TamsS60 – the Symbian Blog

So far, the MeeGo project produced little except for hot air and a few images for the Nokia N900.

Various news sources now claim that the first MeeGo device will hit the road in 2011. One example is the tweet below:

As of this writing, not much is known about which device this will be. However, sources inside carriers are busily waiting for “the N9″ ever since the Smartphone Show in London – stay tuned for further info as I get it.

It looks like the Symbian World has followed my advice and is busily hitting Qt 4.7 in order to find bugs.

On Maemo’s end, the situation is less critical – which is why a group of developers have just released an early Host USB patch for the N900:

First of all, thanks to joerg_rw for kicking off the hostmode project, and sarahn for the patches, as well as all the devs involved in the project.
The patches are the same ones released in May/June, with a proper method to reproduce them.

This is a prealpha release, although it works on my device, it has NOT been tested on any other devices (kernel is safe though).
Also, DON’T play with i2cset without knowing what to do, the commands in the UI are safe, but don’t feel free to experiment with them.

As of this writing, the patch is far from complete – hit the URL below to learn more:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=62787

Even though the keyboard of the Nokia N900 is not impressive, the machines openness and decently strong hardware make it the ideal candidate for all kinds of gung-ho ports.

The latest victim OS is Android. While most official Android devices are still waiting for their upgrades, the N900 already has its port.

The video below shows the OS in action:

Even though Nokia’s Maemo platform was always intended to be an “open platform”, other vendors were not too interested in it. The platform has now been renamed to MeeGo, but…well, repainting a cow does not change its contents.

However, Shanzai manufacturers are always on the look-out for opportunities to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Strange operating systems are one possible way – enter the AIGO WalkShow:

ChiniTech reports the following:

The Chinese manufacturer Aigo does not seem to slow its pace of innovation. Here is today a new MID, called Walkshow NX7001. This new model has the particularity to look like a smartphone and runs Maemo Linux. This device has a 3G and WiFi module to access to internet, and also a GPS and Bluetooth module. It will fit perfectly in a pocket thanks its compact size, 146*75*18mm.

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As of now, nobody knows when this 500$ unit will hit the road in the USA and Europe – stay tuned…

Nokia’s Qt ports are best classified as work in progress – Symbian-based Qt apps can’t be released, and don’t even get me started on Maemo-based ones.

The fast “patching sequence” should thus be unsurprising. The latest patch for Maemo brings us up to 4.6.2+; and mainly bothers with kinetic scrolling:

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Up until now, kinetic scrolling was limited to 20 fps. This is a good default, since 20 fps look smooth, don’t drain too much battery and leave some CPU for background processes/threads (isn’t it nice to have multi-tasking?). However, for demo purposes, you might want to have 60 fps for that really, really smooth look, so we introduced the QAbstractKineticScroller::scrollsPerSecond property. Unfortunately, our camera cannot grab 60 fps, so no youtube video today

The second interesting feature is QAbstractKineticScroller::axisLockThreshold. Imagine that a user scrolls downwards in a QScrollArea. Now, unless he’s an android, he won’t manage to scroll down in a perfect line, usually it’s something like 100 pixels downwards and 5 pixels to the left. The axisLockThreshold property allows to lock the scrolling to the nearest X or Y axis. In our example, the 5 pixels to the left are ignored, and the view just moves 100 pixels down.

Finally, QAbstractKineticScroller::OvershootPolicy allows to set the overshooting behavior when scrolling. The default is to just do overshooting when a view is able to scroll in a particular direction. In addition to the default behavior, overshooting can now be completely disabled, or always forced on

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Further information via the URL below:
http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2010/04/01/pr-12-sdk-for-maemo-released-with-qt-46/

Don’t ask me why, but it looks like Nokia has some issues promoting its next “super box”. I don’t really have any other explanation for the video below, which shows a Nokia N900 barely managing to “run” Mac OS X via an emulator:

Its creator Toni Nikkanen describes it as follows:

As you can see from the heavily edited video, it took almost 2 hours to reach the “About my Mac…” window. Keep your eye on the time display as that will give you an impression of just how uselessly slow it is. The emulator I used was the latest CVS snapshot of PearPC, which to my eye appears to be pretty good quality code, built without problems in Scratchbox. I experimented with the various frontends and finally settled on the SDL one, since support for the mouse cursor seemed to work best there. As in my previous emulation attempts, I used x11vnc to remotely control the mouse from a laptop sitting nearby. And once again the screen size of N900 was slightly too little to run something that expects a desktop-size display.

Further information can be had at the URL below:
http://www.tuug.fi/~toni/serendipity/index.php?/archives/13-Mac-OS-X-10.3-running-on-the-N900!.html