Re: [maemo-users] Next revision of 770 hardware - any idea when it will be available?

[John B. Holmblad]

Title: Best Regards,

Devesh, your point is well taken. But what puzzles me is that with Nokia's formidable capabilities with respect to handset and related consumer products manufacturing, why is there not by now a broader family of 770 products that all take advantage the ongoing growing investment in software. The PDA market has been characterized by a very high rate of innovation/improvement in hardware and it is common for a new revision of a manufacturer's hardware baseline to occur at 18 month intervals or less. I realize that the 770 at least right now seems to be targeted to a very specific market niche (I have yet to see someone pull one out at a meeting or conference here in the U.S.) so it may be that the slow uptake of this product has caused Nokia to hold back on implementing an aggressive hardware upgrade roadmap. One factor I think that holds back this product is price. As with many consumer goods there is a price elasticity of demand for this kind of product and right now the price is well above that which is necessary for product sales to take off to the point where you actually see lots of people caring one of these around. If the price gets down to $150 or less then you may see people having several of these things laying around the house for convenient www browsing, remote (RDP/VNC) access into the home network, serving as remote controllers for  Microsoft Windows and other media center systems, as well as control of home environmental/security/irrigation/lighting systems. In that sense the product could be repositioned as the "Home Network Intranet Tablet" or something like that.  At the right price they could even take market share from some of the purpose specific providers on touch-screen products for high end home entertainment systems (e.g. Crestron and others) most of whom by now are using Linux any in their embedded OS environments. Here by the way is the url to some recent commentary from Ari Virtanen, vice president of convergence products at Nokia  on what they are considering for future hardware revisions:        http://news.com.com/2100-1044_3-6086747.html?part=rss If Ari or his team are listening on this thread then I say to him/them, don't wait for WIMAX, but get on with the next revision of hw soon, as in 6 months or less to address the deficiencies in the current hardware baseline! By adding a expresscard slot (assuming there is room) and a USB interface the product would be able to accommodate almost any external device supporting one or the other interface including a future WIMAX client card that should be available in the market in the next 6-12 months. Also, how about a wall/desk mount cradle for the device so it can be charged when it is not in use?    Best Regards,   John Holmblad   Televerage International GSEC Gold, GCWN Gold, GGSC-0100, NSA-IAM, NSA-IEM   (H) 703 620 0672 (M) 703 407 2278 (F)  703 620 5388 (O) 410 849 2376 (has voicemail to email)   primary email address:  [EMAIL PROTECTED] backup email address:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]   www page for texting:   www.vtext.com/users/jholmblad text email address:        [EMAIL PROTECTED] Devesh Kothari wrote: ext John B. Holmblad wrote: All, has Nokia given any indication of if/when the next revision of the 770 hardware will become available? If the 770 is going to be a stable ongoing member of the Nokia product portfolio, as opposed to a one shot offering, then it would be reasonable if not prudent for Nokia to provide a hardware roadmap so that developers have an incentive to continue developing software for the platform. It is nokia policy not to give out details about future products to general public. Though such information (or some of it) is available to nokia partners who have all the confidentiality agreements in place. As for "one shot offering" , all i can say is nokia is definitely here in this space for a long haul. If it was a "one shot" thingie, why would we have taken all the trouble with creating a open development environment, working so closely/listening/contributing with community, established maemo :) I noticed in the Maemo software roadmap on the www page whose url is http://maemo.org/platform/docs/roadmap.html a reference to x86 device emulation/virtualization but I wonder whether the performance of the current hardware would be anywhere near sufficient to allow anything useful to be accomplished in a vm environment. The reference in the roadmap about virtualization is purely as a development platform, so that the developers can transform their PC into a n770 device (together with attached peripherals like usb WLAN, or USB BT dongles) in a VM and cut down development and debugging time (hopefully). No specific work has been done on that front :( yet Interestingly, and as some on this list may be aware, Microsoft has recently released an ARM device emulator that runs on Windows OS's and is entirely decoupled from the Microsoft Visual Studio development environment. For anyone interested in trying out this emulator, here is the url at the Microsoft www site to it: www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=C62D54A5-183A-4A1E-A7E2-CC500ED1F19A&displaylang=en It includes images for Windows Mobile 5.0. have tested it (the emulator + the WM 5.0 images) and it works fine on Windows XP SP2 host as long as the host system processor speed and ram are sufficient. It runs fast enough that I can stream audio from a live radio www site through IE + Media Player on the emulated device over to the host OS and play it out on the speakers on the host OS without any noticeable stuttering. The payload measured by Media Player in this case is ~22kbs. This is very interesting. I will check this out. Thanks I have also installed and tested a SyncML client from Funambol on the emulator. Funambol, for those who are not aware of the company, markets an opensource technology based on SyncML that allows PIM servers such as Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, etc to be sync with mobile devices that implement the SyncML protocol stack. Here is the url to the Funambol www site: www.funambol.com On the subject of syncml I have two related questions: 1. Does the 770 software support/implement syncml? Currently 770 does not have a syncml implementation, but I hope someone would port one :) Best Regards Devesh 2. Has anyone successfully tested the 770 with the Funambol software? -- Best Regards, John Holmblad Televerage International GSEC Gold, GCWN Gold, GGSC-0100, NSA-IAM, NSA-IEM (H) 703 620 0672 (M) 703 407 2278 (F) 703 620 5388 (O) 410 849 2376 (has voicemail to email) primary email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] backup email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] www page for texting: www.vtext.com/users/jholmblad text email address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ maemo-users mailing list maemo-users@maemo.org https://maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-users

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