Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Someone posted a link to where to buy the N900 on Nokia UK. It says it has Ovi Maps for it... but didn't Ovi Suite never support N900?

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

The real question is, isthat step 4 of 5? Or is it step 5 of 6 perhaps? 6 of 7? Maybe what Nokia really needs is to just come out and admit they need 12 steps up front.

Freemantle?

Agreed. At this point, I find it increasingly hard (as someone everyone seems to go to for tech advice in their business and homes) recommending anything from Nokia anymore and I'm PROFOUNDLY glad that I had been cautiously optimistic before, because I've since learned to become profoundly cynical after lots of burned moments dealing with this platform so far. I'm glad I never recommended this thing to any business purpose--but I nearly went there.

After all is said and done, Nokia had something to pioneer and they ended up pissing all over it and all over the customers too. I'm happy to see MeeGo started up but I REALLY need to see some other manufacturers involved before I can give it any amount of my confidence. At least Intel's participation helps a little, but I haven't seen a unit in my own hands yet and I've not heard much from the Intel camp of MeeGo, so I can't get a gauge on how useful this will truly be despite all the assurances. Even with that said, I would trust buying the Intel device more than the Nokia device. At least Intel treats their customers with only MILD insult and derision. Nokia was exceedingly awkward and hostile.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

I have only the vaguest of ideas as to what Ovi Suite and PC Suite are, and I'll happily admit I haven't followed the talk of which versions of which one support what. So, while I seem to remember Ovi Suite adding support for the N900 not too long ago, I'll accept for the moment the implication of your final question.

That established, how does Ovi Suite not supporting (or supporting) the N900 have any bearing upon whether or not the N900 has Ovi Maps installed on it? The only connection I can see, and it seems a stretch, is the preloading of map data, and Jaffa explained a straight forward method of achieving that well before the N900 was even released.

So, would you please better explain where you're leading?

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

I guess from an R&D point of view continuously developing an OS by experimenting as you go, it is evolution, but looking from the customer's point of view it is a set of random changes that completely messes up all and everything.

If you, as a customer, are into this experimenting, it is all fine. It is more than fine, there is nothing else like it. But I must admit that I am surprised and disappointed by the timeframe of Maemo5 and also the N900. A top of the line device usually outlast 2-4 cheap phones, but here, even the cheapest phones outlast the N900. Given that the N900 was priced at the very top, this simply is far from good. The hardware is excellent, but the actions by Nokia has caused a situation where there are no applications utilizing the hardware to its potential. No one bothers making software for a dead end device.

The absolute very least Nokia could do, was to "officially" support MeeGo on the N900 and continued that support at least a couple of years. Now they are going to do the exact same thing on the N8. It will be left out in the cold when Symbian^4 comes out. At the same time, I am sure the board at Nokia are scratching their heads wondering why they aren't selling more smartphones.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

PC Suite has partial N900 support only. It's a bare minimum, but does sync contacts and copy images over no dupes (yes, it replaces a small shell script).

OVI maps seems to be "supported" if you ask the site, but doesn't seem to do anything as it was meant to work with different implementations. Can't get it to do much.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Nokia's gameplan on the n900:

We won't advertise it as a test product yet sell it as high as possible... we wont offer any support or development for it... and we will make it EOL (End of Life) before you can type this sentence. Don't worry about annoyed users or their complaints much easier to find lots of new ones on new contracts to replace them with the new device. Or sell this device in far off countries where they haven't caught on yet.

I got this from leaked documents.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

You've chosen not to respond to my first response. That's cool. But you keep using phrases like the above that seem more like FUD than an informed opinion.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

I read the Symbian-Guru's post and the nokia forums post about Ovi Suite, and poeple complaining about how Ovi Suite was how you put Ovi Maps on the device. I think I'm wrong though based on your response, but perhaps the map updates come from Ovi Suite?

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

That dude is just randomly grieving about OVI (maps) on an OVI suite thread.

http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/...00/td-p/576344

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

It is step 5 of 5 - the fifth and last Maemo device (regardless of how it will be called on release). It will certainly (have to) be targeting the mainstream high end as it will have to replace both the niche N900 and the ill-fated N97. How you (or Nokia) treats the Maemo-to-MeeGo transition with regard to step count - that I have no idea about.

