Submitted by There has been a lot of rumors around about Nokia’s upcoming open-source Maemo phone, dubbed the N900. Mobile-Review now has a first look at the device, with lots of photos. It runs the Gtk+ version of Maemo. “Due to variety of visual effects, smooth transitions and decent reaction time of the touch screen (which is a significant improvement over the Nokia N97), the N900 feels more like the Apple iPhone. At the same time its UI looks nothing like that of the iPhone – it’s just different, but eye-candy nonetheless (maybe somewhat similar to HTC’s products). Everyone who had a chance to play with it noted that it didn’t look like any other Nokia-branded device, yet it was an enjoyable experience overall.”
I am glad to see nokia doing maemo development to step up the game against apple and android…
I think that Symbian produced more than previously thought it could do but is too complicated and wired in a way that makes supporting applications and legacy code hell on earth.
Hope that maemo phones will be a huge hit cos thats what nokia is needing after the review disasters from the latest symbian phones (n97 included).
Having said that, I work in a company that the main focus is on S60 development and it creeps me out the idea of all the people that depend on it to make their living…
Symbian is not dead yet – and it doesn’t seem to be “on the way out” either, considering that it will get rid of the Avkon grief in favor of Qt soon, and emerge as reasonable platform to develop for (with all the bling required these days).
Luckily we have iPhone and Android; if that wasn’t the case, Avkon would have been deemed “good enough” for much longer, Trolltech acquisition would have never been made, and we’d still be stuck in the obsolete & tedious programming model of Symbian C++.
Personally, I enjoy Maemo development (much) more than Symbian development, but once S60 comes to its senses and Qt & open source starts to pervade the platform, I imagine it won’t be *that* bad.
OSNews got it wrong. The N900 is using QT, not GTK (anymore). Just a note…
No, it’s still Gtk. Next one will go Qt.
How? Maemo 6 isn’t even alpha, yet. Does Nokia have a time machine??
This article is so full of BS that it has singlehandedly killed any faith I had in internet journalism.
Where are they getting this crap? “Microsoft is freezing development of Windows Mobile”? “Nokia is freezing development of S60”?
It’s clear the author just wants to push his own agenda (“Linux everywhere”) while resorting to complete fabrications to support his arguments.
What a load of crap.
Edited 2009-08-22 10:45 UTC
That said, this phone does look pretty sweet. My main concern is for battery life. Previous Maemo-based devices had something like 1/5 the battery life of a comparable S60 device. If this hasn’t changed, I can’t see this thing going anywhere.