Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Using Maemo on the other hand feels like you are holding a full computer in your hand. It is easy to keep track of multiple applications you have open on Maemo because you can tap a single button to view/switch between all open applications at any given time. Similar to Android, Maemo also has four work spaces on which you can place widgets, application launchers, and contacts for quick access. Like a full Linux distro however Maemo's desktops allow you to flow one into the next, continuously in a loop. Maemo also allows you to easily edit the number of workspaces available to you in case four is too many for your needs."
Posted Apr 4, 2010 17:52 UTC (Sun)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link] (17 responses)
nokia, rimm and even microsoft have no choice but to adopt android or become irrelevant in the iphone/ipad monoculture
Posted Apr 4, 2010 18:30 UTC (Sun)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (8 responses)
Posted Apr 4, 2010 19:05 UTC (Sun)
by jwb (guest, #15467)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Apr 4, 2010 19:22 UTC (Sun)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link]
Posted Apr 5, 2010 5:09 UTC (Mon)
by igorschwarzmann (guest, #64025)
[Link] (5 responses)
Currently brewing:
Etc etc etc. Chrome might be nice and all, but counting Mozilla's technology out at this point is premature. They're firing on all cylinders right now, there's a lot of stuff coming down the pipe. And it's not just playing catchup, either; a lot of the above Chrome doesn't have.
Posted Apr 5, 2010 9:24 UTC (Mon)
by vaib (guest, #48292)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Apr 5, 2010 10:32 UTC (Mon)
by kripkenstein (guest, #43281)
[Link] (2 responses)
Perhaps it depends on how fonts are set up on our respective systems? I'm on Ubuntu 9.10.
Posted Apr 5, 2010 12:46 UTC (Mon)
by cowsandmilk (guest, #55475)
[Link]
Posted Apr 5, 2010 17:14 UTC (Mon)
by linuxjacques (subscriber, #45768)
[Link]
I can't look at chrome because the text is all fuzzy.
I tried researching but found nothing.
Firefox looks fine.
Posted May 12, 2010 22:07 UTC (Wed)
by miketrim (guest, #54570)
[Link]
Posted Apr 4, 2010 19:29 UTC (Sun)
by debacle (subscriber, #7114)
[Link] (2 responses)
I still cannot buy an Android phone (in Germany) that is capable of video calls. As long as I cannot do this, I'll stay with my good old pre-Symbian mobile phone.
There is room for competition, it seems.
Posted Apr 5, 2010 16:52 UTC (Mon)
by bryan (guest, #64696)
[Link]
Grab the "mirror" application for a simple test of the front camera.
Posted Apr 8, 2010 1:57 UTC (Thu)
by jebba (guest, #4439)
[Link]
The front-facing camera has serious issues, but they are likely related to a broken driver, not the hardware itself (speculating here).
Posted Apr 5, 2010 21:23 UTC (Mon)
by fb (guest, #53265)
[Link] (1 responses)
My wife has a Nokia XPress 5800 (exact number could be wrong). I do disagree that
While they do fail on many items that Android doesn't, they do:
As a portable computer, I find my Android phone much superior to Nokia's. But as
Another point is that the iphone 3GS is still above most people's budget, and
Posted Apr 6, 2010 17:25 UTC (Tue)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link]
by year's end there will be over 100 android phones, so even your argument of superior hardware will soon be untenable
Posted Apr 6, 2010 6:35 UTC (Tue)
by Felix.Braun (guest, #3032)
[Link] (2 responses)
I hear that Android has all the buzz over there in the US. But don't you think that equating that with worldwide mindshare is a bit limited? My impression here in Europe is, that tech-savvy circles talk a lot about Maemo / Meego.
But then, this may only be because I'm so excited about having a real portable computer that happens to have a GSM modem.
How did you measure mindshare for your initial assertion anyway?
Posted Apr 6, 2010 17:23 UTC (Tue)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link] (1 responses)
people care about android
people don't care about maemo
go and talk to anyone doing mobile development
chances are 90% of their time is spent on the iphone/ipad
the other 10% is android or maybe rimm
0% on maemo
who is doing maemo development?
look, i agree that maemo is cool. what i am stating, which i think is obvious, is that no one cares about it
Posted Apr 8, 2010 9:51 UTC (Thu)
by spaetz (guest, #32870)
[Link]
>>"How did you measure mindshare for your initial assertion anyway?"
