Neo900 - finally a successor of N900 - Page 19 - maemo.org

Kangal | # 181 | 2013-08-29, 15:59 | Report

So nobody interested in my idea for a better Neo900 ??

Just have a small production run (~1,000 units) in China to produce basically a Plastic Motorola Droid 4. Use the Allwinner A10 SoC (open hardware, very cheap). Install Nemo on it.

Viola!
An N900 successor that's feasible and cheap.

misiak | # 182 | 2013-08-29, 16:00 | Report

Originally Posted by jackburton View Post

While I respect your preferences, that's all they are. To say that something without a keyboard is crap is completely unquantifiable without using an objective set of qualifications.

I'm sorry if you felt offended by my post, I did't mean to offend anyone. As you noticed, these were just my personal preferences and I wanted to emphasize that they are no more than that

I could as well only write that I support the project and nothing more, but I wanted to write briefly why I find this idea great.

As for other suggestions about loosing hw keyboard (it's not aimed at you, jackburton, but to general audience) or changing the device completely, this, while being interesting idea, is a task for a big company with funds and manpower. We are talking here about a really small group of geeks with little to no money. There are no other people interested in Maemo5 anymore and even if we try to advertise it anyhow (which also costs a lot, I guess we can develop at least one prototype for the same money and it would be a better investment), we won't get much more attention. My experience (your may vary) tells me people prefer prefer rather simple to use dumb/smartphones with many entertaining games and stuff. N900 has neither of these (I don't find it an easy-to-use device and cannot say it has many entertaining games) and it won't change. [Suggestion]Let's try to treat this project as a small step for N900, which will refresh it a bit, not change it. If it succeeds, we can think further. But it allready is an enormous task and we should not aim for too much, otherwise we'll fail miserably...[/Suggestion] By the way, sorry for using "we", I don't really do much for the community, but I feel the spiritual bond with you people:P

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joerg_rw | # 183 | 2013-08-29, 16:03 | Report

Originally Posted by Kangal View Post

So nobody interested in my idea for a better Neo900 ??

Just have a small production run (~1,000 units) in China to produce basically a Plastic Motorola Droid 4. Use the Allwinner A10 SoC (open hardware, very cheap). Install Nemo on it.

Viola!
An N900 successor that's feasible and cheap.

Go ahead, by all means! Just this isn't about any such project. This is strictly about a board called GTA04 that by lucky coincidence looks amazingly similar to N900 hardware, and about the opportunities this offers to the maemo community.
/j

Last edited by joerg_rw; 2013-08-29 at 16:11.

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misiak | # 184 | 2013-08-29, 16:36 | Report

Originally Posted by joerg_rw View Post

Go ahead, by all means! Just this isn't about any such project. This is strictly about a board called GTA04 that by lucky coincidence looks amazingly similar to N900 hardware, and about the opportunities this offers to the maemo community.
/j

Maybe you should not call this project Neo900 and just call it "GTA04 mainboard modification to fit inside N900 cover" so people would not get missleaded by the name :P I think many in here were tricked somehow or, in a hype, overestimated our/your possibilites and resources :P

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wolke | # 185 | 2013-08-29, 16:45 | Report

Originally Posted by misiak View Post

Maybe you should not call this project Neo900 and just call it "GTA04 mainboard modification to fit inside N900 cover" so people would not get missleaded by the name :P I think many in here were tricked somehow or, in a hype, overestimated our/your possibilites and resources :P

strong disagreement. peoples fantasies just carried them away. neo900 is a perfectly good name for what this project is about, and everyone hoping it was about something else and whining about it is merely detracting from the single most realistic n900 revival project proposed to date.

EDIT: note that the principle thing that makes it realistic is that someone is DOING it, and with a reasonable expectation of community support.
there may have been proposals that, if actually attempted, would produce better devices for cheaper, but it is extremely hard to weigh such proposals, and very few get beyond the wouldnt-it-be-great-if-someone-ELSE-did-this phase.

Last edited by wolke; 2013-08-29 at 16:53.

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jackburton | # 186 | 2013-08-29, 16:57 | Report

Originally Posted by RiD View Post

Keep in mind the N900 virtual keyboard isn't exactly very user friendly, when compared to most other virtual keyboards out there. (key alignment playing a big role here). Also, that would make it impossible for you to search for a certain name in the contacts application, etc. Many apps do not offer "alternatives" (such as a search button) for the lack of a hardware keyboard, since it makes sense to use the keyboard on the N900.

