Good news! The folks from fring just announced today that the first version of fring for the Internet Tablet is now available for download. For those who are not familiar with fring, it lets you make free calls and live chat with all your fring, Skype, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, SIP, Twitter, Yahoo! and AIM friends.
fring is available in all sorts of platforms — Symbian, Windows Mobile, iPhone, Java ME, and now Maemo. If you are connected to a high-speed connection, calls made to other mobiles running fring is free. Calls however to landlines and regular cellular contacts can be made via SkypeOut or via SIP.
Yay, Diablo has been released! Nokia has just released new firmware upgrades for the Nokia N810 and N800 Internet Tablets that adds a Seamless Software Upgrade Feature. Based on Maemo 4.1 (Diablo), the new OS2008 feature upgrade lets you now perform future OS upgrades over-the-air (WLAN only).
A new automatic notification from the home screen will now notify you of new versions of the OS and system apps, including updates to third party applications. The new firmware also replaces the current email app with an open source version based on Modest and tinymail. Chinese fonts have also been added, reported openssl bugs have been fixed, and browsing panning experience has been improved.
In a few hours from now, Dr. Ari Jaaksi, Nokia Director of Open Source Operations is scheduled to present his 30-minute keynote over at Handsets World in Berlin Germany on “Nokia’s Vision for Wireless Handsets”. The schedule lists his talk as follows:
What are the attributes of wireless handsets going forward?
What do users want?
How is Nokia meeting the needs of the market around the world?
I’ve just had a crisis of convictions — returning my laptop to the publishing firm I’ve worked for since 2001 meant I needed to buy a computer quick.
And the deciding point came down to this: How much computing power did I need away from home?
You have to know that my friends expect me to separate from them when boarding the train to New York so I can sit in a laptop-friendly seat. They’ve also seen me skip a not-yet-full PATH (subway) train on the next leg into the city and wait five minutes for the next departure so I can open up the laptop for twelve more minutes of screen time.
Did I truly believe a weblet like the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet would suffice for my mobile computing?
Or has my fervent evangelism been tainted by way-cheap access to the Nokeys* I’ve used and by a top-of-the-line 17-inch laptop that my employer nefariously supplied me with, ensured its constant access by having me work at home two days a week?
Would I spend my suddenly scarce dollars for another laptop, intending to cart it most everywhere as I’ve been accustomed to for the last four years?
Or would I buy a sufficiently powerful desktop for less money and rely on my N810 for all my mobile computing?
This from someone who has written well over 90 percent of my ITT postings on a laptop. Who spends his free time looking at websites in Khmer (a script not supported by the Nokia weblets) and who works with multilingual texts every day. Whose eyes are aging and who consequently has a 14-point minimum font size set in his browser. Who installs on average one new program a week with a footprint of 30MB to 150MB.
Fabulous as the Nokia Internet Tablets are for spontaneous surfing, e-book reading, voip calls**, games, GPS geocaching, listening to music and watching video***, it’s not a full-service device. I can’t type 20 words per minutes on its keyboard, much less 100 wpm (as I do on a full keyboard). Can’t run any topic map software (needs Java). No great XML and XSLT editors. And so on. How much would this lack hurt me away from my desktop? Could I manage to do what I had to do on the run with one or another weblet?**** The walkaround web is wonderful but what about trips? Could I go days without a full-powered computer?
Ah, who am I fooling?
I bought the desktop, which was half the price of equivalently powered laptops. For any kind of on-the-go now, I’m a weblet guy, body and soul.
__________
* I’ve paid 99 Euros each for the 770, N800 and N810 as they appeared over these last three years (roughly $115 to $140) as part of Nokia’s seeding of the weblet development community. An N810 for $140 is a magnificent machine, there’s no doubt about it.
** I use Gizmo for my second line permanently now. When I’m on one- and two-hour conference calls, it’s really proved its usefulness by freeing up the main line for my wife’s calls.
*** TV mostly, via the HAVA player, Today in the kitchen and Charley Rose in bed.
**** OK, at the moment I have five NITs. But some of them I bought to give to family. Really! I just haven’t gotten around to it.
Great news! Access just released Garnet VM Beta 2 adding fullscreen support as well as MathLib support. Please verify and report any other enhancements that you find!
