Submitted by After having the Netbook UX of MeeGo out for quite a while, the MeeGo project
released the first preview of Handset UX for public scrutiny. This is, finally, the Qt based heir
of Maemo. There is also a youtube video available, with someone running the release on Moorestown-based Aava reference phone. While this can be flashed on your N900, that is only recommended for platform developers; this
release is not productized to be useful for consumers. Pics after the jumpThe MeeGo Project Handset Day 1 includes:
- MeeGo APIs, incorporating Qt and MeeGo Touch UI Framework (MTF)
- Subset of the handset reference UI and applications
- Status Bar: clock, network, Bluetooth, 3G connection, notifications, and battery charge
- Home Screen
- Lock Screen
- Application Launcher
- Virtual Keyboard
- Applications: Dialer, SMS, Browser, Contacts, and Photo Viewer
- MeeGo Core OS (including the middleware components)
- Hardware adaptation support for Intel Atom-based handset (Moorestown) and ARM-based Nokia N900
Looks nice but there are some things that have to be fixed.*
One is a lot of space is wasted (whitespace! I know that things have to be clickable), I don’t know if this is an ongoing trend on mobile space or here just related with it being a dev-version — though I have seen other sw on phones wasteing space as well.
E.g. Remove the “A” or “B”, I know if a name starts with “A”, well simply because it starts with “A”.
Alternatively you could simply add a thin line that seperates the A-Names from the B-Names.
Further move the “A-Z”-bar in landscape mode either …
* to the left/right, with Figure groups “ABC\nDEF\n…”, when clicking on “ABC” it should expand and show “A\nB\nC”
* half to the left, other half to the right
Worse than that is the current speed, it appears to be really slow. Now what interests me if the reason for that is the lack of proper drivers, not chosing a fast render-mode or Qt being slow in general. Please don’t come with the “it’s a alpha release”-stuff. Yeah might be true for MeeGo but certainly not for the underlying technology, also the used phone appears to be quite capable from a power pov.
In general this shows a lot of potential.
* Yeah, I realise, it is a dev-version, though I have seen other phones that got released with those issues.
Actually, the underlying technology is still in alpha – I’m talking about the “MeeGo Touch Framework”, the QGraphicsView based toolkit this was built on. Optimizations are still being done.
On desktop, you’ll get 600FPS (yes, 2 zeros) easily with MeeGo Touch. Needless to say it’s not there yet for phones ;-).
BTW, if you are running Lucid you can easily try out MeeGo Touch now (from my ppa):
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:villemvainio/meego
sudo apt-get install meegotouch-demos-widgetsgallery
… and run “widgetsgallery”.
Thx for the hint.
Just tried in a virtualbox and it worked pretty good — though that is hardly compareable to that video.
Btw. is it currently intended to have “!!” e.g. “!! Yes” instead of icons or is this related to your packages?
When scrolling too far (i.e. last item is not viewable anymore) I get warnings — a simple check should be enough — but I guess that is known already.
On the gallery: I guess you use fastscaling, there was a method discussed once on the Qt blog that gives very nice results also fast — called something like “fake scale” [1] IIRC — this would make the pictures look nicer. In fact this could be a none-issue with smaller screens and more dpi.
Though bear with me but I am a little sceptical on the optimisation part. Since if such “easy” effects are that slow already and optimisations have to be done to speed the process up it might not turn out as fast as intended. Still I have high hopes especially since this might help improving the whole “Qt-world”.
[1] Found it: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2009/01/26/creating-thumbnail-previ…
Missing translation, might be fixable by installing the translation packages.
Dunno, there might still be huge performance hogs around. Optimizations may involve things like more caching which can easily boost the performance quite a bit.
If this video is any indication, the release version of MeeGo has a long way to go before it approaches the performance and feature completeness of Maemo 5. And consider, Nokia is touting it as its next flagship smartphone OS, and has claimed in the past that it will be the first version of Maemo–er, Meego–that is suitable for a mass market and not just hackers! So yeah, I think it’ll be at least a year before we see a real successor to the N900…
Edited 2010-07-05 22:31 UTC
…and given Nokia’s track record, there will be no support for Meego on the N900, like, EVAR! Nokia really don’t have a clue about long term support for Platforms 🙁
I’m looking forward to them releasing the Tablet version. I don’t have a link handy but the one video I’ve seen of it sure was pretty. Could work nicely in a touch screen kitchen computer.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/01/meego-moorestown-powered-tablet-…
From the current state I saw, I think there’s a long long way for MeeGo mobile to be released for selling.
Sorry, could not resist
http://img708.imageshack.us/img708/3076/nokiastyle.jpg
P.S. I’m not Apple fan.
You may not be an Apple fan, but comparing a shipping product to a pre-alpha technical preview with placeholder artwork is unfair nonetheless.
Man, I miss my Zaurus SL5500!
Whatever – it is about 1 billion times nicer than Maemo.