Re: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
 

http://wiki.meego.com/Quality/HandsetTestReport for exact reports of what is different. These are development images. Sometimes Aava things are totally hosed, sometimes N900 images are totally hosed, sometimes they are equally screwed.

Re: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
 

I have been going by what I see with my son and his Nexus One. I'm very impressed.

Re: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
 

Nokia know full well that if other venders join the MeeGo bandwagon, then their job becomes a lot more competitive on that front. Nokia became complacent, they were top dog and didn't/don't put R&D or customer upgrade paths in the places where their customers really want it. This is something that will drastically alter their hand now with MeeGo. They will have to continually be the best to keep on top, Android and Apple aside.

Quim even mentioned something along these lines when there was a query about vendors mucking up MeeGo on their own devices. If you as a customer are not happy with the device, and see a better option from someone else, you'll go for it. This is extremely evident in the Android handset market and I'm sure Nokia are going to learn a great deal from them. With all the Android based devices out their the competition has really kicked off and customers will weigh up the benifits of one device over another. Hopefully this will happen with MeeGo and put back the competitive streak that Nokia have been missing the past 5 years.

Good luck Nokia, I really hope you're up to it.

Re: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
 

tswindell, that was one of the best posts I've seen on the subject.

Re: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
 

Thank you for the link. I have yet (including the most recent build) been able to successfully connect to my WiFi using the UI that looks like it's supposed to work. I tried everything that they show in the Moorestown Video preview and almost every app either crashed, failed to launch, or didn't work right. I was talking with you the night I ended up being able to finally get my Wireless working by manually adding every command I needed to /etc/rc.local.. but even there it was extremely flakey. I have not tried all of these in the new build released yesterday(ish), I simply booted it, messed around for a few minutes, tried to get connected to wireless with the tool (which failed) and then rebooted.

I understand they are dev/alpha releases and things break. I'm a developer, I know this. The point is that at release there: a) was no N900/Arm capability at all.. there was a problem in the kernel or something that delayed it a day.. and b) was obvious that the Moorestown was more complete at that time.

Anyway, you focused on one very minor and specific point in my post that wasn't the overall point of where I was going. All of this is water under the bridge. The N900 is coming along, I'm sure it'll get to the point in the future to be functional. I know this.

The point is, well, further shown by you actually:

Tell me, why is that hosted at nokia.com? Why are those not hosted here?

Is there something special in them that only nokia.com can distribute? (rhetorical, obviously)

Ok then.. so with the official report from Nokia that the N900 will not be officially supported once MeeGo is stable/finished then how long can we expect to Nokia to maintain and get those proprietary components into community builds of MeeGo for our N900?

As I've said.. my points have all been related to Nokia's view of the N900 and so far everything we've seen/been told is that the N900 has no future in nokia. So why should I feel all warm and fuzzy that the only way I can build a workable image is from nokia.com?

Sorry that my post is a little over-combative.. I kinda took your post a little personally with the way it was presented, the challenge to "do something", and the repeated links to the MeeGo N900/ARM page that proves nothing at this stage of the game regarding how long Nokia is going to continue to care to distribute images for the N900 when all it is to Nokia is a money-hole since they won't be officially selling or distributed updates for existing and new users to the N900 when MeeGo is officially released.

Re: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
 

I am really hoping others join the meego train for that reason. There are so many amazing android devices coming out now and I think a big part of is the competition is so intense that if your device is not of a very high standard it is likely to be completely ignored.

Personally I never want to buy another Nokia device (with them refusing to fix the usb port on my N900) but I am quite liking the idea of meego. Hoping for HTC to join the party. And Samsung who seem to have come along way since the horrible Samsung Tocco.

Re: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
 

It's simple really. The blobs I keep on referring to (wifi, bt, sgx) does not currently have licensing that allows us to distribute those blobs from repo.meego.com. Hence, those images containing them can't be there as well.

Hence we have to do our images outside the current release structure, but we follow them and QA considers our 'closed' images the ones to test.

(I'll read through rest of your post and answer, just wanted to answer this specific point as I had direct information, not speculation)

Re: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
 

If you want a breath of fresh air, go read some of the Dalvik documents here. This is a mature product that is probably getting better every day. It might not be someone's cup of tea, but it's impressive software and the docs are very well written.

Open source competition is good and the future looks bright.

Re: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
 

Well, I do agree that Moorestown had more time to fix basic things as many things in MeeGo come from Moblin. I'm not sure what release you're referring to exactly.

If Handset day one, I'll state that I was on vacation at the time, following the chats through a J2ME IRC client, so I don't have the whole picture of what was going on there. Biggest problem with handset day one was that we were going to have this in the middle of the invasive changes period. Guess how difficult that is.

I've always understood (and get confirmed several times) that 'support' means that it isn't a Nokia productized OS. If we're looking away from all the shiny bits, it means in practice it won't be a firmware image that has gone through Nokia's extensive process for developing OS'es, roadmapping and updates, QA etc. And no phonecalls to Nokia support about it.

This does not mean no 'supporting' as in no resources thrown after it. This is obvious from anyone looking at how much effort is going into the MeeGo platform from Nokia's side. As well as the reference platform of N900.

Technically it's on repository.maemo.org the files, but :) (We are working so things are published from repo.meego.com instead. Things take time when there's legal aspects involved)

It doesn't, hence my first sentence about asking what kind of commitment actually exists. I'm just showing what is actually going on instead and what resources are being spent on N900 and how things will look like now, at 1.1, after 1.1, etc.

I'd be a lot happier man if we didn't have the blobs at all. My point was that they require little maintenance. And that the 'cost' of maintenance is less if there's also community people capable of lifting burdens together with us.

My main gripe is that people here complain more than contribute (and this obviously doesn't apply to Fatalsaint, who is contributing in many different ways). More work, less talk.

Re: What is the future for the n900 from now? meego or no updates or nothing?
 

Those closed source, proprietary applications riding atop the open MeeGo stack will really be critical then, eh?