Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Some people said that Moblin is not a Maemo competitor, but seems this will change soon.
Inventec shown today at Computex, a 'Mediaphone' very similar to our tablets. According to the resources below, there will be a demonstration of 3 Moblin Smartphones tomorrow.

http://www.midmoves.com/2009/06/mr-b...-a-mediaphone/

http://www.midmoves.com/2009/06/prev...s-at-computex/

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

it's not really a surprise: i remember an intel representative saying that the smartphone market is where they're heading.

it would be cool. the most recent moblin ui seems much more appealing than what we've seen of maemo 5 so far.

battery life will decide the battle for me if both plattforms gain momentum.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Totally agree, although isn't optimized for finger use yet.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Interesting how they are so different from Nokia -- waving demo units around a year before they're going to be released. Granted, Nokia told us most of the features that will be available on the Maemo 5 lead device eight months ago, in September 2008, but they've only shown some development prototypes at the end of May 2009.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Nice screen size on that one device...

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Note, intel only sells the internals, they just want to give the ones that produce complete devices ideas...

Its just like TI, nvidia or qualcomm showing of what their products can do, and hope the third parties pick their product as the internals for the next device...

So basically, intel is telling companies that they now can do smartphones and similar, while using the same tools that they have used for developing computer products. Or in other words, develop on pc, run on phone...

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

The key is that someone at the chip behemoth is backing 1) Moblin and 2) compact tablet format. Together.

With their clout behind it, something can be expected to happen in the Moblin tablet space.

The Moblin project is still totally Intel-centric, but its steering was handed over to the Linux Foundation in April and an ARM port is probably only a matter of time, esp. considering the number of ARM licensees vying for a piece of the ultraportable market.

I very rarely come across any news or even rumours in the media about Maemo or Mer...

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

No coincidence that oFono, sponsored by Nokia and Intel, is announced, followed by a leak of a Nokia linux phone and an announcement of a Moblin linux phone...

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Considering the bazillion partnerships and consortiums announced by megacorporations in the last year or two, I can't escape the feeling that on quite a few of these it's the old principle at work - keep your friends close, but keep your enemies even closer.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

... which is the whole point. that's why it's so much nicer and elegant. :)

(of course this means that they could develop a maemoesque, grandmother-friendly version of the overall system UI for small phone screens. but they'd still have both then, and i'd assume you could hack your moblin-phone to use the netbook-UI. maemo cannot do this.)

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

The Intel Ultra Mobility event @ Computex came and went.

One screen previewed 5 upcoming Intel-based MID devices:

http://www.midmoves.com/wp-content/u...6/img-9437.jpg

And the details in plain text in case the picture vanishes:

[removed to protect the innocent from despicable marketspeak; look at the picture at your own peril ;) ]

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Well, indeed, we haven't seen actually much public (or anything interesting really to be precise) of the Maemo 5 UI except the very basic wire frame layout. All the good things such as the multitasking, status area, themes, and desktop window enhancements have been removed based on my request in the SDK. The purpose of the SDK is to allow developers to build their innovation. The purpose of SDK is not to show the UI innovation of Maemo 5. You will see the Maemo 5 UI in its entire glory when the lead device is launched. So, comparisons between Maemo 5 SDK UI images and Moblin v2.0 UI are not even comparisons between apples and pears. We haven't shown even yet how the apple looks like. ;)

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Maybe not the thread for it but could you, from a marketing position, explain why exposing only a subset of the final UI is good for marketing? Is it to produce more of a 'bang' when the final UI is shown or something else?

I bring this up as it seems there is this stance where there should be a lot of secrecy about what the final product will be. From the Maemo Summit last year (not being able to record one of the sessions) to not allowing photos of the developer prototypes at the Danish get-together, it seems there is a good reason for this but I'm not sure I understand it.

Just trawl the pages of Engadget and you will see many a prototype long before its released. If there is adequate explanation that what the reader is seeing is 'work in progress' then you do not see the 'hey this is the next Nokia tablet' comments, you get more of 'here's an early prototype of the new Nokia tablet'.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Short explanation about the motivation: you never have a second chance to make a first impression. And for mobile computers such as the Internet Tablets, the screen is obviously rather big and, therefore, a lot of the value of the experience is derived from the UI. Another obvious reason is to keep copycats away as long as possible. And lastly, you always need to balance early excitement versus influencing your existing sales.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Not to mention that showing the UI now builds expectations about "it will have new features X, Y, and Z! ooh I love feature X, I'm in love with feature X!!!" .... and then at the last minute they find out that X has such a horrendous bug that they have to pull back on that feature.

