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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."
Take 2 and call me in the morning....
I'm just here to regulate Funkyness
If this gets popular, and as presumably the interface will be similar to all other Nokia products, people will realise that Linux is not necessarily hard to use.
I doubt there will be a left-handed model. Pretty much every PDA or device like this one has buttons on the left side, which I can't use because I'm holding the device with my right hand because I need to write on it with my left hand.
Oh well, sucks to be me I guess.
I know it kind of goes against the whole portability idea, but no ethernet?
Please note that it is also recently revealed that Nokia has been funding GStreamer ! Thank you Nokia!
3 hour battery life seems to be a little short if you are going to be traveling and want to use it.
I suppose you could charge it in your car...
All spelling mistakes are due to solar flares...honest
I've been using my Gateway tablet for about half a year now and while the stylus works and works well, it's not something I felt the same level of comfort using as I do when I use a pen or pencil. My guess would be that the stlus seems to slip more over the very slick screen.
In regards to the Nokia 770, the stylus seems to be the primary form of input and command for this device. Unless Nokia has changed the feel of stylus, this might hurt adopters of what looks like a neat PDA/tablet hybrid. Indeed, implementing a small keyboard similiar to the Sharp Zaurus PDA's would be very nice.
-Teiresias
Here
I've seen $350 quoted as a price point - once more and more devices start offering control access over TCP/IP (think TiVoweb, Xbox Media Centre etc) I think we've got a good candidate for the much-trumpeted "terminal" device that everyone uses around the home. I had the PSP pegged as a good place to start, providing a vibrant homebrew community springs up around it. This Nokia device offers that sort of functionality and development possibilites right out the box.
The Slashdot Paradox: "100% Overrated"
Looks exciting; can't wait for them to make a PDA out of it. I just wish they'd used regular SD instead of reduced size memory cards.
Not sure where you got the price from, but my sources say it's going to be $350.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
cough PSP cant surf the web *cough*
nor can it read emails, play streaming radio and at least 60 other things.
the PSP is a neat portable game but a webpad it CERTIANLY is not.
so how do you click on a fricking link because the PSP lacks a touchscreen? and when is FLASH going to be released for the PSP?
*cough*
for wanting to impose software patents on us in the EU!
What can you compare this to? The Palm devices? It seems to have a good screen 800 x 600, Wi-Fi... I can imagine teachers carrying something like this around to hold teacher edition texts, and accessing the school network. IMHO, this is very cool, and could open up a lot of opportuniity in web applications for verticle markets.
I wish it had a sim card, and I hope that they offer a keyboard tray of some sort.
It only supports GTK user interfaces. I have direct contact with people on that project and that's something that will not change for now.
What do you mean no bluetooth ?
(Straight from the site:)
Connectivity:
* WLAN: 802.11b/g
* Bluetooth specification: 1.2
...
Well then good news! It's a suppository!
If the screen is bright enough to be daylight readable as some of the outdoor press shots would suggest, you have a very compact, removable linux-based media engine with hi-res touchscreen and navigation buttons. If much of any developer community adopts it (hard to imagine it wouldn't), there will probably be support for all sorts of additional media formats and peripherals. Given that current sunlight-readable VGA touchscreens cost ~$3-5 hundred USD alone, this could easily knock the price of building a carpc setup in half.
It's open source and it's X11 based. That means that RandR probably works on it and you can just rotate the screen 180 degrees.
Just did a quick read of the licenses section of the FAQ. They've released the UI, Skins, and Graphics under the Creative Commons (CC) license. I guess they want to see maemo used on other platforms (assuming the license fee for the graphics is reasonable).
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
http://www.maemo.org/screenshots.html
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I think it's a pity that the rather beautiful design and obviously neat software doesn't include Nokia's core function: mobile phone connectivity (and not through BT).
But what is the SIGnificance?
A C64 can too. But does anyone really want to?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
Yes, ipkg is nice. It is derived from Debian's dpkg. The good news for you is that maemo uses dpkg directly.
See for example the sections "Creating debian/ directory" and "Creating package" near the end of the howto for creating a new application. Another example can be found in the howto for porting an existing application.
Maemo is probably more open than you think...
-Raphaël
here
BS. My pda has 128mb built in, and has an SD slot. I have no problems with storage. Besides, how much storage do you need for browsing, mail, etc.? This isn't a portable dvd-player.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
See, for example, the PMA400.
It is open source, linux based, has a 30gb hd, and has many other goodies.
But it is still nice to see that a large company like nokia is offering such a product. It will definitely help to spread linux :)
Why do manufacturers hate CF so?
Because CF is based on the ancient ISA parallel bus interface - too many pins, too much overhead. The newer formats use a serial (eg. SPI) interface, more easily supported by microsontrollers, saving a lot of wiring and board space/complexity.
what about audio IN? that way it would (shock horror) actually be useful, because we could (possibly) run skype on it.
- It took western civilisation 2000 years to ensure popular literacy, and now we work with icon driven GUI's. Go figure.
It's a perfectly cromulent word !
Yes, we'll have wireless broadband everywhere, but only so you may legitimately download Approved Content(tm) from Vericingusprint, and they'll continue charging outrageous prices for even sending a kilobyte of data. Lord help you if you want unproxied HTTP or TCP with enough ports open to do any real work.
That is, there might be broadband everywhere in a few years, just don't count on using it.
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
IF the CPU ( uh, I don't see that in the spec, that makes me worry, folks... ) is powerful enough, and you could pack on external batteries to keep it going for 3 hours *while* actually using your Bluetooth keyboard, it looks like it could *almost* work as a more-portable laptop replacement. Something to type up notes on while sitting in the park or coffee shop, that kind of thing.
Not that I'm going to run out and get one. I still look at this and think "but... maybe I just want a laptop..". On the other hand, if you could use a BT keyboard with it, it might be sort of like a low-power, extremely small laptop with a keyboard you can ditch when you're not entering lots of data... that does have a certain appeal.
I talked to Uraeus about this a bit. The machine has combined ARM9/TI DSP cores. The idea is that you want the codecs running on the DSP, and apparently the free Xiph codecs we're included in the launch because there's no DSP port of the reference implementations. (There's no GCC back end for the dsp, although some folks are working on a related series.) This includes Ogg Theora, Speex and FLAC as well as Ogg Vorbis.
Whether the ARM is too slow (or battery consumptive) to run the decoders on its own, I'm not clear but with everything open source it will be easy to check.
I'll be a Guadec, where they are apparently also doing a demo, so hopefully will know more next week.
In the long term though we need help with the DSP gcc port and someone to do hand-optimized asm for the xiph codecs. If anyone's interested, please let us know.
1. Small keyboard that can be attached/removed when needed. 2. Hard Disk 3. Ethernet port
Summary: It sucks. I wanted to like it, but ... I didn't.