It's the most hyped device of the moment, a device that nobody has laid eyes on without an NDA death-grip. While rumour and speculation escalate (sometimes giving way to apathy), little has leaked out of Cupertino. But nobody seems to be asking whether this tablet thing will be successful or not.
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Member since:2006-01-01
Yeah, they made it nigh on impossible to get an official version. There is a "open source" project, but it's called something other than Maemo.. I forget the name. Basically, the N800 is apparently obsolete, as is the N810. The N800 is about 3 years old and the N810 is much less, more like 18 months. So, Apple get's flack for dropping PowerPC support after not producing a PowerPC based machine for 4 years and clearly indicating that PowerPC was a dead end - Nokia, well no, Nokia just screw their users over. Sad but true.
Member since:2007-09-06
A long lingering complaint has been the poor choice of GPU chip int he N810 and previous. This results in poor video quality playback and similar graphics heavy functions. Among it's changes, the N900 has a GPU capable of higher resolution video and 3D rendering.
Maemo 5 is written with a new interface taking advantage of the N900's newer hardware; lots of pretty-shiny and flipping screens with finger swipes. Porting it back to the older hardware with limited GPU chips wouldn't go well.
Since Maemo 5 has some specific hardware requirements, I hope that the developer community continues to update Maemo 4 for the N8x0 folks. There was a recent firmware update so development hasn't sopped with the release of the new version. Maemo 5 seems to be evolving quickly, though it didn't originally include portrait and landscape views, the newest firmware now includes a traditional portrait phone view. Other bits will continue to trickle in also.
I also thought that Nokia had been much more open with Maemo 5 including releasing source for NIC drivers and other bits kept closed in the past.
Member since:2005-08-26
I had a nokia n770 several years ago and I've always understood it and its predecessors including the maemo platform to be for R&D with a plus side that consumer/hobbyists like myself could pick up. I don't see any room for disappointment about them fading away fast or being hard to update or even getting newer builds of maemo for the devices.
Nokia gave a recent glimpse of what's to come for symbian and how they plan on bringing it up to speed with competing mobile offerings; point being that maemo isn't their primary concern and doesn't appear to be their future platform for mainstream mobile devices (at least not back then and still not now).
For what it's worth, I've always thought the maemo devices were pretty cool but they have always been sort of hobbyist or special interest devices rather than something they wanted to market at the general public going out and buying cell phones and or other forms of mobile devices.
Source on the info about what's to come for symbian:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/15/symbian-provides-early-glimpse-a...
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Member since:
2009-08-21
Having read much about the new N900 I was just wondering what are the upgrade possibilities for users of older N??0 devices. So you say the folks at Nokia are making this very difficult? I'm negatively impressed here...