, I will shorten to the most vital parts.
All of the commotion around Symbian (that was almost closed down recently and seems to be dying slowly) and MeeGo (still under heavy development) leaded to announcement that Nokia will choose the latter as main system for high-end mobiles. This is good news for MeeGo after recent changes in Nokia management, new CEO (formerly in high ranked at Microsoft) and employment reduction.
On the other hand cooperation between Nokia and Intel is still far from monolithic. Intel bases on it’s GTK+ solutions, while Nokia insists on Qt. There is right on both sides, investing time, money and work in technology and abandoning it later doesn’t seem the best solution for big company. This part is a bit tricky for Nokia and Intel, while Apple released iPhone with it’s iOS quite a while ago, iPad quite recently, in the mean time Google answered with coherent Android platform, MeeGo may meet some difficulties conquering mobile market.
Apart from all of difficulties and doubts, MeeGo looks quite good as for few months old, open source project. Lot of experienced developers are involved, works is going forward every day, even I have my own share. In the next few days I hope some of the secrets will be revealed during MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin, I will be there and I will surely share my observations and every news I can reach. Let’s stay in touch, something interesting may come up
–
MJ

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First Symbian was told to be coming to an end but it was not confirmed, then the Maemo software was told to become extinct and now it night be true after all.
Let me fill your diary with a few dates. Nokia World is due to take place on September 14th and 15th in London.I am sure that devices will be announced and I am hoping that the leaked N9 is one of them. If not at Nokia World then hopefully at the first ever MeeGo Conference, scheduled to take place exactly 2 months later in Dublin.
According to to the project’s official wiki page, version 1.1 of the Intel-Nokia is due to hit the web between October 21 and October 27 of this year. The next version, 1.2, is rumored to hit the market between April 21 and 27 2011 according to unnamed sources. That’s a 6 month gap.
What will be in MeeGo 1.1? And what about 1.2? No idea, but at least you’ve got a few dates to put into your calendar.

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The Nokia N900 was released in November last year while the Motorola Charm was released in August but also released the same month which shows that Nokia is falling behind. The Charm comes with a TFT capacitive touchscreen with the size of  320 x 240 pixels, 2.8 inches and the Nokia N900 also comes with with a TFT but a size of 800 x 480 pixels, 3.5 inches considering the size, the Nokia N900 wins this round.
The Nokia N900 comes with a QWERTY keyboard as well as the Motorola Charm.As usual, both the devices have a 3.5 mm audio jack. The Charm comes with 512 MB internal memory but the Nokia N900 comes with 32GB internal memory. The rival comes with Android OS, v2.1 (Eclair) which is not as good as the Maemo 5. The Nokia N900 is great to capture images with 5 MP, 2576×1936 pixels, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, Dual LED flash, video light, the Charm is far behind with 3.15 MP, 2048×1536 pixels.
<
The Nokia N900 comes with 278 h (2G) and 250 h (3G) while the Motorola Charm comes with 267 h (2G) and 334 h (3G) which is a really big issue for me but I don’t know for others.

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Told to be for 500 euros by some and 700 euros by others. Who is right? None are right. The Nokia N900 with me was bought for 400 euros in Europe and if you convert in into Dollars or Rands, it will be $ 506 and R3.737.

Not so expensive for a Tablet. But if you want to buy the Nokia N900 in South Africa, then it might cost you around R4000 without the usual tax or subsidies.

Multi tasking, Debian Linux abilities and awesome graphics are major contributions to the price of this device.

Nokia was selling the N900 for $489 but it dropped its price to $389. A great deal for the people that wish to buy the Nokia N900.
In the UK, the Nokia N900 Tablet costs 489 pounds with vat so rather buy with Nokia as it is much more reliable and much cheaper and the device already is included with vat but still has delivery charges.
Amazon was selling the Nokia N900 for $689 but then lowered the price very heavily to $489. A big drop of $200.

