LWN: Comments on "Nokia's N9 handset launched"

Nokia's N9 handset launched

pemav1 — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 16:22:59 +0000

only 92,000 are being made

Source?

I'm quite surprised N900 sold 100K.

During its five first weeks.

Animations are VITAL

pboddie — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 13:54:44 +0000

People don't need pretty animations. But they want to see them

Animations can give important visual clues, but the best ones do not involve "bling" which is what I and the other commenter were referring to. I admit that some special effects can be quite nice - KDE 3's icon-bar tooltips are nicer than the overused yellow tooltips that used to appear (and which can still be enabled by changing the settings) - but for many users, busy user interfaces and things rushing around all over the screen can add to their confusion.

Some of these observations can be "generational": young people whose experiences have been formed by playing with GUI-based technology from infancy are perhaps a lot better equipped to deal with busy user interfaces because they're probably accustomed to filtering things out, but observe older people and you will see how confusing even a small dose of "bling" can be.

It's switchable...

khim — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 06:54:22 +0000

Well, WebKit embedded in recent versions of Qt obviously uses Qt. Chrome for Linux uses Cairo (and may be GTK but AFAIK they try to minimize GTK use). I don't know what webOS is using.

Animations are VITAL

khim — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 06:52:19 +0000

This just shows that "you don't exist" :-)

Joel said it best: Don't, for a minute, think that you can get away with asking anybody to imagine how cool this would be. Don't think that they're looking at the functionality. They're not. They want to see pretty pixels.

People don't need pretty animations. But they want to see them - and that means companies who sell phones (Nokia in particular) absolutely, positively, need them. Yes, they are useless. Yes, they waste power and screen space. But without them you can sell your phones (except to few geeks who are not affected by "pretty pixels") and if you don't sell phones your company will go bankrupt.

It took me a long time to understand this. Epiphany was achieved when I've "solved" problem of my niece's slow computer. I found out that ICQ sometimes use all four cores to do what knows what and offered to replace it with Miranda IM (very lightweight messenger). The first question was: "how to download skins or at least make it less ugly". The second one was: "how to install better smiles". Only after that questions about what the thing can actually do and how to do that followed.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

zmower — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:36:30 +0000

Yes. As I am sure you understand the concern is whether end of that list marks the end of the Nokia's Linux based phone line. Right now I haven't seen a single credible announcement from Nokia giving hope it isn't.

It is definitely their last linux phone. And they're trying hard to make it fail. For example only 92,000 are being made and its not available in some big markets (UK, Germany, Canada...). My guess is when they announce the price it will be sufficiently high to put most people off. So then they can say "See? There is no market for meego based phones; they didn't even sell as well as the N900. Our shiny new Windows phone is the future."

I'm quite surprised N900 sold 100K. With a launch price of £500 which fell to about £400 after a year, that adds up to quite a pile of cash. Not bad for a hobbyist device.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

mvaar — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 15:46:59 +0000

what does webkit use for rendering ? In other words, what is the rendering API, one level above the graphical primitives such as openGL or X or whatever ?

Nokia's N9 handset launched

halla — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:48:18 +0000

There is Qt on the devices by default, though.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

ebassi — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 14:29:10 +0000

no, they don't. webos uses webkit and html5+javascript for the whole UX.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

jospoortvliet — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:17:10 +0000

The only area where deb vs rpm will matter for meego vs harmattan is that you can't directly run a deb on the rpm based one and the other way around. Anywhere else, you won't notice it - the SDK and the Open Build Service take care of that easy enough...

Nokia's N9 handset launched

petur — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 07:52:29 +0000

No, intel hasn't just now gotten into the embedded world, they have been in it for a while, with Moblin. It is used in far more in-car entertainment systems than you think.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

ras — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 02:18:27 +0000

@tajyrink: The .deb/.rpm is mostly a problem that SDK will take care of.

Yes. Alien demonstrates it isn't a big problem.

@tajyrink: If you read the comments above, you can see that Qt Quick is the preferred application development method for both MeeGo and Harmattan,

Yes, but there were also comments like this:

@ajross: Basically, while MeeGo and Harmattan share roots, UI code can't be meaningfully written to run across the platforms.

@tajyrink: MeeGo reference UX:s, if that's what you meant with MeeGo UX

There are several reference MeeGo UX's? I know I am sounding like a complete pleb here, possibly because I am. But in my defence if I google "MeeGo reference UX" your comment (ie the one I am responding to) is the 5'th hit. (I was hoping the search would reveal a like of MeeGo reference UX's, with a genealogy.)

I am guessing there are two MeeGo UX's, the Intel Tablet one and the Nokia phone one. One of those MeeGo UX's also run on Maemo on the N9, thus somehow leading to the entire N9 edifice, from window manager to kernel, being labelled MeeGo. It's dammed confusing. So now we apparently have at least 3 meanings for the work MeeGo: a distribution managed by the FSF, at least one window manager which runs on the N9, and right now the label the popular press is attaching to what they term the N9's "OS".

