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Comparing the Freedoms Offered By Maemo and Android
An anonymous reader writes "Maemo 5 and Android have received a lot of publicity lately, despite the former not even shipping yet. Both have become famous partly for using the Linux kernel, but now that we have a choice, how do we pick one? Is the issue as mundane as choosing your favorite desktop distribution, or is there a more significant difference? This article compares the two from an end user and developer perspective, emphasizing root access and ease of sharing code."
There's more than one kind of end user.
As an end user, and potential programmer for the platform this is precisely the sort of review I wanted. It doesn't work for the non-technical user maybe, but there will be plenty reviews for those.
Personally as an user I want lack of restrictions and don't give a damn about support -- I've never ever called it for anything I own.
I pre-ordered my N900 through Amazon a few weeks back. I figured it'd be easier to get Android working under Maemo than the other way around.
Also, Maemo has a pretty long history of development. I was actually planning on buying an N810 a few months ago until I found out that the N900 might actually have a decent GPS.
Plus, Android phones will be cheap and easy to come by... so hopefully I'll get one for my wife and get to play with it there. But what I've always really wanted in my pocket was a little debian box, and the N900 is pretty much the first thing that fits the bill in that respect. I could care less about the smartphone bit, other than the network connectivity, and of course the fact that I shouldn't need to carry a separate mobile phone around with me anymore.
I played around with Familiar linux (from http://handhelds.org/ ) on an old IPaq for a while, but it was always a bit frustrating that the hardware support wasn't completely there. So it shouldn't be too hard for Nokia to improve upon that experience :P
I really do hope Google caves in to the demand for a native google maps / google earth application on the Maemo, though.
screw "send to voice mail". I want the phone to *PICK UP*, play one of a selection of pre-recorded messages, and then allow the caller to press a button if they really really want to interrupt, or answer the question in the message. 200MHz on an ARM is plenty of power to implement this.
Can land lines receive SMS where you live?
I don't know about now, because I haven't had a landline for a while, but they definitely could back in 2005. The text of the message was read out by a voice synthesiser and you had the option to replay it when you received an SMS. This is in the UK, so it may be different in other places. They occasionally get celebrities to record the voice samples used for the synthesis. For a while, Tom Baker was doing the voice, so it sounded like you were being sent a message by The Doctor.
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Simple. Get a Palm Pre. Seriously. WebOS is good stuff. Download the SDK, plug the phone into your computer, and type 'novaterm' (ok, first you have to type the konami code on the phone). Hey. Look. Linux. And the apps are all text (javascript to be precise). You even have things like vi and wget without having to install them.
WebOS is definitly a step up in terms of freedom and ease of development compared to anything out there today. It's biggest problem is a lack of apps. This is where maemo really shines, any linux app can be ported with minimal effort, in most cases it's just a few UI changes.
Basically, you have a Busybox session where vi and wget haven't been compiled out. You're still bound to whatever Palm decides to push your way.
Which makes me wonder if you can replace the kernel on a Palm Pre, or if it will only boot a signed kernel.
Which is great, as long as the phone is running. In my experience, WinMo phones need a firmware reset every couple of months or else buttons and functions start flaking out, which is completely unacceptable for a phone. It has happened with every WinMo phone I have seen.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I think Google is designing phones for ordinary people to use. 99.99% of cell phone users don't give a rats ass about most of the things on your list. I grew up on X11 but I can see no good rationale for putting it on a mobile device for ordinary people to use.
I imagine some people want Flash in a browser but Android is adding that. Me personally I suspect Flash on a mobile device will just drain the battery, hog the CPU and memory and make browsing generally sluggish up to the point your battery is dead. Might be OK if you are plugged in to a wall socket 90% of the time but at that points its not really mobile anymore is it. Video is the only compelling reason to have Flash, unless you have a taste for stupid Flash sprite games. Video in a mobile device would better be done by an optimized player in hardware like iPhone does on YouTube or like you could have with HTML/5. Unfortunately this requires the web to stop being so Flash centric.
I doubt anyone really cares about Firefox. They want a browser that works and ViewKit or Opera is just as good or probably better in a mobile device than Firefox.
MPlayer might be worthwhile but everyone has video players of one degree of quality and performance or another.
I think I'm saying that everything about this thread coming from Maemo fanboys, including the original article, is probably an advertisement for why Android will win in the real world, while Maemo will thrive in the tiny little niche of open source fanatics, that the rest of the world is mostly indifferent to. Not to mention Maemo is locking you in to one hardware manufacturer and an incredibly small range of hardware, while Android is now on dozens of different platforms. How exactly is that freedom.....
@de_machina