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You can use FingerTerm on Nokia N9, like I do. It isn't as good as a HW full keyboard, but it's the next best thing. Even more, it is also opensource.

Aegis security system is a bit more limiting than I would like it to be, but you can easily bypass the limitations with inception (for the moment the site seems to be down, so just use your favorite search engine to get some info). With inception you don't even need a computer, everything is done on the phone afaik. Haven't yet tried it myself, because so far I am fully satisfied with the official "developer mode" which can be easily activated from settings menu.

One extra feature for N9 is the community backing it up. You can join IRC freenode network and join #harmattan channel for instance and get help in matters related to SW development.

An alternative would be to try to find a Nokia N950, but as I recall although it has a full hw keyboard, it has some drawbacks compared to N9.

Finally I must also add that as far as I can tell you can't get a better user experience than with N9 UI. It's simply amazing. I hope Jolla will be able to provide it in their future phones.

This is not the first such UI, there's already an existing gesture UI for Nokia's N9 phone. Relatively simple and experimental, but still.
http://store.ovi.com/content/214364
I have not tried it myself.

Full disclosure: I work for Nokia, even though I've not had anything to do with this particular software.

I've made a simple stopwatch app for Symbian. I entered it into Nokias store when it opened I think 2008. Its sales have actually gone up instead of down even though there has been more competition than in the past. Of course it is the best one in mobile ;), but still I don't think that Symbian is quite dead yet. Besides Nokia is still making most of its smartphone money from Symbian.

http://store.ovi.com/content/23158

But who with an N900 actually used the Ovi store, when everything useful was in the apt repositories?

That's another stupid type of app that sells a lot.
Nokia seems to have one of these promoted in its app store currently.

That's another stupid type of app that sells a lot.
Nokia seems to have one of these promoted in its app store currently.

If this is ok for you then the maps should be ok too:

http://maps.ovi.com/#|47.7023446|-122.2419395|11|0|0|hybrid.day?

It doesn't seem too bad to me. It's not great in Argentina or my part of Africa. It's also quite a lot better than not having a map at all because you've run out of credit or can't get a signal.

Regards,

Tim

We write apps for Nokia Symbian phones and publish them on Ovi Store:
http://store.ovi.com/publisher/BITIMPRESS/

After liking Tron Legacy alot we wrote a screensaver which mimics the behaviour of the door code unlocker app Flynn is using:
here is a video of our app in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FhvPpIF_zM

here is the Tron Legacy trailer where the N8 is used to unlock the door (Nokia product placement), starts around 0:49
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkFErfVoBW0

You can get our app for free on Ovi Store:
http://store.ovi.com/content/99490

(the Ovi Store link does not work yet on N8 and other Symbian^3 phones since the Symbian^3 app is currently in Nokia QA so it should be up in a few days).
You can download it directly too (on the N8 too) from our site:
http://apps.bitimpress.com/codeunlocker_installer.sis

The app is enjoying quite nice success, several thousand downloads per day, last peak was 16k per day :)

PS: if any of the Tron creators read this, how was the original footage created ? The N8 just playing a video of the code unlocking sequence or was it a custom app written for the N8 ?

thanks,
BitImpress
http://www.bitimpress.com/

We write apps for Nokia Symbian phones and publish them on Ovi Store:
http://store.ovi.com/publisher/BITIMPRESS/

After liking Tron Legacy alot we wrote a screensaver which mimics the behaviour of the door code unlocker app Flynn is using:
here is a video of our app in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FhvPpIF_zM

here is the Tron Legacy trailer where the N8 is used to unlock the door (Nokia product placement), starts around 0:49
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkFErfVoBW0

You can get our app for free on Ovi Store:
http://store.ovi.com/content/99490

(the Ovi Store link does not work yet on N8 and other Symbian^3 phones since the Symbian^3 app is currently in Nokia QA so it should be up in a few days).
You can download it directly too (on the N8 too) from our site:
http://apps.bitimpress.com/codeunlocker_installer.sis

The app is enjoying quite nice success, several thousand downloads per day, last peak was 16k per day :)

PS: if any of the Tron creators read this, how was the original footage created ? The N8 just playing a video of the code unlocking sequence or was it a custom app written for the N8 ?

thanks,
BitImpress
http://www.bitimpress.com/

It's still only a few dollars each way, but Android is only free if you don't include *any* of Google's services on it.