But, doing so causes all of the people who fell in love with feature X to become disappointed with the final release ... even though they never had feature X in their hands, and they're still getting new features Y and Z. So, showing feature X before the product was ready only served to create disappointment in the final product ... no matter how great the product was, otherwise.

The more you release about the final product, before you're ready, the more you're committing to the form of that final product ... before you've actually finalized it. That's basically painting yourself into a corner. Then any changes you want to make become PR issues, instead of internal engineering/marketing refinements.

That actually goes for the hardware too.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Looks appealing maybe for a 6-9" netbook, but people will cry if you try to put that UI - as is - on a <4" touch screen.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

i guess my new favorite game's called "tickling peter" :)

i remember the last time i was involved in a thread discussing "have we seen all of maemo 5 ui or is there more to come?", my remark that there simply has to be more based on technical information we have was met with some hostility later. (along the lines of "how dare you not be impresssed? you're not even a developer")

nice to read your post, peter. ;)


peter, i beg you never show us anything that remotely resembles an apple. ;)

about the comparison: i could still be fooled by your information strategy, but what seems to be obvious is that maemo5 - no matter what exactly it looks like - is a step away from the desktop feeling of current and prior maemo versions. (this impression is based more on the HIG than on any code.) moblin otoh looks very much like a full-blown desktop, the only difference being a home screen that you may like or not.this is what i find appealing about moblin, not any cosmetics that we haven't seen yet on maemo. (i think they even have "cancel"-buttons over at intel's ;) ...)

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

i'm not "people". i'm somebody who fell in love with the 770 because it had a full desktop on a 4" screen. i did already cry when the big menus and fat scrollbars destroyed this with their "finger-friendliness".

so from that background i think you'll understand that the current moblin UI on the 4.5"-5" screen i'm hoping for would be pure porn for me. :) - read my "appealing" above this way.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Soylent Green is "people".

Even the 770 was heavily non-full desktop. We optimized heavily, from having only one window on screen at the same time to basically redoing every UI on the device. nothing from "the full desktop", in terms of UI, could be utilized directly.

Ok, so this is just my personal opinion here: The full desktop experience is really great, on a full desktop. Trying to emulate the full desktop experience on something which is very far from being a full desktop will only leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.

Naturally people have different definitions on what is a "full desktop experience". Being able to install applications, to multitask etc. are all of course very good parts of the experience. But in terms of the UI I fail to see why emulating the desktop UI would be a good idea on a non-desktop device. The UI should suit the device in question.

Naturally it's also a curve. There are already 10-12" display laptops running OSX or Windows, somehow ok. The Moblin UI is clearly designed for the MID screen sizes, looks quite right for 6-9".

I don't think it would be an impossible task to try to design an UI style that would scale from 3" to 9", but at least the current Moblin 2.0 UI, as in the screenshots on the site right now, does not do it.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

oh how i hate this marketingspeak meme...

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

ragnar, i know what you say is true for many people. i'm just not one of them. you're also right about restrictions and compromises made for the 770 - they weren't visible as restrictions, though. (but: yes, i would have payed extra for the possibility to move modal dialogues ...)

anyway... two more posts and we're back to stylus vs. finger and the cancel-button and all that... maybe we'd better not. :D

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

windows vista?

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

What? No, that's For Real! The full Internet will be carried around in your handheld. It will have a 500 petabytes of internal storage.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Hey I was just copying the text from the slide as a public service... :cool:

But really, what's there to hate about having "full internet" in your pocket, or is it just the words?

If it means that the OS is real Linux instead of the neutered and sandboxed Android, or worse, winCE, I've no problem with that concept.

(From what I read, Moblin is getting Android compatibility built-in so those apps will be available but without the Android OS's restrictions.)

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

As any other os now when android is working on ubuntu

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

I was fully aware of that, and was wondering if i should (or in any away could) adjust the quote to take that into account.

The problem is that its so nebulous, what does it include exactly? W3C standards only? Third party plugins? And how easy/hard is it to move said goal posts depending on the product?

I have it lined up next to the super/mega/giga/ultra-3G stuff used about mobile phone data traffic speeds.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

What if it's simply shorthand for "unrestricted internet"? "Whatever works on the desktop should work on our gadget too"?

Until now most handhelds that the "market" has seen have been rather limited toys or glorified organizers or required specific iphone-truncated web pages and services to work with the dumbed-down applets running on closed platforms etc.

I don't feel any specific love towards marketspeak, but is that expression really worth getting worked up about? When Intel is using it to plug their investment in Linux-based handhelds and quite obviously hoping to take it mainstream?

