was sick of the "blag" thing

Maemo family.

So! I got an N900 last week! It is awesome and stuff, and so I held off writing about it until I thought I was more or less familiar with the inner workings of Maemo and stuff, even though I played a lot with my N800, lots of things changed for Maemo 5. I’ll list my experiences with it, coming from an Symbian (formerly S60 lol) background, because making a full blown review would be redundant this far into the game.

Hardware:

• My first phone ever with a QWERTY keyboard, and it’s great. Complaints: no ~ key, so I have to go Fn+Sym to pick it on the touchscreen. Meanwhile keys are “wasted” on € and £ (I know I know, only one layout for all English speaking countries, still.)
• The off center spacebar doesn’t bother me at all, as even on my laptop, the right side of the spacebar key seems to be the most worn out one, it just felt natural to me.
• My last Nokia slider was an original N95, so it’s great to see that the slider here actually feels solid. If I were to point one fault with it, is that when it’s closed, there’s a slight amount of play on the bottom right corner of the phone.
• The lock switch is small lol :( coming from the 5800, with its awesomely placed and shaped lock switch, that’s kind of bad. Thankfully there’s two other ways to unlock the screen, onscreen and sliding the phone open.

Built in software:

Speaking of unlocking your phone, this is something I really didn’t like, with all the possibilities of an unlocking screen (tap two different places in the screen to unlock, draw a pattern, etc) they had to go with the iPhone-ish swipe thing?

Lame.

Unlocking the screen, you get to the homescreen.

My current desktop.

First thing: I didn’t grow used to the Panorama Desktop thingy, I keep just one pane active. Mostly because it remembers the last pane you were at when you unlock the phone, I guess I just like to know what I’ll see first thing when grabbing the phone. Oh well.

Also, you’ll see I removed the now playing widget. Mostly because it doesn’t open the full media player when you tap play, giving an illusion of it being a separate player, but when you close the full media player in the Dashboard, the music stops. Kinda confusing. The music player also gets jumpy on high CPU load (really high), when I’m downloading something using transmission for example, the music skips.

Last complaint about the music player: those really shouldn't be behind the options menu. :P

On the other hand, everything else is awesome :D The browser is the awesomeness, Email + Nokia Messaging works brilliantly for my Gmail account (getting stuff even before my desktop email application), the image editing options in the gallery are great. The whole concept of the Conversations app is fantastically done. I have nothing but praise really.

Except maybe Ovi Maps. It’s not bad per se, but it’s hard when I have high expectations from using the Symbian version for so long.

Oh, and someone make a in-device search app, kthx.

3rd party applications and modification:

Ah, now here’s where Maemo really shines. Ever since I saw that OpenOffice running on an N900 picture, I knew this was the platform to look for. But for now, let me start from the simpler ones:

• From my screenshot, I have Custom Operator Name Widget. Sometimes I have it set to display lyrics, or a witty quote, or whatnot, love being able to edit it. (Right now I have it to display “T-Mobile” instead of the regular alphatag “T – Mobile” (notice the spaces) lol)
• cpumem-applet displaying current CPU and memory load, great to see if some new app you downloaded is hogging all the CPU, and it’s visible mostly everywhere.
• Remember all that noise I made about the iSearch/Q Search widget for S60? :P Someone finally got it right, and made a simple and editable search widget, TouchSearch.

Going opening the menu I have this

I stuck the Ovi store shortcut in more, promoted App. Manager to the top level and added a Games folder (I love Games folders). I wanted to hide the Camera icon (because there’s two other ways of launching it lol) but couldn’t get myself to break the harmony further. Here’s my Games folder icon (copied myself from the .svg, that’s why the ugly borders) and a talk.maemo.org post with an instructions .pdf on how to modify hildon.menu Anyway, let’s list what I got installed:

• In the games folder: Angry Birds, Bounce, DrNokNes, Gweled (Bejeweled clone), MasterGear, VGB and VGBA (I love emulators) (where’s my Genesis emulator developer people where~)
• Enhancements to the device (aka stuff that should be here in the first place): fMMS (lol), FM Radio, GPSJinni (think the GPS Data application from Symbian that actually displays latitude and longitude) and Petrovich (send stuff)
• Then real other applications, Mauku, XChat, Transmission, among others. It’s amazing, that’s the full XChat, the full Transmission etc, just like on desktop computers. (only with interface modifications to work better on a phone, of course) Downloading a series with Transmission and watching it on mplayer without leaving your phone is awesome.

Community:

You might have noticed I linked to maemo.org a lot, and really, it is a huge part of the allure of this platform. You can have conversations with application developers on talk.maemo.org, read community sourced guides on the wiki, submit platform bugs on bugzilla and chat with people on #maemo at freenode.

I’ve already submitted bug reports on the forum, and one to bugzilla (go vote for it!), but my favorite thing happened on the irc channel. I went there and just asked if there was a possibility of running this (SSH tunnel manager) on the N900. A couple moments later someone links me to this

gSTM running using Easy Debian.

Quite amazing huh?

Wrap-up:

Closing this fast because I’m going up to 1000 words. The N900 and the Maemo platform are great, they’re incomplete for now (MMS, portrait mode, etc), but really, just looking at desktop software being ported with ease and the community behind it, I can tell this is the right platform to bet on.

P.S. This went past my radar, the V40 firmware for the 5800 is hackable again! Just did it to mine yesterday, so it can go to retirement in peace. Or something.

P.P.S. It took me forever to write this, and I’m sure I forgot something I wanted to talk about, so as always, I’ll be updating this post if I remember more stuff.

Update Feb/15:

And a very important one, too. So, Nokia and Intel are merging Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo. I still don’t know what to think of this announcement, besides that it’s a shame they’ll throw the Maemo branding away, after maemo.nokia.com is so well done and laser shooting penguins. Plus there’s the whole ARM vs X86 architecture, will Intel be cool with devoting itself to an ARM platform? And finally, Maemo is based on Debian, Moblin on Fedora, this will probably get in the way somehow. (packages, maybe?)

So yeah, this announcement might make a lot of sense, as two powerhouses making a single OS (hosted and approved by the Linux Foundation nonetheless!) instead of two underfunded side projects, but still, it changed my view from “best platform evur!!1″ to “wait and see” for Maemo.

Welp watch me coming here a couple months from now saying “zomg MeeGo is the best thing ever” or something, I’ll be enjoying my N900 meanwhile.

P.S for the update: Nokia also showed Symbian^3 concepts at MWC, looks kinda cool too, you guys~