As for UX, I a dreading the day when like "Gnome UX" and "KDE UX" become common. Although now I google it, it may be that day has already arrived without me noticing until now.

@tajyrink: Qt future will include: Nokia N9, N950, N900

Yes. As I am sure you understand the concern is whether end of that list marks the end of the Nokia's Linux based phone line. Right now I haven't seen a single credible announcement from Nokia giving hope it isn't.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

debacle — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:53:18 +0000

I was under the impression that Meego uses RPM because an Intel manager and ex S.u.S.E. employee just loved RPM, not DEB. And Qt, not GTK. But maybe that's just gossip.

Too bad, that the very nice and already functional Maemo was dropped for the Meego work-in-progress.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

miahfost — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 21:10:53 +0000

If the deb vs. rpm problem is so easy to fix, Nokia would have taken care of it long ago. It isn't easy to fix and it was one of the reasons that the N9 was so delayed.

Debian based systems have been developed for ARM and other architectures for about a decade now. Intel has just gotten into the "embedded" space and chose rpm because they are a major contributor to the Linux Foundation and rpm is a Linux Foundation "standard." But if you're building an embedded platform you need the collective expertise of embedded developers and many of those people are clustered around either proprietary systems or Linaro/Debian/Ubuntu, which all use .debs.

So the package format matters, not just because of the meta data.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

mvaar — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:34:34 +0000

doesn't webOS use QT for rendering the UI ?

Nokia's N9 handset launched

tajyrink — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 10:37:42 +0000

Yes, I admit, and it is definitely annoying when he talks about "completely moving to" Windows Phone and the "winning" ecosystem around it. But it's also that western medias tend to focus on smartphones reporting only and forget about the hundreds of millions of Series 40 phones on the market and any discussion related to those at the same press events. Technology press is simply interested in smartphones mostly, and the mass media don't understand there is a difference when they source their ideas from the technology press.

From the talks it looks like there would be no commitment directly to MeeGo, but there would be a strong commitment to Qt.

So far in each of these launch events it has been officially said that a) N9 is a product to be on sale for a long time b) Qt will be brought to the "next billion" phone consumers ie. non-highend phones. At least the SVP of developer and marketplace Marco Argenti and SEA area smart devices head Andrej Sonkin have said that Qt is in core of their future strategy. Even Mary McDowell and Elop himself talk about the same "next billion strategy", though of course not mentioning technologies directly.

And I hope it will be so simply because that would be great for Qt's future in general - which in turn is good for MeeGo as well and FLOSS in the long term to have a long term supporter. And I hope some other company would now look what Nokia made possible with Qt and make the next winning Qt/Linux smartphone ;)

Nokia's N9 handset launched

spaetz — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 08:39:46 +0000

> No, they do not want to be 100% Windows Mobile shop - they've just announced also that Qt will be in the next billion devices

You have to admit that you get a different idea when you listen to the announcements of the Nokia CEO, so we might be forgiven for remaining sceptical :-). Top Management committment to QT/Meego looks different.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

tajyrink — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 06:04:17 +0000

The .deb/.rpm is mostly a problem that SDK will take care of.

If you read the comments above, you can see that Qt Quick is the preferred application development method for both MeeGo and Harmattan, and both MeeGo 1.2 and Harmattan have Qt 4.7. MeeGo reference UX:s like Tablet UX are made with the same Qt / Qt Quick as well - do not confuse the Harmattan platform UX (with the legacy meego touch framework that was obsoleted by Qt Quick) with MeeGo reference UX:s, if that's what you meant with MeeGo UX.

The applications in MeeGo can be targeted against handheld, IVI, tablet, or usually all of them at the same time if you don't have any specific eg. handheld specific needs like phone stuff. So those normal MeeGo applications work similarly in Harmattan as well.

Qt Quick Components will help application developers of both MeeGo and Harmattan in the future by providing a ready toolkit that was missing (not counting MTF).

Despite Windows Phone, Qt future will include: Nokia N9, N950, N900, Symbian^3 (10 new devices to be announced in year), this "next billion" (more low-end phones), all MeeGo devices from other vendors than Nokia, and desktop Qt like even Ubuntu now that they will include Qt in the base install. Of course the Qt promise would have worked better without Nokia's Windows Phone selection. Now we need the other MeeGo manufacturers as well, because that "next billion" Qt devices from Nokia, if it happens, will take time.

MeeGo is also coming to N950/N9 via community

tajyrink — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 05:19:15 +0000

Yes, so more like this is about competing with SHR's E17 applications (on top of FSO for phone functionality) with Qt/QML on top of oFono or FSO (the latter is not yet packaged in MeeGo).