"hello". Here I am. I care about maemo. Case refuted :-)
>chances are 90% of their time is spent on the iphone/ipad the other 10% is android or maybe rim and 0% on maemo
One reason is perhaps that maemo us build upon upstream components whereever possible, while Android forks off lots of stuff? So Maemo benefits from work that has not been done exclusively for maemo, err meego?
When you talk about development do you talk about the system software or apps on top of it? Not sure.
> look, i agree that maemo is cool. what i am stating, which i think is obvious, is that no one cares about it
Not obvious at all, and no, I am not paid by Nokia or Intel :)
Sorry, now I fall into the bad habit of not backing up my claims. I'll rather stop now.
Posted Apr 4, 2010 22:01 UTC (Sun)
by mikov (guest, #33179)
[Link] (27 responses)
Yeah, sure, you can do an "apt-get install gcc" on the N900 and I f*ing
That is why I find reviews like this harmful - ordinary people might
Posted Apr 4, 2010 23:30 UTC (Sun)
by klbrun (subscriber, #45083)
[Link] (23 responses)
Still, Android apps mean Java, and Google, like Apple, still needs to learn how to write mobile phone applications. I suppose Meego is part of Nokia's strategy to go multi-platform. And the rest of the world is very different from the US mobile environment. So I think it is still a horse race.
Posted Apr 5, 2010 4:23 UTC (Mon)
by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
[Link] (13 responses)
Posted Apr 5, 2010 4:44 UTC (Mon)
by fest3er (guest, #60379)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Apr 5, 2010 4:55 UTC (Mon)
by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
[Link] (6 responses)
Can you come up with a technical reason? "I'm used to it" doesn't really qualify. IMO we could have distributed Debian in RPM form and only package makers would even have noticed, and them not so much. We've had machine translation between formats for more than a decade.
Posted Apr 5, 2010 9:31 UTC (Mon)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
Posted Apr 5, 2010 10:49 UTC (Mon)
by klbrun (subscriber, #45083)
[Link]
As for my remark about switching to RPM being a hit to the developer community, I was referring to the change itself, since that means new tool chains, etc., rather than the merits of the respective systems.
Posted Apr 8, 2010 16:03 UTC (Thu)
by pjm (guest, #2080)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Apr 8, 2010 16:23 UTC (Thu)
by pjm (guest, #2080)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Apr 8, 2010 17:06 UTC (Thu)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link] (1 responses)
The author took that down...
Posted Apr 13, 2010 1:36 UTC (Tue)
by pjm (guest, #2080)
[Link]
Posted Apr 5, 2010 5:43 UTC (Mon)
by Arker (guest, #14205)
[Link]
Posted Apr 5, 2010 14:40 UTC (Mon)
by MattPerry (guest, #46341)
[Link]
Posted Apr 5, 2010 15:10 UTC (Mon)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (1 responses)
So why has every new distro adopted Debian for several years now? Namely, Corel Linux / Xandros, Linspire, Knoppix, Ubuntu, Mepis, and so many others. The only distros that use RPM either invented it (RH/Fedora), started in the days when Debian was supposedly for hippies (SuSE), or are/were clones of the above (Mandriva, CentOS), as far as I can see. If one packaging format should die, it is RPM. When I last used it (RHL 8.0) it was a nightmare; no doubt it has improved, but deb hasn't been standing still either.
As someone who used to be closely associated with Debian, why would you advocate such a thing?
Posted Apr 6, 2010 21:42 UTC (Tue)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link]
This just isn't so... several new distributions have adopted their own package formats (look at, e.g., Arch). Totally pointless, if you ask me...
Besides, the Red Hat 8 RPM mess is a world away from today's yum. And most of the mess I saw was due to different policies in package naming/package splitting/numbering among distributions. If you stayed with a single distribution, there were little problems (and Debian-derived distributions have always had the advantage that there was only one standard source for packages, each RPM based distribution cooked their own).
