MWC Announcement : Moblin and Maemo merge to create MeeGo

BARCELONA, Spain – Nokia might not have any new devices to show off at MWC but they have announced a new partnership which is bound to push the boundaries of the mobile operating system scenario. Yes , you heard it right , Nokia’s Internet Tablet OS Maemo and Intel’s Moblin OS have been merged to give rise to a new os termed as MeeGo. According to Ari Jakksi , VP Nokia “We will put all our force behind making MeeGo THE operating system” and “Nokia will ship tons of MeeGo devices, Intel, too. And others will use MeeGo in their devices. It is open, free, powerful and compatible.”

1. MeeGo is a hardware architecture independent Operating System. It will run across x86 and ARM based devices. This makes it compatible with netbooks , tablets , MIDs and smartphones.
2. Maemo 6 will be a form of MeeGo , in fact it might just be a branding choice on part of Nokia to term it as Maemo 6 as they will in essence be the same operating system.
3. MeeGo is meant to give you a unified experience across devices.
4. Applications will play an important role right from the beginning. Nokia branded devices will receive their applications of choice through the Nokia Ovi Store. Applications for MeeGo running on other devices will be provided by the IntelAppUp software center.
5. MeeGo essentially merges Moblin’s linux based core with the Qt UI toolkit which forms an integral part of Maemo. The result is that applications created using the Qt framework will be cross compatible across devices.
6. The first devices based on MeeGo can be expected by the end of the year.
7. The MeeGo project is being hosted by the Linux Foundation.

5 Themes to Rule Them All ! :P

Our dear friend CJ over at ZOMGitsCJ.com has come up with a list of 5 themes which really show off the capability of the OLED screen on the N86. However in my personal opinion , i find that these particular themes look great on any smartphone !

Take a gander at some of the screen shots here.

Head on over to ZOMGitsCj to download this and several more exciting themes !

Symbian V/s Maemo: who will be the most favoured child

There has been a lot of talk about Symbian being abandoned by Nokia in favour of Maemo for their high end devices by the year 2012. Ben Smith mentions this in his post. That’s where it first appeared and has been picked up by everyone.

Nokia, in a bid to salvage the insider news spill stated that it is not shifting away from S60. It’s funny that this is so surprising. With Nokia having spun Symbian off into a foundation and made it independent of itself, was in a way the beginning. Then came the N97, which was everything one wanted from a Nokia and almost an iPhone killer, but firmware problems were abound, Nokia had begun to ship ‘half’ finished devices and attempted to fix them with firmware updates. This made it abundantly clear that Symbian was not going to shape their high end devices anymore, at least not the touch devices. there were too many problems with it’s implementation on touch devices.

Personally speaking, the S60 is a robust OS on a non touch phone, it’s still the one to beat here. But with the competitors (Samsung, LG, Apple, etc) having deciphered this secret, they have simply worked around the ‘problem’.

The touch factor bought in a lot of challenges, which still hasn’t been completely solved. Nokia was beginning to lose it’s game and for a brief moment it was lost. It needed something to bounce back.

Nokia being Nokia, did some research and worked around the problem and brought in Maemo, an OS which it had developed for it’s Internet Tablets. The OS was fresh, and could be developed as a full fledged OS for future devices. Being a Linux based OS, development would not be that complex. To add to that, they made Maemo completely open, this meant that one would be able to get apps and various things in huge quantities and fast.

So is Symbian no longer Nokia’s favourite child? I don’t think so, Symbian which has been developed so much by Nokia (predominantly) will still remain a part of it’s software solution, it’s focus might change and instead of doing duty on only middle to high end end devices, it might be loaded onto devices which are more tuned towards the mass market. Thus fulfilling a void that no manufacturer is interested in fulfilling or is not currently looking at. One look at Nokia’s portfolio today, and you can see that it is slowly creating that gap within it’s portfolio and when the new Symbian OS is out, one could very well see it on devices in that segment. At the same time, I don’t think Symbian will be completely ruled from their mid end devices category.

