johnel | # 211 | 2010-07-30, 22:20 | Report

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

imperiallight | # 212 | 2010-07-30, 22:24 | Report

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

chaoscreater | # 213 | 2010-07-30, 22:28 | Report

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.

danramos | # 214 | 2010-07-30, 22:35 | Report

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

attila77 | # 215 | 2010-07-30, 22:35 | Report

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

imperiallight | # 216 | 2010-07-30, 22:36 | Report

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.

danramos | # 217 | 2010-07-30, 22:39 | Report

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.

johnel | # 218 | 2010-07-30, 22:52 | Report

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.

sjgadsby | # 219 | 2010-07-30, 22:58 | Report

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.

attila77 | # 220 | 2010-07-30, 23:24 | Report

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.