On Sun, 2010-01-10 at 15:06 -0500, David Montminy wrote: > Does anyone has any experience with the Nokia Meamo platform? > > I just broke my phone (Nokia N95) and the Nokia n900 seems very > interesting, but I'm not sure how good the Linux-based OS is. > > David Montminy >
I have an n810 and love it. I use it for downloading and listening to podcasts as well light web browsing and of course, ssh'ing into other boxes from the couch. Maemo as a development platform also pretty good, they use debian as a base OS plus Hildon for the desktop. This makes porting GTK applications very easy; I've done it myself with a python app and something I cobbled together in C and it wasn't very hard. Also, I think it's very easy to get Qt on Maemo 5 (the OS for the n900) so they aren't making developers lives very complicated. If you'd like to try-out the OS, you could always download the Maemo 5 SDK and play around in it. It won't be exactly like what it is on the device (it's much cooler on the actual hardware) but you'll get an idea of how apps look and feel under Maemo. See this site for details: http://maemo.org/development/ An important thing to note is that the software on these devices is not 100% free. There are some things like the media player/server in Maemo 4 that are closed source but often this isn't a problem because there are a plethora of apps to choose from in the Maemo Extras repository where you can often find a free-software equivalent. This isn't to say that Nokia isn't trying to make their OS as free as possible, iirc it was even one of their goals for Maemo 5 (for instance, the Maemo 5 media server, MAFW, is free software). The hardware is pretty good, I've dropped my n810 a few times and it hasn't incurred any damage. The only problem I have is that the audio-out connector's load-detection is flaky so it doesn't always switch to the external speakers when I unplug my headphones. Also, the original battery is no longer usable but I replaced it with a cheap unbranded battery from eBay. I think if you get the n900 you won't be disappointed, the people I know who have them love it. nick P.S. If you do end up getting one, could you please share where you got it? I can only find it at NCIX for $900 which is way out of my price range :( _______________________________________________ mlug mailing list [email protected] https://listes.koumbit.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mlug-listserv.mlug.ca