With this new approach of giving something different and new to their high end phone customers, Nokia is attempting to reinvigorate the top end of their devices and bring it back into the limelight for the right reasons. At the time of the launch of the N95, the software was one of the ‘wow’ factors of the device, with the N900, Nokia is attempting to recapture that emotion again. But with the market becoming so diverse and big also the addition of the ‘app’ store, now a cornerstone of having an OS, the dynamics of this market has evolved. The external variables have now become internal variables. An OS without applications supported by the handset manufacturers now is a dead investment. Nokia has all the cards and the coming few years will see how the ‘Big Blue’ plays out it’s cards and reshapes the industry. It is clearly a gamble, and Nokia has a lot to gain and lose.

Nokia Digital Design Bootcamp – Delhi 2009

As we had informed you earlier , Nokia India had kindly invited us to attend the Nokia Digital Design Bootcamp at Oberoi , New-Delhi.

The evening centered around interaction with Nokia’s design team responsible for the amazing iconography , homescreens and even upcoming UI technologies. We are thankful to Nokia for giving us the opportunity to peek into the mind of these talented designers and get a first hand look at the designers perspective of a device.

The one on one interaction with the very people who design the devices that millions use in an experience to be remembered. Read more

N97 with V20.0.019 firmware: First Impressions

I’m sure you know that the N97 firmware was launched a few days back. I have a N97 and I used to find the N97 to be woefully inadequate in terms of handling things without giving me a warning on low memory or RAM.

V12 was pretty bad and did not really help the top of the line Nokia to remain up there. A beautifully designed product and very practical, there were a lot of things that went against this phone, so much so that many of us were prompted to believe that the N97 was launched before time.

Recently Nokia outed the much touted and talked about update for the N97.  The new firmware was supposed to bring forth many changes to the N97 and bring it on par with the N97mini in terms of software. Kinetic scrolling and what not was promised… but did it deliver? Well the reactions have been mixed with some people having a harrowing time with the device afterwards. I was skeptical of what was beings said and decided to take the plunge. The first thing I did was to fire up FOTA, but there was nothing there. So then it was onto Nokia PC Suite and the Nokia Software Updater, but that did not work properly and the same was the case with Ovi Suite. Both of the suites did not allow the phone software updater application to update itself, which is kind of weird. I tried to get it to work on 3 different internet connections but faced the same error of the internet connection being lost and this would always happen at the last 1%.

Finally this is what I did to get the software updater and Nokia PC Suite to update themselves and pass on the update love to the N97 too and it worked. So if you are facing similar problems, I strongly advise you follow this process and you’ll have the updated software on your phone too.

So here are my first impressions of a long overdue firmware update. Kinetic scrolling is a life saviour and coupled with a better touch sensitive screen means that it is no longer a pain to use the touchscreen. In fact it is the other way round. I found the N97 to be more touch friendly in this firmware than in any other firmwares. After a long time I felt as if I was holding a touchscreen phone and this in many ways according to me is the first proper touchscreen phone Nokia has made.

That’s not all, the music player application has undergone a very pleasant and welcome change. The listing of songs and albums is much better and so is the search, at least visually it seems to be great! Each song is now represented with a big icon instead of a small one in the previous versions and there are changes all around in almost every nook and cranny of this OS.  It seems that they have really pulled out on any stops to provide a user experience that should have been there in the first place.

Long press of keys on the QWERTY keypad has been implemented, this means that one does not have to hit the ‘blue arrow’ key to type anything printed in blue on the keys, you just have to long press that key and voila!

The calculator application seems to have undergone a change and is more user friendly than before. There seems to be more RAM free on the N97 now. I surely can feel that things are working more smoothly and quickly. The phone memory management has improved. Ovi store has received a new client and an icon to boot. These were all the changes I have noticed in the new firmware of the N97.

Just forgot to add that there is now a ‘Phone Setup’ on the N97 which allows you setup your phone and all the important things in it. There is also a new widget, Vlingo which has been added to the list of widgets. Vlingo basically is a software that allows you to ‘talk’ to your phone and tell it to do things which you would otherwise do with your fingers. This application needs an active data connection which is a bit of a downer in India.

I would suggest you all to give the new firmware a shot. It is really good. Finally it feels like the N97 has got a proper update and some attention from Nokia. Nokia on its part, has revived the resistive v/s capacitive debate with great touch sensitivity implemented on the ‘97 through the firmware update. I haven’t tried the Maps yet, so will not comment on it yet, but I hear it has received an update too.

If there some additions or something that is different on the N97 after the firmware, please let us know. Leave your comments below!

Next Page »