Yeah, but why would Nokia care for Google services when they are already building a bunch of mobile services on their own? Just go for bare-bones Android and port the existing stuff over. Then they would "graciously" bow over to the customer demand and put Google's stuff there if the customers really seem to want it. (Which would happen, like, the following day.)

Nokia was simply the best phone manufacturer out there. Bar none. They were the ones with the guts to try new things, like a weird flip-and-spin phone that works like a camcorder and had a fantastic camera for its time, a slider flagship with everything you could possibly want in a phone, a fully factory-hackable Linux phone that you upgrade with sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, a phone with an internal HDD at a time when Flash wasn't that cheap, or more recently a digital camera with a smartphone bolted in that looks and feels like a phone. Not to mention things like giving free music or free offline navigation to all new phones. Now, they'll be constrained by the capabilities of a third-party OS.

Now, what should a Maemo user do: switch to WebOS or Android? And which phones? Neither OS looks as good as Meego, nor do they offer the same level of hackability; and the phones don't look as sweet. Any opinions?

First of all, MeeGo, Maemo and their cousins allow me to run any vanilla GNU/Linux GUI applications. They are most often inconvenient to use on a phone, but they are sometimes better than what's available on the platform.

That just goes to show that "what's available for the platform" isn't much. Which is an argument against Maemo/MeeGo, if anything.

On Android I'm limited to apps written for Android. Thanks but no thanks.

Yes, but there are plenty of apps written for Android. It's pretty hard to find something for which there isn't an app these days.

In contrast, when we look at e.g. N900 - if I go to Nokia app store, restrict listing to N900 only (by default it also shows stuff for S60), and browse through the list of all apps, there's a grand total of 80. Yeah, I see why you'd need to run those vanilla Gtk apps on that now... with all the pain of dealing with UI not designed for touch...

And I don't see anybody rushing to write similar apps on Symbian.

WTF? They already exist, as standard. Certainly on n97

ActiveNotes for syncable hierarchical multimedia notes.
Built in MP3 player & streamer.
Weather is built into Ovi Maps which comes on the phone, as is Find Places for local businesses etc.

Clearly you have no idea about Symbian apps. Did you look? I suspect that'd be a "no".

e.g.
http://store.ovi.com/
and
http://www.symbian-freeware.com/

but tethering is inbuilt in all phones. every cheap and expensive phone asks you if you want to share the 3g network as soon as you plug in the usb cable. nothing has to be bought. also, applications like these are freely available. you can have lite and paid versions too. i don't think they are illegal.

America is full of prudes. Compare with a well know Finnish company.

http://store.ovi.com/content/17993

His email address is ...@ovi.com. Ovi is the name of Nokia's internet services brand, so it looks like this is just astroturfing.

Either that or he just happens to have signed up for a free ovi.com email account.

Nintendo does sell old games; they used them in the GBA Classics series, and now the Wii "virtual console" has tons of games. The bone of contention, I think, is Nokia advertising their system as a platform to pirate Nintendo games with a weak "don't forget to buy the original cartridge!". Which would be substantially undermined by Nokia's marketing team not even following the rules.

It's hard to remember, but there was a time when Nokia directly competed with Nintendo in the hardware market with the N-Gage. They've since moved to a different model, but the fact remains that they're a competitor. Hell, the n900 is powerful enough that one could probably build decent DS emulators. Partly, Nintendo should be worried that you can get a much better device than their own DSi. Higher quality cameras, more RAM, 3G, bluetooth, IR, etc.

But mostly Nintendo's problem isn't a competing platform though; the problem they have is the absolute lack of DRM built into emulators. No point in putting games in the Ovi Store if Nokia marketing hints that you can get it all for free.

http://store.ovi.com/content/744FD2C886D77218E040050A87327F92?clickSource=search

It just is. The only people demanding Android phones are right here, on /.

Symbian is 50% of the market, and most of that is Nokia (e.g. http://store.ovi.com./

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone
 

The C64 emulator was removed from the AppStore => With the N900, the equivalent service will be the Ovi Store.

