A pre order website just went live... The Demo shows some amazing integration...

>> http://europe.nokia.com/n97#/main/landing

It does seem well integrated, the Facebook widget looks very cool (for those who use Facebook). I fully intend to get this phone. I wish they had used omap3 and xenon flash. But then that would be making the perfect phone and Nokia never does that!

I'm excited about OVI and it's future on the next Maemo device.

While searching Maemo + OVI to see what the future may bring for development and whatnot I came across this by our friend LiquidCoooled over @ Slashdot >> HERE <<

It seems he has convinced Nokia to make even their buildings more finger friendly.

(lcuk, I'm hoping for your speedy and uneventful recovery dude.)

Ovi and Maemo is something that's likely to take shape in the Harmattan timeframe (when officially-supported Qt libraries are shipped). I'd expect some real discussion on this plan during the Summit.

@YoDude: Have you used Ovi? (ovi.com, that is, not the actual doors at Nokia's in Finland...)

I'm also excited about the idea, but the implementation is really bad so far. Some services don't work at all, others work somehow but have implementation bugs, others just are very, very restricted... there's little to no customer care.... And the whole thing started in 2007! I really don't know if they'll ever make it work. I hope so, though. It would be cool to at least have the option to use it (as long as we're not forced to).

That's not quite fair (services which don't work AT ALL? ) or accurate.

The Ovi BRAND was announced in late 2007, but none of its services were available then. It was purely an announcement of how Nokia wanted to develop in the coming years. There was no actual product attached to the announcement, it was just about the brand and the company's future.

Ovi as a single unified service is still mid-launch, it's still in the phase of bringing together many different elements which were launched indpendently.

The reason it's taking a long time is because Nokia are having to integrate a lot of baggage from many different services that were conceived totally separately, often in totally separate companies which Nokia didn't even own at the time. Google took just as long to integrate e.g. YouTube into its system for similar reasons.

The components of Ovi are:

Ovi Share - Renamed version of Twango.com which Nokia purchased, which carried on after purchase as basically the old site with its old accounts system. The unification with Nokia's accounts system (i.e. becoming a proper part of Ovi) only happened in the middle of last year.

Nokia/Ovi Maps - Originally an independent navigation software company called Gate 5, Nokia purchased it and used it in a standalone service based on data from Navteq (which Nokia also purchased some time ago, but they only got the purchase cleared by competition authorities last year).

Nokia Music - Originally a standalone music store.

Ovi Files - First made-for-ovi service, launched last year.

Ovi Sync (contacts and calendar online syncing service) - Another made-for-ovi service, launched late last year.

N-Gage - A standalone gaming service for Nokia smartphones, it has never been integrated into Ovi at all and perhaps it will just be rolled into Ovi Store (which is what is happening to MOSH, Download and Software Market).

Ovi Store - Made-for-ovi content download service, but hasn't launched yet (launching very very soon though).

Ovi Mail - On-phone e-mail service intended for developing countries and those with cheaper phones, but anyone can sign up if they want to. The webmail client is in very early public beta testing (mail.ovi.com).

Ovi as a single service is just being born now, basically. You've got to give it time to exist as an integrated service before judging its success.

The N97 is probably one of the first phones to be designed with Ovi in mind, so this is something of a first step into the mobile world for Ovi.



The upcoming Omnia HD uses the same Symbian S60 5th Edition platform but with OMAP3 hardware.

OTOH the Omnia HD lacks a hardware keyboard, and of course Nokia's online services won't be on it either.

I think Symbian and Maemo will become mostly Qt-based/fully supporting Qt at roughly the same time - as the Symbian release roadmap mentioned, Symbian is intended to fully switch to Qt by the end of 2010 (with the Symbian^4 release). I don't know when Harmattan is planned to be introduced, but I guess sometime during 2010?

thanks

it seems so strange to see my full nickname here
lcuk was never meant to be permanent

Ooh la la... totally my IT replacement device. Makes me wonder what could have been Maemo 5 with this though... from the widgets to the hardware... (ok, so I say it all the time, but even the device's design language says IT to me).

Their choice of CPU and the fact they're having to optimize their own OS to keep it snappy disappoints.