I'm here in Copenhagen, DK at the the Maemo/Mozilla Danish weekend ( http://wiki.maemo.org/Mozilla_Maemo_Danish_Weekend ). It's been great to get together with some of the other Maemo/Mer people and talk face to face, but that's a story for another post.

Yesterday, Nokia actually brought out ten of the devices that the Nokia developers are using to test Maemo 5 on. They were in big black plastic cases and obviously weren't production hardware, so don't get all excited about what this means in terms of the RX-51 or even the RX-71. What I was told is that the machine was designed to have all of the features that might possibly be on any future Maemo device. It was a rather hectic weekend and I only got to play with the device briefly, so, keep that in mind as I'm describing this thing.

The basic form factor is a touchscreen device with a sliding keyboard. The main features worth talking about:

-a very accurate touchscreen. It seems to be much more sensitive than the N800/N810 and it is resistive. There was a stylus/stylus slot in the side of the device. I got to see someone demo a drawing app, and the line tracking the cursor was totally smooth and instantaneous.

-The keys on the keyboard were a little smaller than the N810 but were easier to type on. Somehow they seemed a little bit easier to push, but at the same time more "clicky."

-The LCD was very bright and clear, and I had no problem reading on it. I was later told that the screen is 3.5" but I wouldn't have guessed without someone telling me.

-I believe it had a 500MHz ARMv7 CPU and 256MB of RAM

-In terms of software they were running the code from the Beta SDK. The new X terminal can switch modes between hilighting text and kinetic scrolling. It was very nice to use.

-I got a chance to play with fennec on the device a little bit: Even when loading heavy sites it was responsive and fast. It loads engadget.com many times faster than fennec on the N810 I had sitting next to it on the same WiFi network.

They wouldn't let anyone take a photo of it (ha! imagine that) so you'll just have to trust me. Also, keep in mind, this is a device used for testing development builds of Maemo 5. It is not now or ever will be a shipping device, however the features of this device do obviously represent technologies that Nokia is interested in.

I am willing to answer a couple more questions as long as people keep their heads about them and don't overreact. If this thread gets out of hand with flames or usless comments I don't think there will be any more info forthcoming about the device.

-John

Updates: I thought I would repost my answers from later in the thread in this first post to make it easy for people finding this later.

(People were asking about whether there were any new features that I saw on the development device.)

"The software running on it was basically a slightly newer version of the beta SDK. So there's nothing new compared to what you can already play with."