[M]aemo 2.0 [has the] tools needed for application development at maemo. The purpose of this beta is to give tools for the developers to get their apps & stuff ported on the new software.
And he adds:
The beta is beta! It has its problems but I believe it is very usable for this purpose. It is not intended for regular consumers but for developers. So be careful out there. It may bite!
Here we go! Soon it will be not just in these developers’ hands but in us users’ hands, with the updated apps too.
Ari Jaaksi’s post in his blog got me to read his Linux World presentation, where I saw an interesting statement on slide 14 about how Armin Warda had added swap to Jakub Pavelek’s applet for controlling memory and taking screenshots. And that “What this is for Nokia [is] something we could productize. However we must ensure that it will not break hardware, and that it is easy to use, etc.”
And next to the screen capture shown here was also a capture of the X Terminal app.
Am I reading this right to say that Nokia is definitely including swap (and screen capture and X Terminal) in the OS 2006?
* * *
Well that made me want to go and read the roadmap at maemo.org that Ari mentioned.
I’m sure I’ve seen/heard of this before, but it looks very different than I seem to recall. I can’t say whether I saw an earlier version or have a bad memory.
(And the one at maemo.org is dated today. Is it really from today, or is that just an artifact of the way maemo.org presents things?)
Anway, the roadmap says the Farsight audio/video conferencing framework will be included, as well as support for python development within the Maemo SDK. We’ve heard that real package management will be included, but I hadn’t realized that every Application Installer app that works in the current version will break and in fact that every third-party app will have to be recompiled because of the “new EABI toolchain.” (OK, I don’t know what that is, but then I’m a user, not a developer.) I hope this means that OS 2006 will be available to the developers in advance of our user release.
So what have we got?
Video conferencing. OK, cool.
Python — faster development of brand new 770 specific apps, yes?
apt/dpkg — more and greater automation in bringing apps to the 770, yes?
gtkhmtl — support for html within apps? Especially those new ones I’m theorizing about?
There’s more.
The roadmap also includes such enticing items in the “To-do List for future unannounced releases” as x86 multimedia development support and support for full x86 device virtualization. That sounds so tremendously wonderful I have to stop myself and acknowledge I don’t really know what it portends. But it’s got to be good news! I think. As does the last item on the page: “Enable other languages beside C for writing UI applications (Python, Java, C++ binding for Hildon widget set).” I really think that one essential for the growth of the Internet Tablet platform is that it becomes a great place to develop new apps and that consequently other companies use Hildon or something derived from it for their own tablets.
We know now that the 2006 OS will come with at least one new application pre-installed — Google Talk, with its instant messaging and VoIP phone capabilities.
Since Nokia has been promising IM and VoIP by mid-2006 for 51 weeks (hey! one more week till the announcement anniversary!), we knew this was coming.
I wonder if there will be any other pre-installed applications? Maybe FBReader, the world-class e-reader, for instance. We know that the 770 is an ideal e-book reader and that e-books are becoming more significant.
Or maybe there will be some additional games — Nako, Battlegweled and IceBreaker seem obvious candidates. Maybe a sturdy text editor to supplement Notes. Or built-in XTerm and CPU/MEM load graph. I would add PIM apps to this list, if there were any such available. I’m not envisioning the Nokia developers creating new apps with so much already on their plate.
I’ve definitely made my opinion known that FBReader is a natural application for the Nokia 770. But maybe not everyone agrees. RemoteUser (aka Gene Mosher) believes in the 770 as a remote control device. A whole crowd is making it a mapping/GPS displaying device. Not to mention others developing its audio and video playing side.
If Nokia isn’t going to pre-install all of these apps, and is wary of picking only one or another of them, I hope Ari Jaaksi and his crew provide a good clean automatic way to install and update them that even a rank beginner will be able to follow, as they’ve hinted will happen. If there are “click to install” links to add some of these apps, that will be the next thing to “pre-installed.”
License what is needed from Nokia, or partner with them. Run Linux or run Solaris, who cares? And make them in more than one size.
Then push the idea proselytized by Remote User (aka Gene Mosher) of the device as a window on a more powerful computer, where you really run your software.
I guess this is the idea of the diskless computer that was temporarily popular a few years back, but that seems mostly to have been an anti-Microsoft effort. This one will work, because you’re untethering the computer.
The 770 is meant to access the web. (OK, it does many other wonderful things.)
But think about it from the remote control perspective. I want a bigger screen for accessing my desktop. I want maybe 5.5 inches width and 1024 pixels. I’m thinking of this Sun tablet as more a business device than the 770, so I don’t worry about it being larger. Still has to weigh little. Still needs fast, no-cost, open-source OS. No disk drive needed (for obvious reasons). Is more RAM useful in this context?
