Nokia's Linux Handheld

Nils Faerber writes "Today Nokia announced the introduction of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet device along with the Open Source based Maemo Development Platform. With this new product Nokia enters several new worlds all at once. A new concept for the use of a handheld device, a new fully visible open source based development process and the explicit use of open source software in a commercial grade product. The typical use case for the Nokia 770 is to be the internet usability extension to your mobile phone or other wireless internet access equipment. It is extremely portable by its small formfactor, usable for almost all internet applications thorugh its exceptional resolution of 800x480 pixel and its multimedia capabilities by making use of a TI-OMAP CPU and a accompanying digital signal processor (DSP) core. The consequent use of open source software and technology basing on the Linux kernel 2.6, X11-server technology and the GTK+ toolkit the resulting new Hildon graphical user interface creates a fully new user interface experience for portable Linux devices."

Comments

And it will be a HUGE failure...

[Lumpy]

There has been many attempts to make a "webpad" and all of them failed horribly because of one thing common with all of them.

the price was insanely high. $600.00 is way too much for this device. $399.99 is a better price mark but the under $300.00 mark is where it will sell...

Nokia is getting ready to market another failure as it will be overpriced and will have dismal sales because of that fact.

reformat (was: Re:Take a Maemo)

[Doc Ruby]

Should have used the Preview button :(.

"Modified Hildon GTK+ is more suitable for embedded device, but it's still binary-compatible with normal GTK+."

The major milestone here is Nokia developing the GUI for mobile devices that runs on Linux (it's a tweaked GNU GTK+, in fact). That means that the premiere organization bringing mobile computing to the masses is figuring out the presentation layer. Which Linux programmers can then use to deliver apps to those mobile masses. Hildon transcends just this phone, just Nokia, and even just "phones". When someone writes a GNOME->Hildon porting tool, Linux developers and the mobile mass market will really go together nicely. And since Maemo apps are Debian packages, SW can be distributed to this huge market with a familiar mechanism that includes automatic comarketing via dependencies. This is going to be fun.