Posted Apr 15, 2010 16:38 UTC (Thu)
by stevem (subscriber, #1512)
[Link]
Posted Apr 5, 2010 11:14 UTC (Mon)
by oak (guest, #2786)
[Link] (8 responses)
The yearly API changes are annoying, but with MeeGo the system is finally
Unlike Android, MeeGo shares most of the software with Linux Desktop so
General Linux community doesn't really benefit that much from Android work
[1] Current Qt improvements come from Nokia, but AFAIK they aren't
> 3) it is much simpler to create a "hello World" app for Android than it
Qt Creator and Madde seems to be aimed at fixing this:
The experimental Qt Creator setup has still quite few steps (although less
But it makes development and testing the SW easy (press a button and IDE
Posted Apr 6, 2010 17:29 UTC (Tue)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link] (7 responses)
but no one cares about this
indeed the more likely path is the opposite - android will move from phones to non-phone devices. android may indeed end up being the "linux on the desktop"
how many manufacturers are planning android-based tablets? many, with delivery before the end of the year
how many manufacturers are planning maemo-based tablets? none
Posted Apr 6, 2010 18:49 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Apr 6, 2010 19:02 UTC (Tue)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link] (5 responses)
the internet disagrees with you
Posted Apr 6, 2010 19:30 UTC (Tue)
by nix (subscriber, #2304)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Apr 6, 2010 22:24 UTC (Tue)
by b7j0c (guest, #27559)
[Link] (3 responses)
who cares about maemo? who other than nokia is making apps for it?
right now there are two choices in mobile: iphone and something else. if "something else" ends up being split across three or more choices, then "something else" is dead. if you want a future where you can even use a phone other than apple's, you better start picking winners in the "something else" crowd, because the way the market is going, rimm and nokia will be gone. show me ONE person who had an iphone 3g and then sold it so they could get a rimm or nokia phone. you can't. but there are millions who are going the other way. we are well on our way to an apple monoculture in mobile, the ipad is accelerating this.
android is the ONLY option in the "something else" camp that matters. forget analysing this as a technology decision, its about mindshare and who has a chance in being succesful
Posted Apr 6, 2010 22:40 UTC (Tue)
by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639)
[Link]
2009 marketshare summary:
Nov-09 - Feb-10 marketshare summary:
If anything the iphone marketshare has now saturated. Proof perhaps that only 25% of the population is actually "cool."
-jef
Posted Apr 7, 2010 6:21 UTC (Wed)
by Felix.Braun (guest, #3032)
[Link]
If your argument was right, Linux wouldn't exist. But even though Linux has single digit market share (as far as we know), we're doing fine. There is on-going development, new projects, a thriving community. You simply can't only think of a market as a limited resource that will be split among some players. That is way too simplistic. Different people have different preferences. There is lots of room for growth in the smart phone segment.
Granted: this growth may or may not bring enough developers to Maemo/Meego for it to be sustainable. But for the time being it doesn't seem that the platform is doomed being backed by two big players with a history of community participation.
Posted Apr 13, 2010 7:31 UTC (Tue)
by pjm (guest, #2080)
[Link]
Thus (in conjunction with what Felix.Braun has already replied), I do not think it necessary to avoid Meego or pick Android in order to have a future where you can use a Free-Software-based phone.
(Let alone where you can even use a phone other than Apple's; I suspect that b7j0c doesn't really expect Apple to be the only phone maker in the future if we don't back Android, despite his claims that no developers care about any other platform.)
Indeed, if one values free software, then I'd suggest backing Meego (or others) in preference to Android, because increasing success of Meego seems more likely to result in improvement to software we use on free desktops than does increasing success of Android (with its forks and limited feeding back upstream and its greater emphasis on proprietary software).
Posted Apr 5, 2010 4:22 UTC (Mon)
by BrucePerens (guest, #2510)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 5, 2010 13:32 UTC (Mon)
by oak (guest, #2786)
[Link]
I think that of the pre-installed applications, only phone application
I had enabled the Browser portrait mode, but I found it a bit annoying, I
[1] If they don't switch off orientation reporting when not visible, this
Posted Apr 5, 2010 7:45 UTC (Mon)
by fyodor (guest, #3481)
[Link]
Posted Apr 8, 2010 10:21 UTC (Thu)
by mitchskin (subscriber, #32405)
[Link]
Their initial strategy made a lot of sense to me, and it's one that the LWN crowd ought to like: they explicitly started out to build a developer community first, as a way of generating developer momentum for the smartphones that they'll eventually introduce. And it worked to some degree; when the N900 came out there was already an engaged community building software for maemo devices.
