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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."
That auto-SMS idea is amazing, and one of the reasons why even as an iPhone developer I'm annoyed at Apple for locking us out of making apps to fill in that kind of functionality. I respect that they need to make sure the phone doesn't blow up whatever network it happens to be running on or ring up a $500 bill for the user, but you would think that something that cool would be really trivial to write now that everything else is in place.
Another idea: why not have the phone give you a couple of options on the auto-SMS that you can write yourself, i.e. "in a meeting right now," "at the theater," "soldering my fingers to the windowsill," or vary the auto-SMS depending on the caller? I don't know if you can roll this kind of functionality yourself on Android, but if you can Apple is going to be sweating bullets in a year or so.
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.
There must be a nontrivial market consisting of people like me who don't care about support as much as they care about functionality.
The Maemo looks good. It's the first smartphone that I'm actually excited about!
From my personal opinion Android simply doesn't stand a chance. While Android does run Linux kernel it doesn't have X Window etc. It's glorified java platform that doesn't even support full java spec. You can do anything with it, but things will take a lot of work.
Maemo on the other hand is what I see as a 'real' Linux platform running software stack which makes it pretty trivial to port existing apps to it.
Stuff I currently run on my N810:
-Real browser looking firefox with flash support
-MPlayer for playing nearly any format I can throw at it...
-Gnumeric for spreadsheets
-Battle for Wesnoth, Beneath the steel sky, Duke Nukem 3D when I feel like playing something
-Vnc server & client
-Gjiten for translating stuff to Japanese. Japanese symbols display nicely etc.
Only thing I'm really missing is the phone functionality. Even if the only improvement to N900 would be adding that, I would be happy. Adding processing power etc. makes it a must buy for me.
It only provides a warning that you may damage your device and does not mention breaking a warranty, EULA, TOS, etc...
It's also worth noting that the warning links directly to the instructions for reflashing the device (with the obvious caveat that any data that isn't backed up will be lost). So even if you shoot yourself in the foot as root, they're more than happy to point your toward the stack of bandages in the corner.
Windows Mobile is like the two Matrix sequels or the Star Wars prequels. We pretend it doesn't exist.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
all the features you mentioned are available with windows mobile.
Additionally, you get a lot of nice extra features, like random restarts, battery monitor that always reports full battery, battery that lasts 1 full day when you're lucky, touchscreen that sometimes responds to your touch (sometimes even to do what you want it to do!), apps that cost much more than I am willing to pay and don't do what I need, plus a generally clunky and inconsistent UI.
I have a windows mobile phone and I will NEVER make that mistake again.
And before I get flamed: I know, many of the problems I have are specific to the device, not to windows mobile, so I have also blacklisted LG for my next purchase. Still, the OS makes you feel like it's windows 98 all over *shiver*.