Three amazing answers!

@jolouis
That analysis regarding the batteries is certainly encouraging! It'll be interesting to see how it's pulled off.

@GA
Thanks for the tip on mxr.maemo.org. It certainly is useful to be able to look at the code!

@sjgadsby
This information was tremendously helpful! It was one of my major gripes regarding the mail program. I now primarily use it over my web-mail client as it is certainly more finger-friendly, light weight, and well integrated (contacts et al).

Honestly, I love the integration between between the built-in apps (which is what the strategy that the pre seems to be capitalizing on). With a couple of intelligent decisions, some fixes, and of course additions (calendar? where are you?), this could be quite a good suite of apps.

@all
To add to the 'realistic' wishes for the N900. I wish there was a larger community rally on the built-in applications. It seems that there are far to few updates to the built-ins which is a shame, because they seem to provide a good starting point and integrate well with one another. Improvements could include:
1) better indexing in the media player (long song lists take much longer). SQLITE?
2) better organising with the media player (forming playlists is painful)
3) an integrated calendar. I know there are a few options (I use GPE), but something that integrates well would be lovely (does this exist?)
4) inertial scrolling on many apps (mail/media/contact). And for the love of god, please put a selection button to the right of each list object. There's nothing worse than 'inertial scrolling' and accidentally selecting an item.
5) A call log on RTCOMM and some other useful features
6) More than one incoming channel for RTCOMM (useful for 'call-waiting')
*(if you're interested, see the open-source SIP app twinkle for some very useful features).
7) A better file manager (something with tagging and app association) as an alternative to the desktop metaphor.

I'm sure I can think of others, but this would be a nice start.


YARR!
}:^)~
app>capt'n>corrupt

Here's another wish:

I recall a presentation done by intel (I think) regarding hand-offs between WAN and WiFi depending on AP proximity. This would be a tremendous feature of the upcoming N900 as 3G/4G/whatever is expensive in some areas -- *cough* Canada *wheeze*. Of course, I would imagine seamless hand-offs would provide some serious challenges with persistent TCP connections, and even software that uses UDP as you'll likely get a new IP with the hand-off.

On a side note:

I'm seriously considering Rogers' expensive $37 for 1GB service. I'm using my NIT increasingly for work and it's a legitimate business expense, but as I don't have a phone, nor am I looking to get a plan, at the moment it's too expensive a proposition to tether. When the N900 comes along as it's own 3G device, I'll likely make the purchase.

Quick question: how much bandwidth would you say you consume from your NIT in a month? I'm planning in the event that N900 hand-offs are an issue.


YARR!
}:^)~
{:^)~

Well, Fremantle is using Tracker.

Fremantle has something called the Multimedia Application Framework, which, although it doesn't say anything about the Media Player UI, should significantly lower the overhead involved in writing and maintaining media playback applications on the platform, as well as making a user's media experience more cohesive from player to player (global playlists, etc.).

All scrolling areas should be finger draggable.

Anyway, I recommend you read over the Fremantle roadmap and pay attention to announcements as most of your existing, past and (I expect) future questions are answered there.

Maemo 5 will include an iCalendar (RFC 2445) calendar framework.

Unfortunately, neither the Wiki, Ars article nor the 50+ page pdf draft outlines clearly (at least I didn't notice) how the media will be discovered by the framework itself. I'm really really REALLY hoping that the people at Nokia came up with something less braindead than the metalayer-crawler approach.

Just had this thought, so I'm throwing it into this thread:


What if one of the next form factors for the IT were similar to the N800 in that it was all screen and small bezel. A few buttons for volume and power on the surrounding chrome and then speakers pointing up when held landscape. Resistive, multi-touch, and AMOLED would keep the profile pretty low, and allow for fancier power-management work on that end.

The included accessory would be a slip leather case that had a built in soft-touch keyboard and kickstand. The 'kicker' being that one could wrap the keyboard completly around the device and navigate the device as if the keyboard on the back were a part of the UI - something like a second screen + mouse.

From an engineering side that might be hard as all get out to program, but it would be kinda neat and definitely different.

Afaik, tracker has a central spot, is open and slighty less braindead than metalayer-crawler.

That question is answered in the top of the post you're quoting, which I'll quote here for you.

My gripe was that almost every of the builtin apps had a fatal flaw for my use-case scenario. I'm just hoping I'll not be jinxed with fremantle in the same way as to ending up almost *none* of the built-ins (except for the occasinal microb and rss reader sessions).

Even this wouldn't be such a problem if there was a 'civil' way of saying no-thanks, I'll stick with claws, pidgin, mplayer, tear, emelfm et al. I hope Fremantle will be more *user* friendly in this regard without (unintentionally, I'm certain) penalizing people who opt for third party apps.

Thanks, but it doesn't really answer just *HOW* it will be integrated. It says rather innoculously

Now, what I still want to now is if this can trawl (in the mafw context) is done like in metalayer-crawler, or do we have some more intelligence and/or user friendlyness behind it ?