Warning: This is not MeeGo

tajyrink — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 05:17:46 +0000

The applications also for Harmattan are done with Qt Quick and Qt Quick components: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Harmattan:D...

So again from applications (not platform) point of view, it's normal Qt and normal MeeGo.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

ras — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 03:16:17 +0000

After reading all the posts here my head is spinning. I gather:

- The base distribution is Maemo, ie .deb based.

- The libraries application developers are expected to use are Qt 4.7, OpenGL ES 1.1+2.0 and some other ancillary bits and pieces. Is this what is referred to as the MeeGo UI 1.2? It looks like it should isolate you completely from the underlying OS (and the POSIX layer), and so it the basis of portability between Maemo, MeeGo, Symbian and perhaps S40. Is this layer identical on both MeeGo (ie MeeGo the .rpm based distribution) and Maemo?

- There are two different toolkit for developing in this environment. One is Intel MeeGo UX, and the other is Nokia's Qt Quick Components. I was originally thinking a toolkit meant toolchain + IDE, but it looks like it means yet another layer over the above libraries; something akin to an X window manager API. I gather this isn't portable between MeeGo (the distribution) and Maemo(?)

So in summary the only relationship this has to MeeGo is this middle layer. But that "relationship" is only that this middle layer was ported to MeeGo during the now aborted Maemo-->MeeGo transition. At least I presume that transition has been aborted. Has it?

And then we have the "we are dropping all this in favour of Windows Phone" line from the Nokia's marketing department. Are they really doing that? In other words, is this just a case of "get something out there that we can sell until Windows Phone" comes along stop gap, or is this a product line that actually has a future.

And in the midst of all this, they are trying to entice people into buying into the platform? Really?

Maybe it's that I am thick. Maybe the big picture is clearly painted out there somewhere, and I am just not seeing it. If so, it would be real helpful is someone could spell it out here.

MeeGo is also coming to N950/N9 via community

pabs — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 02:35:14 +0000

SHR is for more than just the OpenMoko devices, in fact N900 is among the devices they support. I'd wager they will have N950/N9 support soon after they get their hands on some.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

pboddie — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 22:49:03 +0000

Agreed on the animations and the high-end GPU obsessions. From observation of the various smartphones and even tablets my fellow public transport users seem unable to tear themselves away from, such intensively graphical things are hardly needed, unless Facebook adopts the tired "cover flow" paradigm for everything.

Warning: This is not MeeGo

Jaffa — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:45:15 +0000

With respect Arjan, the Linux Foundation own the "MeeGo" trademark and, according to them, although Harmattan may not be MeeGo Compliant or run on the packages from meego.com OBS, it is something with MeeGo in its name.

Semantics aside, and far more importantly, MeeGo needs two things - both of which can be provided by the N9 and N950:

A mass-market, consumer-friendly device perceived to be running MeeGo, for future OEMs and manufacturers to see that a compelling UX can be built on (something like) MeeGo.
Apps.

The Compliance Specification (for MeeGo 1.1 at least) specifies that "compliant applications must conform to the MeeGo API", and since the "MeeGo API" is very similar to the "Harmattan API", this means a relatively simple porting exercise (although a lot of the Harmattan GUI is MTF rather than QML, QML is still the preferred way to write Harmattan apps, as it is on MeeGo).

There are a couple of issues, of course: packaging, which can be dealt with trivially with metadata in the SDK and OBS; and (more importantly) the toolkit with which you can build consistent QML user interfaces. Basically, there are two for QML: Intel's MeeGo UX Components (developed behind closed doors, thrown over the wall and now open) and Nokia's Qt Quick Components for Symbian and Harmattan (developed in the open, then closed for Harmattan's "big reveal" and now, presumably, about to be re-opened).

At the MeeGo Conference last month the development community was basically told "tough" and that there'd be no common UI toolkit. FLOSS developers with N950s and N9s will want to target both Harmattan and MeeGo if it's easy. It's in everyone's interest to make it so.

So, I expect a further QML component libraries - which abstract the two competing ones - to be developed by Harmattan developers wanting to target MeeGo. Ideally, it would be unnecessary, but it's in MeeGo's interest to foster this: I'll put money on there being more Harmattan apps within a month of people getting N950s than there are currently MeeGo apps.

Warning: This is not MeeGo

ajross — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:57:03 +0000

That's not really correct. Harmattan is based on the "MeeGo Touch Framework", which is a very thick layer on top of Qt. MeeGo proper still includes this layer, but it's deprecated and expected to disappear eventually. The UI framework for MeeGo's future is just QML ("Qt Quick"), with a library of common components.