Let me repeat once more - MeeGo is not what you think it is. Nokia’s edition of MeeGo (that’s the one you want, with Flash and Skype and Maps and a store and whatnot) will appear somewhere mid-2011, and will likely target hardware way above the N900. I’m telling you, nothing would change, except for the title of the rant threads, we’d just go from "you have abandoned us" to "how much longer !!!" and then when it finally ships to "OMG we waited a year for THIS ?!?! It’s slow and totally unresponsive !!!". And few years of support is after that, sadly, pointless, no matter how good it sounds, tech simply advances too fast for it to make sense. Honest. Take a look at phones from 2007 and tell me - which one still receives updates (hint - the iPhone doesn’t and Android didn’t even have a shipping device back then). The problem with Nokia comms in my strictly personal opinion is that it did not gave a PROPER explanation of the reasoning and STILL hasn’t started explaining what MeeGo is and how it (along with the N9) fits the Nokia software strategy, letting people speculate - and since they have no sufficient info they speculate wrong more often than not.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

That's fine when you are cooking but are you applying that to maemo & meego or maybe customer satisfaction?
:)

Let's see:
Maemo is stable and operating quite well.
Harmattan is maemo 6?
Maemo has been renamed to meego "because it's cool"
Meego ux reference handset ui is different from harmattan ui?
Does the meego image (v1 no ui) share the same code & versions of software as maemo?
If harmattan is meego then why does the current release of meego for handsets seem so immature?

If maemo/harmattan/meego are indeed the same then meego in its current state is a serious regression!

If maemo/harmattan/meego are indeed the same then I would have expected a fully-working image that would have changed and adapted over time.

Red Hat can do it - e.g. Red Hat Enterprise & fedora so it is not a "linux" problem - it's a management problem at Nokia.

I'm sorry but I smell marketing bullsh**!

As far as I understood things - harmattan was being developed as maemo 6, Intel were working on meego, at some point Nokia decided to join meego and announced meego will become/replace maemo and shared very similar structure. Meego has it's own reference handset ui and Nokia has it's own separate handset ui (harmattan).

It's a pity things are like this I thought Nokia have great hardware and a great platform to compete in today's market - instead they seem to be making "plans for the future" and everyone else is continuing to improve their own mobile OS and add features.

Will my next phone be Nokia?
I'm going to wait and see.

I don't care who makes my next device - I'm not loyal to any company.
I'm a PC and I don't give a f***

*PC = Pi**ed-off Customer

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Meego, a name only a mother (or people from this forum) could love.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Indeed, and that's what happened to me.


I purchased my very first Nokia N900 around April 2010 this year, since I live in New Zealand, the phone isn't out yet (and still isn't out now), so i had to go online to buy it. Us New Zealanders use this website called Trademe to buy/sell stuff online, it's just the same as Ebay but much safer because only New Zealanders with a verified house address can use it.

ANYWAY, all the N900 on sale were over 900+ (in New Zealand dollars), the cheapest i found was $899 which includes a free screen protector, a free battery and a car charger. It's still really expensive to me, but i really liked its design and wanted a better phone with a bigger screen, and that has a hardware keyboard. I wanted to upgrade from my HTC Touch Pro to something better, and only want phones with hardware keyboard, and N900 was hands-down the best choice. So despite the expensive price, i paid for it anyway.

Then, i joined this community and did pretty much everything i could on the phone, i updated it to PR 1.2, tweaked it, overclocked it, installed 3GB+ worth of apps/games etc, and everything. It's a good community and all, but it just seems to lack so much more support than i expected. The OVI store sucks (face it), and most importantly this isn't a completed device to be honest. Nokia is more than likely gonna abandon this once Meego comes out, and it's that exact problem i feared.

Moreover, i couldn't justify the price i paid for since everyday i use it, i become more depressed thinking about how much i paid for it and whether i made the right choice and whether it was worth it.

So, i sold it after using for only 2 months.



