ACCESS Systems Americas, Inc., formerly PalmSource, Inc. has just released Garnet VM Beta for the Nokia Internet Tablet. This virtual machine software lets you run the full Palm OS Garnet on any model of Nokia Internet Tablet (770, N800, N810), giving you full PIM functionality as well as let you install more than 30,000 free and commercial Palm OS applications.
I have just installed the software on the N810. The emulator runs at the middle of the screen at a 320 x 480. Graffiti works well, the keyboard on the N810 works perfectly, and the sound works as well (note that sound does not work on the 770). It seems like it even has an option to wireless HotSync to your PC as well. There is no option yet to rotate it and stretch it horizontally on the tablet which is my primary request as of the moment. Update: There is an option to rotate the screen by unchecking the Fullscreen option, but it just displays the Palm window horizontally at the same resolution. I hope someone finds a way to stretch the desktop area.
As a long time Palm OS enthusiast, I have been longing for PIM apps on the Internet Tablet and never expected this(!), and I am ecstatic! I have setup a new Palm OS forum so IT users and Palm OS users/developers can chat and mingle.
Time to dig up my registered Palm OS app serial numbers…
As I wrote recently, I’ve been working on a Firefox extension. And despite my meager skills as a programmer, the Mozilla development environment stoops just low enough for me to climb aboard and do my thing successfully. This past Friday, the Click SEAlang extension entered beta. Even if I do say so myself, it is (or will be) one of the most useable dictionary extensions available for Firefox*.
I say that for a simple reason — other dictionary extensions make you work too hard. Either you open up a panel, enter your word and look it up, or you highlight a word in your browser and the definition shows up in a separate tab or window.
I wanted to simply highlight a word and then see the results without leaving the page. And I managed that, again not because I’m a whiz but because the tools let me leverage my experience without requiring heavy-duty training.
In simple terms, that means I could use Javascript to do what I wanted instead of having to master C++ (or C or python or perl or ruby).
The release of the Gecko-based browser MicroB for the Nokia Internet Tablets excites me for precisely the same reason. The extension fits into the browser environment, leaving the heavy lifting for the full-time programmers, and weekend programmers like myself need only tangle with the smaller tasks of extending the browser into useful areas.
(MicroB won’t take Firefox add-ons directly; in fact there’ll be full-scale porting of any UI aspects, but the entry barrier looks comparable.)
Maemo.org also mentions that the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet is now on route to the distribution channels so expect to see them at your local store and online in the next few weeks.
To celebrate the the launch of Internet Tablet OS 2008, we at Internet Tablet Talk have decided to refresh the look of the site and make it more current.
We have added a new section called ‘Tablet 101‘ where we plan to post OS 2008 video tutorials and walkthroughs, as well as try to gather other tutorials from other Internet Tablet related sites. We are hoping that new OS 2008 Internet Tablet users would find the new section helpful.
The new look mimics the new OS, using the same default background (blue circles) and transparent menus. It highlights the new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet at the top, with its keyboard appearing at the bottom of the page. Most if not all of the icons on the main page are directly lifted from the OS. As tribute to the site’s old look, a screen capture appears on the N810′d screen above the site. We would like to thank folks from Nokia who willingly provided us with OS 2008 icons and N810 images.
Lastly, we have posted our very first video at Tablet 101 — a 10-minute video walkthough (in HD) of the Nokia N810. We hope you enjoy it.
New changes means new bugs. Please report any problem that you encounter. Thanks!
You’ve heard the buzz about Mauku, the excellent Jaiku client for the Nokia Internet Tablet. Mauku v0.3.0 finally launches as an open source software tomorrow, Thursday, November 8, 2007. Hendrik Hedberg, the primary developer of Mauku, is holding a virtual celebration party over at the #mauku Jaiku channel at 16:00 GMT (11:00 am EST) tomorrow. Everyone is encouraged to drop-in and introduce themselves.
If you don’t have a Jaiku account yet, Hendrick will try his best to send invites to everyone who intend to join the party. To ask for an Jaiku invite, all you have to do is PM your email address to Internet Tablet Talk member Mauku Launch.
leading a broad industry alliance to transform mobile phones into powerful mobile computers that could accelerate the convergence of computing and communications.
The Times points out:
Users would have the ability to load up their phones with new features and third-party programs.
