Is Freemantle dead before it's out of the gates?

[timsamoff]

After reading this thread, I can only summarize what has already been said (sort of). This is really a developer discussion and could never be a user discussion. Sure, there will be a few users who are interested in all of this, but mostly, users are typically happy with their current device for quite some time -- and never come to maemo.org.

Being brought up on major mobile company contracts, most regular users expect to be with a specific device for at least two years -- and most users keep their devices longer. This changes when a new trend arises (RAZR, Blackberry Pearl, iPhone, etc.), but usually changes only occur when contracts are up.

But, that's hardware... When concerning software, it's a little different, but not much. I still know many PC users who are still running Win98 and many Mac users who still use OSX Tiger. They don't care either. (And, I dare you to show me a person who's really -- successfully and at an acceptable speed -- running the latest version of OSX on their old beige G3!)

So, thinking that all of this is a big deal for end-users (the larger market of end-users, not just us) is wrong.

As for developers... Well, from what I've seen, the Maemo Community are all a pretty smart bunch of people. And, being that you will still be able to use your beloved programming languages, I don't forsee any major issues in upgrading releases for new toolkits.

Tim

[jperez2009]

Right you are timsamoff.

Although I've only been a small part of this community and can't contribute much more than advice on getting certain programs to work properly via setting changes and workarounds, I still love to see all the various things happening with Mer and Fremantle/Harmattan. Although Diablo is no longer supported, I know the Maemo Team and Nokia is helping us as much as they can by lending a hand to the folks working on Mer, which will be a great OS.

Many of us end-users/inbetweeners, including myself, don't usually ever know what's going on behind the scenes, but the community is there to relay what is going on if the information is available.

We're waiting Nokia and Maemo Team and I know you will deliver.

Jesse~

[cayle]

I agree with timsamoff about it being primarily a developer problem.

As a developer, I had the similar questions about Fremantle/Harmattan. I'm just now at the point of starting development, and was trying to decide just which platform to target. It seems that at this point I have 3 options: non-Clutter, GTK for Mer; Clutter/GTK for Fremantle, or QT in anticipation of Harmattan. (Right now I am leaning towards sticking with non-Clutter GTK to target primarily (and maybe exclusively) Mer, because nothing that I've seen discussed so far seems compelling enough to purchase the upcoming Fremantle hardware). I'm waiting to make a final decision until more about the Fremantle devices is known.

While I am appreciative of Nokia's new attempts to keep the developer community informed, I somewhat think that they should have waited to even mention Harmattan until the actual Freemantle devices were out. Because after all, aren't we realistically looking at a 2-3 year time frame before a Harmattan device is even produced?

Cayle

[Paxicide]

Originally Posted by qgil

Let's see what they say when the announcements are made.

Discussing this paragraph above when there is not even a Maemo 5 device announced is an exercise of pure Summer entertainment. (which is fine for the Summer, don't get me wrong)

I think the last day of "Summer" in my part of the world is September 7th...so is this a hint or is my imagination merely starved for an announcement and thus delusional?

More about Summer...

[tissot]

Originally Posted by Paxicide

I think the last day of "Summer" in my part of the world is September 7th...so is this a hint or is my imagination merely starved for an announcement and thus delusional?

More about Summer...

It still fits nicely to the Nokia World in September 2-3 that has been already rumoured for some time to be rather big event this year for Nokia and announcements for many new devices including Rover.

[theflew]

@cayle

I think Harmattan is planned for next year, not 2 - 3 years from now. I would imagine it will be an update for Freemantle devices a year after they're out. I couldn't imagine Harmattan not running on the Freemantle devices given they will be able to run Qt 4.5 when they come out via community support.

Personally the application I'm planning on writing will be Qt based given that it has the longest know path.

[lma]

Originally Posted by theflew

I couldn't imagine Harmattan not running on the Freemantle devices given they will be able to run Qt 4.5 when they come out via community support.

You can't draw any conclusions from that. Diablo devices are able to run Qt 4.5 right now and we know they won't even run Fremantle, let alone Harmattan.

[GeneralAntilles]

Originally Posted by lma

You can't draw any conclusions from that. Diablo devices are able to run Qt 4.5 right now and we know they won't even run Fremantle, let alone Harmattan.

Sure we can, there's a reason Nokia decided against backporting Diablo, and it has nothing to do with Qt: hardware. Based on that we can extrapolate most of the necessary information about that to determine Harmattan's likelihood of running on Fremantle hardware.

So, based on its likely timeframe (1-1.5 years away), and the likely hardware landscape at that time (OMAP4 not likely to be available), and what we know about current and future hardware (OMAP4 does not offer additional hardware features over OMAP3 that would greatly increase the difficulty of any backport), we come to the conclusion that running Harmattan on Fremantle devices should offer little to no difficulty.

[theflew]

Originally Posted by lma

You can't draw any conclusions from that. Diablo devices are able to run Qt 4.5 right now and we know they won't even run Fremantle, let alone Harmattan.

I agree you can't draw conclusions, but I think the N8XX is a different issue. I imagine if Nokia really wanted to, Fremantle could have been supported on the N8XX (assuming accelerated graphics drivers were released). But from a business sense it didn't make sense from a cost perspective (development, testing, support, maintenance). Yes it would have made people here happy, but would do little harm otherwise. Instead they could invest most of their time and effort on the "next" device that has more breathing room hardware wise.

From an end user standpoint Nokia could upgrade from Freemantle to Harmattan and the "casual" user might not even know.

The fact Nokia has been able to keep the N9XX hardware secret this long probably means they wont release a device that has a 1 year software lifespan. Also that's not saying their won't be a N9XX+ that doesn't come with Harmattan installed with new features.

[lma]

Originally Posted by GeneralAntilles

Sure we can, there's a reason Nokia decided against backporting Diablo, and it has nothing to do with Qt: hardware. Based on that
we can extrapolate most of the necessary information about that to determine Harmattan's likelihood of running on Fremantle hardware.

I don't believe we can extrapolate anything at the moment. Very little information about Harmattan is public, and none at all about the hardware it will run on.

So, based on its likely timeframe (1-1.5 years away), and the likely hardware landscape at that time (OMAP4 not likely to be available)

These are pure speculation and/or wishful thinking currently. It could just as easily be 2+ years away like Fremantle, with one or more hardware iterations in between like the N810 and N810WE, and it could be based on a non-TI or even non-ARM CPU.

we come to the conclusion that running Harmattan on Fremantle devices should offer little to no difficulty.

Even if there are no hardware or software surprises and that turns out to be true, it could just as easily be another case of "we can't devote resources to maintaining RX-[57]1, use Mer".

I'm not saying that Harmattan won't run on Fremantle-generation devices, just that right now we can't know - and I suspect even Nokia themselves don't.