BUT! I bought it back again! I still love it overall despite that it's still pretty much a non-finished or "prototype" phone if you will. It's still a good phone. BUT this time, i bought it for $600 (2nd hand but very very new and still has 10 months warranty), and i also got a free 16GB microSD card along with it as well. This is a big bonus to me since the 16GB microSD costs $130 NZD, and on the receipt it says the phone cost $1150 NZD.

The seller sold it for this cheap after using it for just 2 months as well, is because he wanted to get an iPhone. So he didn't care anymore about selling it this cheap.



Right now, at least i'm feeling justified and ok to buy it because it's cheap and that i still have the extra accessories from my first N900. My point is, the phone itself is too expensive (and still is, i was only lucky to buy it for $600), that's why not many people would justify buying it considering that everything is still being developed for it.


Compared to the Apple's APPSTORE, and the iDevices in general, the support really suck. For developers, there aren't any benefits for them to make apps/games for the N900 compared to making it for the iPhone. On the iPhone, you can find so much crap that it's unbelievable and amazing at the same time. I own an iPod Touch (jailbroken), and it's amazing the amount of things i can do with it. In fact, i'll be honest, i actually like my iPod Touch MORE than my N900 in terms of the apps/games and everything else it can do. I installed so much crap on it, i have over 20GB+ of stuff downloaded for it, and almost anything the N900 can do, my iPod Touch can do as well. And compared to the N900, the iPod Touch is way cheaper. I bought mine brand new for $250, so that's how big of a difference there is. SURE it's not a phone, but that's the only difference, i use it so much for music, gaming (GBA emulators etc), check my bus/train timetables, photos, my UNI lecture timetables, using Cydia etc etc. There's just so much more. From just Cydia and all those repos itself, showed more support than what Nokia or the Maemo community could ever reach.

But the only reason y i bought the N900 is coz i love its texting and MicroB browser, but generally i use my iPod Touch for all the apps/games etc.


So ya, sorry for this long post and i'm not trying to put anybody off, but seriously, don't many of you have that feeling deep down in your hearts, where you sometimes wonder whether the price you paid for is really worth it? Compared to the APPSTORE, it really does lack support. But ya, i still love it.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

At least MeeGo has a far less ambiguous pronunciation. But.. yeah, I agree.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Yes

Yes

No

You can't make an OS in 3 months. You just can't. That's why 'real' MeeGo devices will see the light of day only in 2011, likely on more powerful hardware. In the meantime, there is a perfectly functional Maemo 6 but to avoid the Osborne effect, they renamed it to MeeGo and made a compatibility layer for it. As simple as that :)

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

There's alot to like about the n900. It's something different if nothing else.

Its the cheated, disillusioned and lost customers in the prior 7 months paying premium prices for their device that upset me. And Nokia's and certain talk maemo member attitudes as well. As well as the lack of commercial and vendor push to realize this devices potential.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Unfortunately, you paid top dollar for POTENTIAL. With iPhone and Android, you pay much more reasonably for far better REALISED power and utility. :( I'm at least glad I own both a Nokia Maemo device and an Android device to know the difference.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Brilliant!
As ever, thanks for clearing that up attila77.

The "million dollar" question is....
Do you have any idea when we can expect maemo 6 to be released to the public?

Is it the same release as expected in October or will that be just the reference UI?

If this is truly the case that's fine - Maemo 6 is released as a "version" of meego then "real" meego is released on new device in 2011.

I just wish Nokia would formally announce something like this!
E.g. by a Director or Product Manager.

Instead it has to be explained by good people like Attila77 & qgil.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Map data is automatically downloaded as needed by Ovi Maps. As you search for locations or move about, it downloads the data for the immediate surroundings. Think Maemo Mapper, but vector, so no separate zoom levels to worry about.

Should you wish to reduce data usage on the go, or have maps available beyond the reach of wireless data, you can optionally download ahead of time from a selection of large, regional map data packs. Think Wayfinder. One of the "Suite" products is supposed to assist with this task for the N900, but as I understand it, it is flaky. As with Wayfinder, manually downloading and unzipping the large files is easy though.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

The official word is 2010H2, current hints (warning, speculation ahead :) ) show a likely announcement in September-October with actual devices in November-December.