I certainly don't disagree with these facts. My use case for searching for contacts was solved by Scout. I had no need for fancy widgets or even application menus. I used app search widget (I wish it had been a separate app) and Quick launch to get to the apps I used.

The portrait keyboard support was an issue on Fremantle for sure. My personal hope was that apps could move to Qt and we could have a new input method library there by extending the Maemo Qt port to use it as Qt is alive and well.

Of course big dreams and ideas aren't always practical, but should always be considered with a pragmatic approach if possible.

biketool | # 187 | 2013-08-29, 16:59 | Report

100% on reality Joerg.
If anyone remembers the old Zaurus SL5500s there was a distro called OpenZaurus, first it just modified and improved the Trolltech OS and it worked pretty well.
Then the project decided to go the OE direction and insisted on 100% FOSS, a worthy goal for sure, but usability went to hell some apps stopped working and the everyday users had to have a personal repo as the old just-works repos were deleted/upgraded to the low usability version.
Idealism is great but if you want a community of excited users and more than a few ultra dedicated devs you need an OS and apps that actually work for the everyday purpose of the gadget.

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jackburton | # 188 | 2013-08-29, 17:02 | Report

Originally Posted by misiak View Post

I'm sorry if you felt offended by my post, I did't mean to offend anyone. As you noticed, these were just my personal preferences and I wanted to emphasize that they are no more than that

I could as well only write that I support the project and nothing more, but I wanted to write briefly why I find this idea great.

No offense taken and no apologies needed. I know you were not attempting to offend. Language syntax is highly important for effective communication and even more so I feel in community efforts.

I agree this Idea is great, too and hope it succeeds. Put me down for 600EU and would also love to help where I can with ideas and ports.

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mr_pingu | # 189 | 2013-08-29, 17:04 | Report

Originally Posted by jackburton View Post

I certainly don't disagree with these facts. My use case for searching for contacts was solved by Scout. I had no need for fancy widgets or even application menus. I used app search widget (I wish it had been a separate app) and Quick launch to get to the apps I used.

There is called, app-search-app, only it's not in the user section thus not displayed in HAM
Sorry for OT

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misiak | # 190 | 2013-08-29, 17:13 | Report

Originally Posted by jackburton View Post

My use case for searching for contacts was solved by Scout. I had no need for fancy widgets or even application menus. I used app search widget (I wish it had been a separate app) and Quick launch to get to the apps I used.

The portrait keyboard support was an issue on Fremantle for sure. My personal hope was that apps could move to Qt and we could have a new input method library there by extending the Maemo Qt port to use it as Qt is alive and well.

Of course big dreams and ideas aren't always practical, but should always be considered with a pragmatic approach if possible.

These are your oppinions and, while mine are a bit different, I fully agree with last sentence of your post

The usage of board like GTA04 would happily give us many possibilites to extend it LATER and by other projects. Here are GTA04 hw specifications. It has quad band modem, FM receiver and trasmitter, GPS chip with connector for external antenna, camera support, 3d acceleration, wifi, bluetooth, usb, sensors, connector for external memory, AV jack out, stereo speakers support, 2 builtin buttons, 4 leds, torch/flash controller, rfid chip...

What I see it lacks in current design:
- support for both eMMC and microSD
- more hardware buttons and keyboard (but i think they can be connected somehow)
- infrared transmitter (maybe the n900's one can be used? if not, i would happily pay a few more € for a rx/tx ir component)
- edit:support for two cameras

What I see it has better than N900:
- better CPU
- more RAM
- more NAND
- working USB 2.0 OTG out-of-the-box
- more sensors
- more leds
- RFID
- edit:open manual with schematics (original post was: "quite open")

So I don't see any points where it is worse and cannot improve to reach complete feature set of N900, and I see many points where it is better

Correct me if I'm wrong and I skipped something importand, maybe I forgot about some important point and it really misses something...

Besides, having new motherboard, we could eliminate such a small annoyances as microSD magnet-based umnounting - why not remove that crap and allow user to decide when to unmount sd card (I guess this is not too much to be considered when designing?

). Do you, joerg_rw, collect any community-based notes and suggestions to be taken into consideration when planning?

Last edited by misiak; 2013-08-29 at 18:19.

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