And low, low cost. Not $1,200 like the first Windows-based UMPC. More like the cost of an iPod.
The point is to sell so many of them so fast that the demand for Sun’s current lines goes up. Oh, sure, that was the idea of the iPod too, that it would feed sales of the Mac and that hasn’t happened. But if you’re going to control a computer remotely, you want it to be optimized for that. And if you’re going to have a lot of people doing this at the same time . . .
Hey, maybe it makes more sense to give these tablets away to sell the bigger devices and service.
Probably, as a consequence of being business-y, I’d package a keyboard with this device, or what some people call a thumb-board. I haven’t used one of these, but as an add-on it makes real sense — only buy one if you’re willing to deal with the added bulk and weight. And need it badly.
I’d also push WiFi clouds heavily in urban areas. You need that to make the walkaround web work for business. I mean, how much of your business occurs away from your desk and even away from an outlet? Must be a lot. How about exploiting that, Jonathan?
* * *
I guess I should add that these tablets benefit greatly from the notion of running apps from a website. But I don’t suggest that that is what makes the device appealing to a company like Sun — much more important would be controlling your own apps from your own server or desktop.
Can Sun do this better than Nokia? I don’t know. But I think they could put a lot more people on the project and use this as a way of building their core business, and promoting their open-source OS, in a more direct fashion than Nokia. And if ever there was a way of realizing the vision that “the network is the computer,” wow this is it.
Wonderful as it is, the Nokia 770 does have limitations, storage being one of those that pinch you earliest. One thing you can do is add a larger RS-MMC card. That enables you to keep big files on your device, but you can’t put the really big ones into the MyDocs directory, and you can easily fill that up.
At the Maemo Wiki is a new page called “How to upgrade the internal memory by extending the root filesystem to a memory card” at maemo.org/maemowiki/ExtendedRootFilesystem.
I’m not pointing out anything new to those who saw reference to this at Planet Maemo in the blog recently added there, Wolfram Ravenwolf blog which is written by Stefan Daniel Schwarz.
He also pointed to the wiki page in a thread here at itT forums, with the same title.
In the wiki page, he describes how to repartition and reformat a (larger) RS-MMC card and then move files to a second partition. He suggests moving “the root and user home directories onto the memory card (/root and /home/user) as well as user data like bookmarks (/usr/share/osso-bookmarks), settings (/etc/bluetooth/name, /var/lib/gconf, and /etc/osso-af-init/locale), even installed programs (/var/lib/install),” depending on the size of your new partition.
Explaining that this has the memory card’s new partition mounted at /Root, he adds, “We can move anything in there, and it is swapped out of the internal memory and onto the memory card. We then create a symbolic link in the internal memory which points to the file located on the memory card. To the device, it looks like nothing has changed, but now you can store everything you want on the memory card….
“Specifically, this frees up internal memory, which you will see in the control panel.”
And all those files can be in MyDocs and its child folders, Documents, Images, Audio Clips and Video Clips.
In my own case, I ordered a 1 GB Kingston DV RS-MMC card last week (UPS says they’ll deliver tomorrow), and that will give me enough space to implement this. No more deciding which files I put on MMC and which ones in Documents for me. Now that I think about it, this should allow me to install more applications, including some of the ones I’ll use infrequently.
At the same time, I will likely create a swap file in this partition too, which people have reported makes their system run more stably and faster. The itT FAQ page on swap cites Andy Diller writing at The Synching Apple as the originator of this notion (the initial post there points to a comment in the Maemo Users list about enabling swap). A thread here at itT forums, “Swap space on RSMMC card?“, contains more material on this.
Addendum on buying a bigger MMC card — and a BT keyboard I’ve gotten along fine for three months without a larger MMC card and without a Bluetooth keyboard. Why buy them now? Well, I wanted to stick some songs on the 770 for offline traveling and to try out some video, and that seemed to justify the big card. The keyboard I got hasn’t come into play much so far, confirming my first analysis that I could live without it. Having it for the one or two occasions a month when I’m entering a lot of material is probably not necessary, but my wife wants it for daily email entry — and her emails tend to be long — so we bought it.
So I was willing to pay another $150 (in my case) for these extras. Should they be built in and the price raised that much? That’s a question for another day.
A couple days ago, ThoughtFix wrote in his blog that “Many people are afraid of using their RS-MMC for swap.”
Is this a fear of over-using (-stressing?) the RS-MMC? Or the non-hacker user’s reluctance to attempt nontrivial modifications — cf The Synching Apple’s reformatting of his MMC card to a 24 megabyte swap partition — and inability to become root?
It seems so sensible to do this. Using the memory card for swap seems to make the 770 operate so much more satisfactorily — apparently, I should say. I can’t say for sure because I’m among those who have hesitated.