AFAIK the MeeGo and the Harmattan release schedules are separate (well, except for the Qt components they have to share to be compatible). So what you will get in October in MeeGo as reference UX is still expected to be largely unrelated to what Harmattan will have (by October Harmattan should be long frozen and final productization stages). This doesn't mean it will look worse than the MeeGo 1.1 ref UX - in fact, as the UX is seen as a differentiation source, it will likely never be quite polished in the reference UX implementation, Nokia will always add secret sauce extras on top of it for shipment in actual devices (think Sense or MotoBlur over stock Android).

Yes, that's the worst part - the strategy actually makes sense, but a lot of the rationale of why things are the way they are lost because of comms done the way they are done.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

It's application is universal. Learn it. Live it. Love it. Here's a recent example:

When Steve tells me "multi-tasking" in iOS 4 won't be supported for my iPod touch 2G (ARM11 @ 533 MHz w/ 128 MB) I just say, "Thank you sir may I have another." It's so strange 'cause I used to multi-task with Linux running X on the first Pentium (P60 @ 60 MHz w/ 8 MB). Oh well, silly me.

See, the universe is right again... But I can't help thinking you're on to something; this "breaking a few eggs" thing might be messing me up. I really like multi-tasking. Maybe I should just buy an iPod touch 3G... Hey. Wait a minute. F*ck that. Maybe I should just write him a really nasty letter. Or maybe I should demand the code so I can fix it for 'em.

Yeah baby, I'm fired up! When I'm done with Mr. Jobs, Nokia's next. Watch out!

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Maybe you should just stop being a pansy and jailbreak.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Let's also not forget that Apple didn't play the "open source" and "Linux" (or BSD, in this case) device angle like Nokia did.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Sorry, what exactly is your first response that I haven't responded to?

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

OH SNAP! He chose not to respond to your first response by responding to your response about not responding to your first response!

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

So software freedom's a cool thing?

Maybe you should take some of your own advice and fix Portrait mode for yourself. I've dabbled a little. Let me know if I can help.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

It was just a friendly suggestion.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Even though I mentioned source, we weren't really talking about open source. We were more talking about generational hardware/OS incompatibilities.

If you'd like to talk about open source we can? For instance, I don't have source for my Linux NVIDIA drivers. But those drivers kick a*s! vsync issues aside, same goes for my n900. And I really like programming to the GPU right on the device! I could be wrong, but I think as we speak that stskeeps is making sure that OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, the POWERVR SGX (Imagination Technologies), the n900, MeeGo and Linux 2.6.35 are all on the same page. Maybe he'll even get the vsync issue sorted out.

Is my glass half full or what?

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Or we could you know... stay on topic as we haven't been for the last page and a half.
And Maemo is pronounced as 'May-Mo (as in MOcha)', right? I hope so cause I won't change it anyways :P

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Uh oh, p0rn for Dan.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

He's gonna need a bib.

And a towel.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Without starting from the beginning. Absolutely nothing makes sense about their strategy. How long will Harmattan UI last? Let's see 6 months?

To your questions regarding what devices are still supported from 2007, the first generation iPhone just stopped getting iOS updates, but it got all the way up to iOS 3. Now just because the original iPhone won't get iOS 4 doesn't mean it won't still get patch updates to iOS 3.

I get that they want MeeGo to succeed and I also get that it won't be ready until next year. Harmattan shouldn't exist though, as a stand-alone non backward compatible OS to Fremantle. At some point Harmattan branched off Fremantle, they should have merged all bug fixes and minor upgrades back to the Fremantle release source tree and created a new release, whether that be 5.5 or whatever. Oh, and BTW, the first device that would have run that release should have been the N8. Yeah, it screws up their numbering but who cares about Symbian S^3. Kill it. I wish someone would have the guts to say Linux is it for Nokia Smartphones, but honestly I don't expect the guys in Nokia HQ to have the guts to make any decisions like that. Instead they keep adding more OS projects to work on.

Harmattan / MeeGo / S^3 / S^4 in what the next year / year and a half?

Can ANYONE tell me why they really needed to redo things every 6 months. MAEMO is GOOD ENOUGH!!!! Run that until MeeGo is ready then whole hog move the entire Nokia smartphone universe to MeeGo.