“Today the Internet experience on hand-held devices is not optimized,” said Peter Chou, chief executive of HTC, one of the largest makers of smartphones. “The whole idea is to optimize the Internet experience.”
Of course, that’s the same thing we’ve been saying for a couple years about phones and tablets, from the perspective of the tablet/internet end.
And, interestingly to us tableteering types, Google’s Andy Rubin gives as an example of the incredible new things that will be available, “[T]he company’s StreetView feature of Google Maps could easily be coupled — mashed up, in technology speak — with another service listing the current geographical location of friends.”
Over at GigaOM, I see Om Malik repeating the belief that the Nokia Internet Tablets need to be phones. Same thing at stuff.tv.
Me, I buy the Nokia party line that you use your phone for some things and your NIT for others and they should complement each other. No reason to make the tablet do phone things.
As for that, I look forward to the day I keep cam calls going for hours, used more as visual IMing than visual phone calling.
And I look forward to the day ubiquitous WiFi enables me to access the internet without thinking about how to jack into it.
And if telecoms in the U.S. offered reasonably-priced data plans, maybe I’d be there already.
That makes me wonder what it would take to get a SIM card put into a future Internet Tablet. Answering that is easy — the second a mobile-phone company wants one. Which seems completely unlikely.
But honestly, I don’t really want my NIT to be a cellphone too.
On the other hand, I think it would be great if I could get a cellphone voice-and-data plan that enabled me to add a SIM-enabled NIT as a second device that just accessed the data plan. Sure, sure, you can BlueTooth to your phone now and that’s easy, and enabling the NIT as a phone too would be trivial, but really why tether them or cross them? I’m happy to leave my phone as the phone and be able to take a call while I’m surfing. And what I really want to do is access the web from the car or the train and lots of other places where WiFi doesn’t compare to cell-phone networks.
This isn’t Nokia holding us back. That I understand. But it’s nice after all to think about the day when sticking a SIM into a NIT is an option that makes sense.
At GigaOM, Alistair Croll explains what the Nokia Internet Tablet is all about — positioning Nokia to be completely ready for the open, walkaround web*. It’s not about selling more devices and making money now, but owning the market later.
Croll cites Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki, EVP of multimedia, as pointing to the overwhelming need outside of the U.S. for web access to be primarily handheld and not tied to a desk. (And not tied to a single carrier for one-person/one-phone telephony.)
Nokia sees that closed platforms cripple the ability to compete in the coming world. Hence its commitment to Linux (as contrasted to Apple’s approach with the iPhone). And more critically that, basically, everyone will want to access the web from anywhere, at any time. Hence the computer that you walk around with had better be suited for the web (800 pixels wide) and light enough to carry everywhere (8 ounces or less).
This strategy explains such disparate events as the accelerated release cycle (three NIT’s within 20+ months), the size- and price-discrepancy compared to the UMPC, and Nokia’s support of the open-source community.
Nokia is taking the long view, Croll says, and when the walkaround web is firmly fixed in place, Nokia will be farther along on the learning curve making the devices we will all want. And be most firmly situated in the public’s mind as the company that gets it.
Shortly after the first internet tablet was announced but months before it was released, Nokia indicated that language support would not extend to Asian languges for space reasons. The OS needed to be trimmer.
That decision was perfectly understandable.
I’m sure many users will cheer the arrival of CJK capability. Anyway, the speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
As it happens, the language I personally am most interested in is Khmer (Cambodian). There aren’t a lot of people who speak Khmer and probably the market for internet tablets in Cambodia is too small to be bothered with.
That’s probably true of a hundred other languages, however.
While I’d like to be able to use my NIT to do everything any Linux computer can do, again I see the logic that that’s not really one of the essential design goals of the internet tablets.
But being able to display most any web page is.
And if there are huge swaths of Unicode that can’t be displayed on an internet tablet screen, that’s a big asterisk that needs to be placed next to “internet” in the device name, with a footnote specifying “except in countries lacking Western or Chinese-ideograph-based scripts.”
Unicode, internationalization, combining and displaying characters in complex scripts like Khmer (in which sometimes letters stack and the order the letters display isn’t always the order in which they’re keyed) or Indic languages — this isn’t really optional if one is making a device to display pages on the internet. It’s required. IMO.