Who’s done this so far? What are the real dangers? And is it difficult for the Windows-based (eg., with no native flasher) to execute?
Maybe others who have taken this step will offer their feedback.
We’re entering a new phase for the Nokia 770, the third for users.
Phase 1 was the five-month buildup of anticipation as we waited from the end of May for the 770 to be released.
Then the device was released. And in this phase, for users, it was a matter of acquiring a device (still to be achieved for some who had hoped to be well into this phase weeks ago) and seeing installer-ready applications from third parties appear. In this phase, to a certain extent we’ve had to discover how things work on our own. The many blogs by Nokiaemployees, by developers, by users, the forums here at itT and the FAQ, the Maemo wiki, not to mention Planet Maemo — a lot of sites have popped up to deal with the information exchange.
Despite the 770’s aspirations of being an internet appliance, we initial users have been something of pioneers, having to piece together what to do with many, many issues. And we began to feed our opinions back to Nokia from day one about what we expected from a consumer-ready product, something as easy to operate as a kitchen blender. This phase is still ongoing, of course.
But we saw something new on Friday when the latest firmware was released — unlike the two images released previously, this one was accompanied by instructions. A wizard now takes a user step by step through everything needed to Install the update onto the 770 (a Windows user, anyway).
“Nokia will fix things” and “later purchasers will have a smoother experience” have been the answers to carping in the forums for some while. But still, when someone points out that this thing doesn’t work as expected or that thing is too confusing, it’s hard to deny that more could be done. Now the evidence has come in that Nokia is indeed listening to us and our expectations. It may not be possible to move the scroll keys, say, or change the app list, at least till some time down the road. But making things clearer, explaining more, simplifying any steps an unsophisticated user must take — all these can be done now. It’s great to see Nokia gets this, too.
Devesh Kothari of Nokia wrote on the developer list that codes for purchasing the Nokia 770 would be sent to U.S. developers starting today, November 7. Hooray!
• • •
In the “non-developers/non-reviewers/real-world users” realm, several people have written that they have received the first consumer-obtained Nokia 770’s. Among others is this report from domibont at his blog, mobile analysis and development. Among other observations, he notes:
Screen resolution/sharpness is impressive and reacts very crisply to stylus input
Setting up is extremely easy, based on wizards (I was surfing the web literately within minutes)
Connection with series 60 is transparent: easy access to files, pictures, music, on smartphone which is presented as a choice next to 770 when opening files (however bluetooth is really to slow to access multimedia content on smartphone)
PC connectivity based on USB, again presenting the Nokia 770 as a transparent external memory device very much as a standard USB memory stick (what a relief compared to the notoriously capricious PC suite!)
Plus some photos have already arrived from a couple of those non-d/non-r/r-w users, Martyrmcr and twohe, which you can see in our gallery. Martyrmcr and Manu were the first to let us know they had received a non-d/non-r/r-w device, at “just before 12pm,” or 7:47 at our server’s time (don’t know where that is, actually. Reggie?).
We would love to see more photos and descriptions of anything that those “d” and “r” types forget to bring up.
The screen is really crisp and legible. They actually claim to have 225dpi.
I upgraded to the newer release, 42-9. Doing so require using a proprietary flasher program. That is a bit odd.
Opera, the default browser is quite fast, and works fine on the 800×480 screen….
Input with virtual keyboard is painful, even if you have prediction of what the user input, and input with character recognition works even less …
I still wonder why it does not come with a PIM by default. Even if it is an Internet Tablet, it should be able to replace a Palm for the PIM features, as one do not want to carry another device. I have installed GPE….
He concludes: “But my overall impression is good.”
In a newer post, he notes “scrolling is hard sometimes without using the stylus” and links to Jonathan Blandford’s comments about the 770:
Given that they owned the hardware, I’m really surprised they didn’t include a scrollwheel of some kind. It would have made browsing that much better. It’s a little on the slow side too. I’m hoping that later versions will have a better processor….
In the long run, I could see dropping the sidekick in favor of a bluetooth-enabled phone and a maemo. Right now, it’s perfect for doing crosswords, and reading the news at breakfast.
It’s small. Boy. None of the pictures on the Nokia website do it justice. It’s got that ‘wow factor’ that the original iPod had. If anything, I think it is sexier than a Nano. I’ll take it to work tomorrow and see what the general reaction is.
YES — the screen is incredible. It needs a bit more of a flexible zoom but it really does have the wow factor.
Converted an episode of the West Wing from my Tivo and uploaded it (quite slow, not full USB2 speeds). Very watchable!
Nothing quite describes the buzz you get when you load up the BBC website and connect to the live stream of Radio 1. Cool!!!
Haven’t installed Plucker but will be this evening. My favourite Palm app, so very happy to have it on the 770.