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Not helping at all, as the desktop will always avoid tradeoffs that one need to do on a portable device.

Right now we are seeing more and more pages thats to large for 800x400 or similar. Hell, i have seen pages that expect a display that has widescreen format, no if's or buts about it.

And unless everyone on this planet suddenly goes "green", a desktop cpu will always have more raw power to go on then a portable one. And as such can throw around interactivity gloss that will make anything else hang on the workload.

The problem IMO, is that the web have become to much about presentation and to little about raw data. Pages with mouse over drop down menus, pages made of pure flash with fancy transitions, background music and whats not. Videos of all shapes and sizes? And to present what? Most likely some sweat shop product that could just as well have been summed up in a couple of still images from different, useful angles (the number of times a image is more obscuring then revealing is just nuts) and a page of text defining the specs.

Hell, current comdex coverage is more video then text, while what little specs one see is blurry as the camera happens to pan over some sheet of paper on a nearby table.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Sure, it's a choice by Linux distros to incorporate (and support) those Android kernel extensions + Dalvik VM. Ubuntu/Canonical wants them to sell their NBR edition. Moblin are cooperating with the same folks and choosing to add Android compatibility for the same reasons.

What the deal means is that Google is probably promising to make sure things work on their part without breaking compatibility all of a sudden.

On one hand having more apps (of the portable device kind) available on more (Linux-based) platforms and devices may good for the Android ecosystem and the distros/gadgets; OTOH it'd be even nicer if the effort and momentum was lifting Hildon-based projects.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

the term is marketing nonsense.

what people are probably trying to say is something like "a lot of the web will be accessible"... which, of course, again means nothing at all. what's "a lot of of"? i remember one of those braindead web applications that store all their data locally (as will be the next big thing once HTML5 successfully killed the web) managed to successfully bring 2 of three desktop PCs to a full halt for several minutes when i logged in. all achieved by scripting and loading/caching data. i very much doubt you'll have a pleasant experience with this kind of service on a portable device.

even more, "internet" includes each and every single application designed to exchange data over IP - i really doubt that those marketroids who coin phrases like "full internet in you pocket" are even aware that "internet" is much more than "web".

it's just one of those phrases that should be forbidden by criminal law. (very much like people telling me at the beginning of a presentation how excited they are about the revolutionary product i'm going to see....)

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

The thing is ... "full internet" has nothing to do with "full OS". Assuming apps get ported to the device (which is a valid qualifier even if it's a full "non-neutered" Linux install), anything that has a full IP stack, and isn't heavily proxied/firewalled/filtered by the provider, is a "full internet" device. Even Symbian, WinCE/WinMo, and Android.

What marketing-droids typically mean by "full internet" is the device has a web browser that's not a watered down "Mobile only" WAP browser ... support for pages and web applications implemented with java, javascript / ajax, and/or flash. That's really more "full web experience" than "full internet" ... but try teaching a marketing-droid distinctions like that ;-)

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

That has nothing to do with mobile vs desktop. That has to do with idiot web designer vs non-idiot web designer. The ones who are designing their web pages around specific resolutions ought to be given a shovel and directed to the careers they're best suited for ("sanitation engineer" and/or "ditch digger"). Those are the category of web designer that ruined the web (them, and the ones who design web pages for a specific set of browsers, and no others; though, typically these two groups of miscreants heavily overlap).

Admittedly there are minimum and maximum scaling possibilities for a given set of screen widgets, but they have no business telling me what my browser size should be -- they should be fitting their page into my browser, no matter what size I have it set for, and asking me politely to change my browser size when I'm a less than their minimum.

(few things annoy me more quickly, in browsing the web, than a web page that resizes my browser, and a web browser that doesn't allow me to turn that off)

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

I think this is one of those dividing lines within the Maemo community.

To illustrate that (and the other side of the spectrum from what you're talking about)... I'm going to get on a soap box for a few paragraphs, and then after that I'll come back to trying to be more objective.

I, for one, find the current look of Moblin to be incredibly wrong for a pocketable device. While I do want a Unix _based_ device in my pocketable, and strongly prefer one that gives me access to the command line, and basically supports X based applications ... that's a very different desire than "I want a full-blown (ie. crappy) linux desktop in my pocket".

