Sunday, November 21, 2010

The Nokia N900 Blog

The Nokia N900 Blog


MeeGo Conference 2010 summary – part 1

Posted: 21 Nov 2010 04:14 AM PST

I’m back from MeeGo Conference 2010 in Dublin, found out few things so I can share with you. Let’s start with position of Nokia N900 in MeeGo world.

As I’ve already mentioned Nokia N900 won’t move from Maemo 5 to MeeGo, official statement is that N900 is base for development for ARM-based devices, but it’s not meant to be available with MeeGo for end users. There is possibility that this modification will be made by community, not internally by Nokia. Fair enough for me if such thing is considered anyway.

Me at MeeGo Conference 2010 MeeGo on N900 - presentation MeeGo on N900 - presentation MeeGo Conference 2010 - power consumption session

Apart from all of commotion around new devices and including MeeGo in many different appliances I’ve noticed that N900 takes some attention. I’ve found Comarch’s stand with presentation of tools and applications for many platforms, including N900 – TADEK (Test Automation in a Distributed Environment) that is rather not so interesting for end user, and Drafter (kind of shared, virtual whiteboard for live conferencing) shown on two N900 devices connected to one WiFi network. I liked this live drawing and sharing, it looks promising and I see many uses, not only in business for conferencing from anywhere, but also for regular, everyday, normal people to share thoughts with friends with something more than words.

I’ve also visited some sessions related to mobile Linux in general, not only MeeGo itself. One of the sessions touched our common problem with battery life and energy saving but in very technical way. If to believe in what was said (and if I got all of the things correctly, I’m regular developer, not some Linux kernel expert ;) ) power saving may be done on few levels in Linux and it should initially be done by developers, low level optimization in system kernel and few additional tricks in applications. Since I think that kernel level tweaks are mostly well used I think that everything that remains lies in hands of application developers.

While most of the conference events were focused on what’s about to come with MeeGo, the N900 was still present almost everywhere and still gathers quite a lot of interest. New possibilities with Qt and libraries developed for MeeGo touchscreen devices will surely extend Nokia N900 applications variety. I really count on it!

MJ