There probably aren’t many visitors to the itT site that need to look up words in Khmer, Thai, Burmese or Lao. Especially since you can’t view Unicoded web-pages in those languages on a Nokia Internet Tablet. (Drat!)
Without the work done to establish a Unicode version of Khmer, without the beautiful Khmer Unicode fonts, without the evangelizing of standards and open software in Khmer, without the literally millions of “messages” translated to localize Firefox (Mekhala), Thunderbird (Moyura), OpenOffice and openSUSE for Khmer users, all performed by Khmer Software Initiative, there would be no use at all for the dictionary extension I’ve worked on.
So I am glad to see today that KhmerOS has been selected as one of the nine finalists worldwide in the Stockholm Challenge (one of the two finalists in the economic development category). Recognition for this work is made by the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), which promotes innovation and advancement in the acronymic areas of K4D (Knowledge for Development) and ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). Congratulations to the developers at KhmerOS! You’ve done great work!
When Nokia introduced its first Internet tablet, all geekdom rejoiced at the prospect of an open source palmtop — complete with VGA camera — dedicated to hopping on a wireless connection and surfing the Web. Users flocked to the forums, wrote programs for the device, even went so far as to optimize aspects of its operating system. But Linux n00bs were largely unable to take full advantage of the gizmo’s capabilities. More than two years and a couple of product generations later, it’s not just the hacker crowd that’s psyched about the Nokia N810. This is a far more polished and consumer-friendly version, thanks to all those nerds and their suggestions. The reengineered tablet kept its predecessors’ 4.1-inch, 800 x 480 pixel touchscreen but picked up a full slide-out keyboard. And no, that didn’t make the thing any bigger. In fact, it’s 8 percent smaller. The new kid also got a bump in processor speed and added a preloaded Skype client. For the truly restless, a built-in GPS receiver and maps nix the need to pack a nav system in the old gear bag. The N810 is a rad gadget, to be sure — and the geeks will probably find a way to make it even better.
Thoughtfix just released a comprehensive comparative review of the Asus Eee 701 and the new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet:
… I’m sticking with the N810 as my favorite “secondary” (non-phone) device. It fits my life much better than the Eee does. However, I am not one to turn away from a well-designed ultraportable. I’m going to have a good deal of fun with the Eee and enjoy it as my secondary home computer, but the N810 will get a lot more use out of the home.
I missed seeing an item in the New York Times technology blog, Bits, that Saul Hansell wrote. On October 10, he noted a report had come out from Telephia that said that “location-based services” accounted for half of all the money spent on cellphone applications.*
Half!
Hansell’s irritation centered around the fact that all this money is being spent on services like Verizon’s VZ Navigator, which “display maps and driving directions using GPS hardware built into phones. Verizon charges $9.99 a month or $2.99 a day for the service.”
“I already own” the phone and the GPS in it, Hansell points out, yet he and any Verizon customer still has to pay extra to use it.
Of course that rubs him the wrong way. And of course it’s great that a device like the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet takes the opposite approach.
But the subtext of Telephia’s report seems to me to be that people really like and use location-based services. That’s why half the money being spent on apps went for them. That seems to me to be a pretty big arrow pointing in the direction Nokia (or any company in the walkaround web arena) would want to be headed.
It’s nice to have some facts to flesh out the intuitions now and then.
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* in the U.S. in the second quarter of this year
Nokia has released an officialbeta version of OS2008 for the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. This release intends to help developers port and test their applications’ performance and readiness for OS2008. The Navkit is for the OS2008 beta is disabled however.
The final release version of OS2008 should be available by mid-December. The lucky 500 contributors who received their Nokia N810 discount codes should be able to use them by December 15.
Nokia has filed a US patent application (dated November 8, 2007) on a device which seems to resemble an Internet Tablet. While it is still very early to know if this is a Symbian OS or Maemo-based device, a device with its look and features like a camera and a touch screen, as stated in the patent application, will almost surely belong to the Nokia N-series group of mobile devices.
Remember the iNdT team’s sketches and mock-ups of the next version of Canola? iNdT’s Marcelo Oliveira (aka handful) has just posted an update (video) on the progress of Canola.
Marcelo shows Canola’s new gorgeous Picture Viewer and Music Player interface with kinetic scrolling all around, and their version of cover flow. They intend to benefit from the Internet Tablet’s 3D engineversion of EFL (enlightenment foundation libraries) 16 bit version to provide fluid transitions.
Marcelo also mentioned that YouTube and Blip.tv plug-ins will be included by default but they plan to have other developers extend Canola by creating plug-ins to stream other types of content and connect to other web services. The new version of Canola will have all the settings integrated in the app.
Expect to see the first public beta to be released sometime the first week of December. Marcelo also hinted to watch out for another release in 2008 as they add new features to Canola, having something to do with the Webkit.
With Nokia Internet Tablet Video Converter, you can easily convert your videos – the ones you shot yourself and the ones you downloaded from the Internet (legally of course) – into an optimized format for your Nokia Internet Tablet. All you need to do is drag and drop your videos into the application, which automatically converts them into a size and resolution that are just perfect for your Internet Tablet.
The application is optimized for Nokia Internet Tablets such as N800 and N810.
We would like to kick off Tablet 101, the newest section of Internet Tablet Talk, with itT’s two-part Nokia N810 Walkthrough high-definition videos.
Part I - the Nokia N810 on all its angles in HD, as well as side-by-side with the Nokia N800 and the Nokia 770 (11 minutes)
Part II - the Nokia N810 and OS 2008, what’s new, and Rhapsody demo (16 minutes)
If you still haven’t seen them, here are more high-resolution pics of the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet over at the itT Gallery.
We plan to create more Tablet 101 tutorial videos as well as application demos. Let us know how you like the videos and suggest what you want to see next.
When Nokia introduced its first Internet tablet, all geekdom rejoiced at the prospect of an open source palmtop — complete with VGA camera — dedicated to hopping on a wireless connection and surfing the Web. Users flocked to the forums, wrote programs for the device, even went so far as to optimize aspects of its operating system. But Linux n00bs were largely unable to take full advantage of the gizmo’s capabilities. More than two years and a couple of product generations later, it’s not just the hacker crowd that’s psyched about the Nokia N810. This is a far more polished and consumer-friendly version, thanks to all those nerds and their suggestions. The reengineered tablet kept its predecessors’ 4.1-inch, 800 x 480 pixel touchscreen but picked up a full slide-out keyboard. And no, that didn’t make the thing any bigger. In fact, it’s 8 percent smaller. The new kid also got a bump in processor speed and added a preloaded Skype client. For the truly restless, a built-in GPS receiver and maps nix the need to pack a nav system in the old gear bag. The N810 is a rad gadget, to be sure — and the geeks will probably find a way to make it even better.