But then they decided to change to Qt; it may have been the right technical choice, but the existing app developers will have to shift direction to follow. And that means that all that momentum they spent years building takes a big hit right before they introduce their first device aimed at the wide world beyond developers. What will happen? I don't know, but I do really envy google maps navigation.
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
good for end users and that is not just hollow words. Look at how the presence of Chrome has improved
Firefox.
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
since they added jemalloc?
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
performance, borrowing code from Chrome and WebKit. Regardless of your browse choice, we can cheer
on the competition!
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
- Out of process plugins.
- A serious increase in JavaScript performance by combining their tracing-based approach with a JIT.
- GPU-accelerated compositing and animation of logical layers of the render tree. Aside from a serious performance increase for things like scrolling and video playback (as scaling and colorspace conversion of video layers can be done on the GPU), it makes scrolling synchronized to the vertical refresh and moves animation work off the main thread, so it can stay smooth while the main thread is crunching through application logic. It's using OpenGL right now.
- On Windows, Direct2D support for GPU-accelerated rasterization and subpixel-positioned text. Combined with the above, that means more or less fully GPU-accelerated rendering.
- WebGL support.
- They just wrote a new Ogg Theora decoder that significantly improves performance and behavior (e.g. seeking and no audio stutter when video lags due to insufficient performance).
- Better SVG and SMIL support.
- Various HTML 5 and CSS 3 stuff, of course.
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
chrome is fuzzy
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
Nokia is dead on the water.
-- offer "free" (no ads, offline) maps
-- they have consistently been upgrading the firmware, and each new version has
brought usability improvements. (notice that there is no Android 2.1 upgrade in
the works for my G1/ADP).
-- usability of a Nokia phone (as a phone) is //much// superior.
an actual phone, modern Nokia's do beat any Android phone I've handled so far.
Apple is not normally willing to fight the lower/middle-end market.
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
maemo is a cool but stillborn platform
>people care about android
>people don't care about maemo
>go and talk to anyone doing mobile development
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
and Maemo, clearly today there really is no comparison. Android phones are
real phones, while the N900 is in practice just a technical demo. Comparing
them is ridiculous. I mean, no support for portrait mode? What???
love that. But come on, I really don't think that most other users will
appreciate it as much.
believe them. They would have a very unrealistic expectation of the N900,
as a phone compared to an Android, not to mention iPhone.
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
That's not an argument, it's only contradiction.Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
.deb vs .rpm
.deb vs .rpm
.deb vs .rpm
.deb vs .rpm
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
RPM vs deb?
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Red Hat packaging (a hit to the developer community)
going to be buildable from from scratch also outside Nokia. I guess this
issue was the reason why Mer was based on Ubuntu.
that desktop will benefit more from stuff done for MeeGo and MeeGo from
desktop and server & supercomputer Linux stuff (containers etc).
(like from other stuff Google does) because it doesn't share things with
it, even C-library is different and apps run on top of Java VM. Maemo
work has already benefited Desktop quite a bit during the years (several
minor Gtk[1] features + many bugfixes, Clutter support, X work, kernel
features like UBIFS, telepathy stuff, work on tools like xrestop & Xephyr
etc).
Maemo/MeeGo specific.
is for Maemo
http://qt.nokia.com/products/developer-tools
http://wiki.maemo.org/MADDE
than Sbox):
http://wiki.maemo.org/MADDE/QtCreator_integration_for_linux
runs the SW on the device!). Packaging may still be an issue if one isn't
just doing a simple application:
http://wiki.maemo.org/MADDE/Packaging
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
that desktop will benefit more from stuff done for MeeGo"
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
and they are *huge* in the mobile phone market.
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
plan to, you know, *use* it. This should be obvious.
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2010/02/23/ap...
http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/...
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
what platform for a free future
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
it works automatically when the application sets suitable window hint.
I.e. the platform supports it fine and many 3rd party apps use it[1].
supported portrait mode initially though. In PR1.1 browser and image
viewer had support for portrait mode, but at least former didn't enable it
by default.
don't really want the display to turn when I happen to rotate the device a
bit, I'd like orientation something I select specifically. The reason is
that most real www-pages work properly only in landscape mode, only mobile
versions of www-sites are narrow enough to be readable/usable in portrait
mode.
may affect the battery use-time a bit (wakeups can be noticed e.g. with
strace, if it's not visible in top).
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review
Hoogland: Android vs Maemo - Hands on Review