Here's another reason why the quad-OS strategy is stupid. Remember PR 1.2? Software gets delayed and guess what hardware too. So plans are one thing by the time we get to meego and S^4 where will iOS be and where will Android be? They'll have spent at least another year building their customer base where as Nokia has by then abandoned Maemo, Harmattan and S^3 customers. GREAT strategy. How does that make any sense again?

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Should I be glad you thought of me first when you saw that? ;)
Already saw it. Already soiled my pants and changed 'em. Thanks. heheh
It's nice to have a product that keeps pushing out significant upgrades (not just small fixes) every once in a while over the past year. :)

Yeah! STAY ON TOPIC, PEOPLE!! ...I pronounce it May-mo too. ;)

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

I feel like stirring the hornet's nest a bit.

Why would I purchase anything Nokia in the future? 8810, 8890, 7190, 770, N810... I know I'm missing some in there; however the last two were well-built, but dead end products before they had outlived their usefulness.

So no. I will not buy a May-mo product and I will have to be really convinced to support a Mee-Goh product as well. Perhaps if Harr-matt-en was coming with A-dough-bee Flash Ten Point One and perhaps less con-foo-shun I'd be on the waiting list.

Pass the MOcha.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Yes, but i've yet to see anything spectacular or evolved ever since N900 launched. The OVI Store is pathetic, sure the App Manager is awesome with the Extra Testing/Devel but those are still being developed and not completed.

Overall, Maemo 5 is just not the end of the product line. It's just like Windows Vista, a piece of crap, but when Windows 7 came out, it was awesome.


I love the N900 and of course it has potential, hell it's open source and just full of pure awesomeness (that's exactly why I missed it, and bought it AGAIN). But compare to Android and iPhone, it's just so far behind and so much to catch up.


I own a lot of phones and have used pretty much EVERY mobile platforms there are. I've been involved in each of the communities as well. Just to give a list, i've used:

UIQ3 (W950i) -> (used to be Sony Ericsson, but it's now dead technology and now open source)
Symbian S60
Maemo 5 (N900)
Android (i had the Nexus One & HTC Desire but sold them)
Iphone


and each and one of them, i've tweaked, hacked, overclocked and pretty much used them to the max and exploited everything possible.


My point is, N900 is probably one of the best i've ever used, but it really needs to do something big to catch up, i had a look at Meego and it looked MEH to me, so ya hopefully the N900 will prevail in the future.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

You heard it here, folks! :)

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

I pronounce it "mammal"

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

sorry i wasn't being clear, what i mean is, the Maemo 5 isn't the completed end-of-line product, Meego is. So just like Windows Vista, it was suppose to be Windows 7, but it was released anyway. I believe the Windows Millennium is the same case, and then Windows XP came out after.

Of course, N900 is a beast and is awesome, but i'm just using the Window version example to show that it's really the same thing.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

Whoa... where does Windows NT 4 and Windows 2000 fit in there? Are you sure MeeGo isn't going to just end up being Windows NT 3.51, 4 and 2000 before it ever finally gets even to XP before it ends up back at Vista again? :) Clearly, you're saying Maemo was the DOS+Windows lineage versus the MeeGo being NT lineage. At least, I hope that's kind of what you're saying.

Somehow, I think your Windows analogy falls apart.

Re: Would You Buy Nokia Phone as Your Next Mobile ?
 

You guys are killing me with the Windows analogies.

WinNT begat Windows 2000, which begat Windows XP, which begat WIndows Vista which begat Windows 7.

Windows 95, which never used the WinNT kernel, begat Win98, Windows Millennium... and that's where it died.

Two Window lines that really didn't mix outside of UI and drivers. At the kernel level, they are totally different beasts.

MeeGo is the Windows 95 to Windows 2.0 comparison. There's a step in there that was popular (Maemo 5/Windows 3.11) but it's a step backward to almost all but the most loyal, 5.25" floppy waving Windows 2.0 lovin' soul that I've had the misfortune of crossing paths with in my life.

They exist. And I don't know why.

And stop it with the Windows analogies. It offends my inner MCSE.