mobile (4)
N nine hundred
After several months analyzing the last smartphone of Nokia N900 I decided to buy it. I thought of several options to buy it: amazon, newegg, nokia online store, vodafone or even ebay. But finally I chose the nokia online store in Spain. The price was higher but safer than other options, as far as warranty is concerned. Therefore they included an external charger and a bluetooth hands free set.
The shipment was really fast, I ordered it on Dec 22nd and I received it on Dec 23rd. But I'm aware of the delays some people suffered in November, when the first shipments were announced.
This is a post just to introduce my first impressions with the phone, but I will write more in the future.
I prefer not to call it phone, just because it is a real small computer. Phone calls are only one of the features. You can understand it as a computer with a 3G modem.
Another remarkable feature as a computer is the multitask, but this is "easy" knowing that the operating system it runs is Maemo, a debian based distro. The landscape screen mode and the full keyboard turn it in a true computer.
The hardware is amazing. Everything is in such a "small" device. The software is not so polished but it is getting better. Nokia is working on a important update fixing lot of bugs and unexpected behaviors.
Another important point is the built-in browser, based on mozilla code. It supports flash quite well and also runs fluently. I can say the Nokia did a great job. I also have tried Fennec RC1, the mobile version of firefox, but it runs pretty slow. I'm afraid we'll have to wait for a more usable version.
Anyway I don't care very much for the software as I expect a hard work from Maemo community. The forums are very active and you can find even some alternatives to Maemo, although in a testing stage. I mean, the powerful hardware and its openness are more important than the current software running on it. If it works as the computer world, the software will grow step by step, features and stability.
2010-01-04 21:20 by pichulines (0 comments)
eBook attacks
Here we go... with another specialized device, eBooks. This time to read books. Well it's not new, I know, but now it is getting more and more popular. And I must admit that the eInk kit is like to read a piece of paper (most eBooks are based on this kit).
Amazon launched Kindle time ago, but expensive and close, I mean, they want you only to buy books in their store. That time Sony decided to try PRS-505, a similar device but open and cheaper, just because they wanted to be in but not deep in. That is, they allowed you to connect the device to a PC through USB and load it with tons of PDFs.
But people like to have the power, so the Sony experience has more appeal than the Amazon one. That's why Kindle has no the expected success.
Sony has realized that there is an important market, so they have increased the product line with a wide range of new eBooks. The bad news are that they also have included a set of services and rules oriented to close the device, towards Amazon intentions. They will offer an online book store, they will arrange agrements with libraries (not for free to user, I guess) and furthermore they will use a new "open" format called ePub, instead of well known and extended PDF, html or txt formats.
2009-08-26 20:09 by pichulines (0 comments)
N900: Nokia on the heavens door
Finally, after OpenMoko+Neo Freerunner, a company like Nokia has prepare a complete device, between a cell phone and a handheld computer. I think it should be available long time ago. (I'm not going to take iPhone into account because is a close alternative.)
Its name is N900, and has everything you can expect from such a device. Powerrful processor, up to 64Gb (32Gb inside plus 32Gb in a MicroSD slot), GPS, Cellular modem, Bluetooth, Wifi, camera 5M with flash, screen 3,5" with big resolution at 800x480 and so on, but the most important is that Nokia has decided to open his mind and adopt a debian based linux distribution called Maemo to operate it. Yes, you are hearing right, they forget Symbian.
Maemo is an open source project, but not entirely. Some parts, like components drivers and control apps are closed. This means that, despite of being open, Maemo just runs in Nokia phones. It's hard to deal with this, but probable they want to establish a new mobile standard, software SDK hardware architecture, like OpenMoko+Neo Freerunner tandem. Working in private till a successfully acceptance and releasing it then.
Anyway we will have to wait to know more. By the way, N900 will be out at the end of 2009, and the price will be around $750. Altough this information are just rumors.
2009-08-22 08:49 by pichulines (1 comments)
OpenMoko turns CloseMoko
Well, not exactly. In brief I'll tell about the OpenMoko project and the Neo Freerunner smartphone. The first is an attempt of developing a software stack for smartphones based on linux, since openmoko started some forks or distros have appeared based on it. The second one is a mobile device (nowadays called smartphone) with an open hardware architecture.
Both of them are open projects which means you can know almost everything about them :-) While openmoko is a kit of software tools to develop applications, neo freerunner (the second generation, after neo 1973) is the hardware implementation of reference.
Neo could be understand it as the well known x86 architecture in the mobile world and openmoko is just a sample operating system for it.
Currently, bad news have been published for these two great projects. Although openmoko continues, neo architecture won't. This means that they will continue manufacturing neo phones but they won't improve the architecture specifications, and consequently there won't be new models.
2009-08-06 21:07 by pichulines (0 comments)