Since our launch in November 2007, the ACCESS Garnet VM Beta for Nokia Nseries can boast over 15,000 downloads! Like you, thousands of Garnet VM users around the world still enjoy using Garnet OS applications for their simplicity and their diversity. During the last six months, we have received a tremendous response about the Garnet VM launch. You have shared valuable comments about the features you want to see in the next version of Garnet VM and the improvements you want in the applications. We listened to our GVM community and thanks to your help made some changes. We have added the most requested feature—support for full screen rendering. We have also identified and made other improvements to Garnet VM including providing full support for MathLib that will enable many additional applications to run on Garnet VM.
Today, we are pleased to announce that the new ACCESS GVM Beta 2 for Nokia Nseries is available:
Quim Gil has just posted his Maemo LinuxTag Update slides. I would have wanted to hear what he had to say about Diablo, Fremantle, and Harmattan but I guess this slide says a lot:
maemo.org is also hosting a brainstorming session for the next ten days to talk about the future of maemo.org. It aims to consolidate feedback from developers and end-users to draft its mid-term goals, and eventually become the community proposal of the maemo.org product strategty.
Two Wiki pages have been setup so everyone can add their ideas, suggest, and even complain. Head on to the wiki and let your voice be heard (note: deadline is in 10 days)!
You must have all seen the video that I made of the HAVA Player for the Internet Tablet in action. If this is an Internet Tablet feature that interests you, you can then participate on Monsoon Multimedia’s HAVA beta program to get an advance copy of the software as well as help better the software.
As a beta participant, you can avail of discounted HAVA hardware which you can purchase now. Monsoon is then releasing the first beta of the HAVA Player for the Internet Tablet to the beta participants on May 8.
See the full HAVA Beta Program details after the jump.
Why web pads, internet tablets and ultra-mobiles aren’t the same thing
Ari Jaaksi famously announced the walkaround web in November 2005 when he pointed out that surfing wasn’t stationary any more than phone calls were. Cellphones had untethered calling, and a device like the first Nokia Internet Tablet meant the internet was available anywhere we were. We didn’t need to go to a computer in a specific location to get to the web any more than we needed to find a payphone to make a phone call.
Henceforth, we could carry our web-access with us, the same way we carry our phones. Ari said it all when he wrote: “I surf in trains, in cafeterias, at airports, even while driving. I can go online anytime and anywhere I want.” He called his observations “bold” but they were in fact revolutionary in understanding how this changes not computing, not using the web, but how we organize our lives.
Long before I heard of the Nokia 770, I used a small, keyboardless WiFi-enabled tablet to access the internet from Bryant Park in New York City. The notion of the web away from the desk antedated Nokia’s efforts by many years. By my count, it produced at least eight web pads (the contemporary term) prior to the 770, all of which failed to establish themselves.
My most complete experience was with the Screen Media FreePad, from a Norwegian outfit. The FreePad had a 10.4-inch screen, 800 x 600 resolution, built-in WiFi and “cordless telephone services”; and it ran an embedded Linux. No disk drive; if you wanted, you could attach a USB keyboard.
The rest of FreePad’s hardware was feeble by today’s standards but practical for 2000. Even back then the group I was working with expected to buy the FreePad for just $800 (in quantity).[1]
Eight years ago, and only $800. WiFi was in its nascent stages then, but if you were describing an organization-wide device (as we were) and not a personal weblet,[2] that probably wasn’t what kept the FreePad from succeeding.
You might regard the Sharp Willcom D4 UMPC (pictured above) as either a competitor to Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet — or maybe as its next-generation successor.
The D4’s 5-inch screen has 1024×600 resolution: better than the NIT’s 800×480. It comes with 1GB of RAM and a 40GB drive. WiFi and Bluetooth, of course, slide-down keyboard and camera. (No GPS) Befitting a next-generation device, the D4 is the first web tablet utilizing the Atom CPU, Intel’s low-power chip for mobiles (maybe I should say “speedy chip” it runs at 1.33GHz).
Yup, the D4 has everything going for it. “Beating Nokia at its own game even,” you might say.
Except the design parameters for a weblet include more than “screen shows a full web page width.” Light weight — the D4 is twice as heavy as an N810. Fits in a pocket — the D4 is 1 inch wide and 7.4 inches long; but maybe Sharp’s customers have bigger pockets than I do.
Well, sure, they’ll need to. At $1525, the D4 obviously requires deep pockets.
Me, I’ll be buying weblets in $500 installments — is a D4 worth more than three N810s?
Not to me, anyway, with my small-in-every-way pockets.
Dan Gentleman (aka Thoughtfix) turns back the time and 