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The S60 software platform is slowly ageing away with Maemo covering it up. So I have to say, that the S60 users have to now get used to Maemo. You’ll hear me say this a couple of times here at our Nokia N900 blog.
Maemo 5 is currently present on the Nokia N900.
The Maemo OS which is based on Debian Linux and the GUI which is derived from various frameworks and libraries. The software uses the window manager, and GTK-based Hildon as its GUI and application framework..
Maemo 5 actually has nice 3D games cooking up for us with a new Twitter app.
Here is something that you can expect for the Nokia N900 :

So you can see that Maemo is actually better than Symbian but only in a few ways. The best thing is that you have the terminal to fix problems and awesome games e.g the roller coaster game in the video is really testing our patience.
At work/home and your laptop or computer stops working? Then use your Nokia N900, it is a mini computer in your hands.
With (Maemo) Debian Linux based, Mozilla, the internet browser technology and the Nokia N900 deliver a extremely good mobile experience. The device shows where Nokia is going with software and Nokia should continue to work with the community to unlock the new software capabilities.
Maemo is something that is fuses the power of the computer, the internet and the mobile phone, which is great to see that it is evolving marvelously. If you have any different opinions, let us know at the Nokia N900 forum.

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Announced in August, 2009 but available 2 months later? I am surprised. Read on this Nokia N900 review for more.
The Nokia N900 has really big dimensions of 110.9 x 59.8 x 18 mm, 113 cc. But it actually makes sense as the device is a mini computer. with 181 grams, it is heavy. These are the reasons that the Nokia N900.
The huge screen has 800 x 480 pixels, 3.5 inches which makes it great for gaming.

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Although I just compared the Nokia N900 with the iPhone OS 4, I have to write outside my schedule about the new Nokia C6 unveil from today. The first impression to me was that Nokia brings a really nice looking professional smartphone to the market. You can discover a little similarity to the N97, only the keyboard is slided out like at the N900. It runs on Symbian S600 5th edition, got an 3.2 inch HD touchscreen, a four row keyboard and a five megapixel camera. These specks seems to be almost same as from the N97, but the functionality and the fabrication looks way better.

The functions are also pretty much like in the N97 and N97 mini, but the price seems to be a real killer. Only eur 220,00 before taxes and subsidies are estimated, and thats not even the half of our phones price. And it has the free Nokia Turn by Turn Ovi Maps navigation too right from the box. It brings the best messaging together with instant access to your favourite contacts and communications as we are used from our N900´s. The phone itself is expected in the second quarter of 2010 and I can´t wait to see it for real.

I think this will be a really hot device! Take a closer look at: Nokia C3, C5 and E5. What do you think about it?
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -

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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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Although the iPhone OS 4 itself is not on the market yet (its release is predicted to the second half of 2010), its upcoming features can be already compared to the N900.

Steve Jobs introduced numerous improvements for the new version of the iPhone in the Apple headquarters in Cupertino on the 8th of April. But hold on: Most of them sounds very familiar to us N900 users.

The first of these new characteristics is quess what: Yes, Multitasking! Doesn´t we have this already on our N900s? And hasn´t Nokia always been one step ahead when it comes to multitasking on mobile devices? Well, I think so! Steve showed about 12 applications running at the same time. How much do you have tested running on the N900?
Skype is coming as an native app also. Another feature what is still build in from the beginning in our phones.
Background location. WOW, what does this mean? The iPhone is able to get GPS data, while listening to music or watching to a video … from where does this come from? Because of Nokias accomplishment since the old Symbian versions, maybe?
One of the new quintessence is the possibility to create folders on the iPhone. Is this something new and mind-blowing? Yes, for iPhone users of course. The Apple phone is slowly approximating a handheld computer status like the N900 was right from the start.
Another novelty presented from Apple is the Mail Box administration. Do I really have to write more about this? Conversations will be stored in so called Threads. Wondering about the similarity to the chat-like message function on our N900.
And at last really something new: iAd. The name alone should tell you all. Advertising on the phone. Yes, that´s what I really want to have, don´t you?
Don´t misunderstand me: I like the iPhone. It´s a very stylish designed smartphone just for the right audience. Amazingly with this new features it will more and more be competitive with devices like ours. Where Apple wants to go with its iPhone?
- sam | visit our Nokia N900 forum -
Edit: I forgot one: Still No Flash!