I say crappy because the vast majority linux desktops are just that, crap, when it comes to usability. Ubuntu is _barely_ usable (and I specifically mean usable, not useful; all linux environments I've been exposed to are _useful_, but almost none of them are _usable_). What I've used from KDE was absolute crap (visually ok, but trying to actually do track down this and that setting, set up different things, etc. -- crap). The ONLY linux GUI I've ever used that has usability factor that I'd consider to be really complete and well done ... is Maemo.

With a desktop, I can tolerate more in usability deficiencies than I can in a pocketable. The pocketable has less screen real estate, and therefore it must use it more effectively/efficiently/ergonomically. That means its usability must be higher than the usability of a given desktop interface. I can easily work with Ubuntu's GNOME environment on my desktop, or even on a netbook. There's no way in h*ll I want to use Ubuntu on my pocketable, and there's no other desktop linux environment I've seen that would better fill that role.

I want a user interface that has been designed to work well on a pocketable. I do not want some desktop user interface crammed down into a 4" screen. It's not just about finger vs stylus ... even if we're talking about a stylus driven interface, I still wont want to use a desktop UI on my pocketable. That would be an abomination.

(end of soap box)


So... back that dividing line I was referring to... there seems to me to be these two extremes for UI in the Maemo community (another axis of preference) ... those who want "a desktop Linux environment in my pocket", and those who want a "pocket optimized Linux environment in my pocket".

The current Moblin, and "KDE on the NIT" both seem to be well grounded into the former group. Android is definitely in the latter group. If we generalize to Unix and not just Linux, the iPhone and iPod Touch are also very definitely in the latter group.

Chinook and Diablo were somewhere in the middle... and it sounds to me like Maemo 5 will be somewhere between Chinook/Diablo and Android. It will still be X based, AFAIK (so you should still be able to port X apps to it, etc.), and I assume it will still give you a terminal into the Linux layer ... so it wont be as extremely "pocket/finger optimized, and damn everything else" as Android and the iPhone. But, it wont be as garish as running a full blown Linux desktop on a 4" or 3.5" screen, either.

To me, that's a good thing. It gives you the capabilities of a Unix environment, but in a manner that is optimized for the actual device in question... but with enough flexibility to be used in a more general manner.


So... what major dividing lines do we have so far?

3.5" screen is acceptable vs 4"+ screen is required
physical keyboard vs virtual keyboard only
convergence device vs specialized device (3G or not 3G, separate phone or not)
finger vs stylus
pocket optimized GUI vs full desktop GUI
dpad placement (on the face vs on the keyboard vs none at all) (allnameswereout reminded me of this one)

... any others? And, I expect that few are actually at the extremes of either of those spectra, and are instead closer to the middle of each one (but still on one side or the other of the center). For example... I'm not that opinionated about the screen size, or finger vs stylus ... I have an opinion, but I'm not in the extremes of opinion about those two arguments.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

Those who want "a desktop Linux environment in their pocket" are served with Hildon. If that is not good enough they're free to install other firmware or install KDE or GNOME or whatever on their device. The freedom to do so they have however it will not ship with that by default. It is embedded platform (Hildon, ARM, ...) for a reason.

I want 1) pocket/embedded optimized Linux environment in my pocket, 2) a useful terminal 24/7 usable 3) and then I will think of desktop environment; in the form of remote desktop no less. I believe the latter is very difficult to accomplish on a mobile device, but I've used netbooks for this purpose with little difficulty. So logically it has less priority than #1 or #2. #2 requires certain hardware features or combinations thereof. For example, a good virtual keyboard might be good enough for some. But none I tried does it for me. As for #3, if you 24/7 connectivity, you do not need an X environment to run X software remotely. So if you had such a remote desktop client on Android you'd be set, although it'd have to translate X protocol to whatever Android is running.

Convergence device vs specialized device can have many more examples. It seems the N800 form factor is rather feature poor (but also much cheaper sold). So while it could be a multimedia player (audio, video) it wouldn't be a GPS with navigation system or digital camera or accelerometer able to be used with gaming. The number of (micro)SD slots versus internal flash is also something on which community is divided. Type of screen is also partly related to finger/stylus but you could also think of glossy vs greasy. Oh, and d-pad or even the place of the d-pad is also a hot item.

Re: Moblin-based mediaphone
 

re: Remote Desktop: I had that on my N8x0, via the VNC Viewer. It was sort of a novelty on a pocketable, but sometimes convenient. One of the things I sometimes try to get working on my android phone is the android VNC viewer ... but it doesn't completely work with both ConnectBot(SSH) and VNC Passwords. But, yes, VNC has been ported to Android.

Now, for a netbook, a VNC viewer is a MUST HAVE. And, my netbook and my Samsung Tablet both have it setup and working :-)