The OVI developer terms of service state (from Terms and Service link at https://publish.ovi.com/login): 5.4. Non-Compete. You may not use the Program to distribute or make available any Content whose primary purpose is to facilitate the distribution of Content outside of the Program.

So Nokia might not allow this app on their store either.

I agree. I've been reading more about the Ovi service provided by Nokia and I'm liking it more and more. It looks to have a lot of the stuff I use my laptop for anyway but from a dashboard view. If they can put this in a cheap netbook so that I don't have to buy one of their phones on another service that would be even better.

While not quite as bad as this - I had the battery on a 12 month old iPAQ expand to double size - enough to break the cover. That in itself is not interesting at all. What IS interesting however is that I actually thought HP would be interested in this (in order to prevent this from happening) but they were not - not at all. I contacted the local HP support, I wrote letters, faxes and emails - with absolutely zero reaction except I could buy a new battery if I wanted. They didn't attempt to stop me from talking - they simply weren't interested at all.

Pics are here: ipaq pics

While this one didn't explode it's definitely a faulty battery (the fault happened over a day or two) and I reckon it could easily have caused some damage to the surroundings if only it had been a tad more violent.

Jesus H Christ, they think this is going to compete with the App store?

Maybe it's only version 1.0. How long have Apple had to refine their site? 5 years with iTunes? Nokia are starting largely from scratch.

Still, the more you bitch, the faster they'll fix it.... http://www.ovi.com/services/support
 

> Not only that, but there are many different versions (V9, V9.1, S60 3rd Ed, S60 FP1, S60 FP2, 9.4, 9.5 and that's just the recent ones) and they are mostly binary and source incompatible.

That's balony. I (helped) develop an S60 application, and the differences were significant between S60 2nd and 3rd editions (there was a big OS-break then - akin to OS9/OSX), but otherwise there were very few OS version specific changes needed to the source. The main things I remember were that the 2nd edition phones and the first few of the 3rd edition phones had a WAP browser; and the newer ones have the webkit ones (yes, before the iPhone). The other difference that came to mind was that S60 3rd edition came with an OpenGL driver, while for 2nd edition, we had to package one with our app.

Actually, our code base was common for both S60 2nd edition and S60 3rd edition...the differences there were for SDK differences (like having to get things signed/etc/etc).

In the end, we had just two versions for users to install - one for 2nd edition, and one for 3rd edition. From the user's point of view, it didn't matter which of the 2nd edition or 3rd edition phones they had...and a web/wap page could easily tell from the user-agent which one to provide for the user to install.

Really, not rocket science at all.

Calling them 'mostly binary and source incompatible' is just rubbish and plainly FUD.

Also, what's wrong with having different versions? Even something like the iPhone OS has two (soon to be three) versions. It's mostly a symptom of having a successful platform and many different target phones. Perhaps when there are many different iPhones and Android phones, then they will have the same issues.

Yes, the development platform is not so much fun to use, but that's a different thing to the target OSes being different. I even got the SDK working on Linux the other day and plan to do some applications in my spare time, in the hope that I can sell stuff on the soon-to-open Ovi Store. It seems like the SDKs will even work on OSX for all you Apple guys. Personally, I find it kind of refreshing to actually understand what's going on, instead of have a GUI 'protect' me from it all.

I think the Ovi Store could well be very significant. The prospect of having access to such a large user base has to turn some heads, surely. It *is* huge, especially if they can enable it on existing phones too. I guess they could do that by using the Download! application somehow - the Download! application is what might be called the 'app store' that's been around for many years (yes, way before iPhone even was a twinkle in any Jobs' eye) on S60 phones - since it's already on probably well over a hundred million phones already.

We'll see, I guess.

http://www.ovi.com/

Nokia realizes this, and is working hard on their Ovi services and the Nokia Music Store.

But the actual device is important too, and I'm afraid the first Nokia touch device is disappointing. I've played with the prototype, and it's merely "ok". Not enough to blow away the iPhone.

That said, they do have other phones that, IMHO, blow the iPhone away in terms of cool things you can actually do with the phone. The interface isn't as nice, but the features are much better. A beautiful successor to the N82 is coming out around the same time as the Touch device, and it's gorgeous. A truly stunning OLED display.