Basically, while MeeGo and Harmattan share roots, UI code can't be meaningfully written to run across the platforms.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

pabs — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:30:32 +0000

Considering that the GPU is a PowerVR device, I'd say there is at least one driver that is a non-free binary blob and will not be merged upstream. I hear that the blob is redistributable though. I hope that the FSF's PowerVR driver project bears fruit:

http://libreplanet.org/wiki/Group:PowerVR_drivers

The kernel appears to be 2.6.32:

http://harmattan-dev.nokia.com/pool/harmattan-beta/free/k...

Nokia's N9 handset launched

tajyrink — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 16:05:13 +0000

Well the logical deduction would be that Series 40 (S40) would get Qt. Of course one communication problem there also is that many people confuse Series 40 OS with Symbian OS.

But you're right, companies say all kinds of stuff and change direction all the time. Interesting, nevertheless, that it is now being touted out loud and on intention (to remind that Qt has a future also at Nokia, not just via new MeeGo companies, desktop stuff like KDE and so on).

Developers are interested (or should be interested, but of course prefer their own fancy toys) in where money opportunities lie. That theoretical billion consumers should surely be interesting, even though you wouldn't do your fancy 3D shader bling bling animations but actually just something that people need.

MeeGo is also coming to N950/N9 via community

tajyrink — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:52:43 +0000

Well as pointed out in the Quim's blog post, there is that that the MeeGo Community Edition (http://wiki.meego.com/N900) will now expand also to N950 and N9 - so it will be possible to run pure MeeGo there as well and that, unlike Harmattan, is pure FLOSS and community based.

That could be interesting for a plenty of LWN readers (those that don't think of a phone as an appliance they have no deeper interest in), of course pending on how much work there is on the driver side. But given that N950 and N9 are OMAP3, there is a good chance that it's off to relatively quick start regarding basic hw functionality. Then it's simply about innovating UX on the open side, a bit like SHR (http://shr-project.org/) has done with E17 for the Neo FreeRunner, but this time focusing on Qt/QML and more awesomeness with a fast/modern hardware (FreeRunner wasn't that even at launch time in 2008).

And for both Harmattan and MeeGo, the choice of application development platform is Qt, so it makes sense for also meego.com to advertise N950 as a MeeGo development device, even if using it with Harmattan. _Most_ developers that the mass media is talking about are application developers, not distribution/system developers like many LWN readers.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

blitzkrieg3 — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:37:54 +0000

Does anyone know if the device drivers have been or will be merged upstream? LWN is the only place I trust to find this information.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

pboddie — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:31:33 +0000

Nokia spokespeople say the "darndest" things, and that blog post is pretty vague stuff. Somehow Qt will get onto the next billion Nokia devices, but not via MeeGo or Symbian (which will be dropped) or Windows Phone (for which Microsoft have probably forbidden stuff like Qt).

I don't doubt that Qt could run on some low-end phone platform - it runs on a bunch of embedded platforms already, some of which have probably been on phones - but that won't offer developers the fancy high-end opportunities that, say, Android is offering. Not that this (or more likely, the message) won't change, however: Nokia changes its messages more often than any executive chosen at random changes their tie.

Warning: This is not MeeGo

gowen — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:26:51 +0000

Given that the official MeeGo glossary describe Harmattan as future Maemo 6 (now MeeGo handheld) release by Nokia, but goes on to say

It is MeeGo compatible (that is, has a MeeGo API) but is not to be confused with MeeGo 1.0 Handheld as it is NOT based on MeeGo Core.

suggests to me that the nomenclature has gotten out of hand.

Warning: This is not MeeGo

daniels — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:23:32 +0000

I guess you need to remove the N950 from the MeeGo Community Device Program page then, or at least make it clear that the only way you'd be developing on MeeGo is if you got the N950 running Harmattan, then ported MeeGo Handset to run on it, and removed Harmattan.

You should also probably stop referring to it as MeeGo-Harmattan in meego.com's glossary.

And have a word with the most recent poster on Planet MeeGo (which is displayed on the front page of meego.com), who has just posted an article stating that the N9 runs 'MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan' (sic).

Given these, I'd say that the confusion is fairly understandable ...

-Daniel, who works on neither

Warning: This is not MeeGo

blitzkrieg3 — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:22:20 +0000

arjan is hardly a "random" LWN commenter.

But aside from that, Wikipedia seems to be in agreement:

> Even though MeeGo was initiated as collaboration between Nokia and Intel, the collaboration was formed when Nokia was already developing the next incarnation of its Maemo Linux distribution. As a result, the Maemo 6 base operating system will be kept intact while the Handset UX will be shared, with the name changed to MeeGo/Harmattan

Translation: We're still using Maemo under the hood with a bolted on MeeGo API and UX.

Personally I'm curious how easy it would be to get MeeGo on the device, if the Handset UX truly can be used for both.

Warning: This is not MeeGo

tajyrink — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:12:11 +0000

To be fair, http://www.developer.nokia.com/Devices/MeeGo/ is mostly about Qt, Qt and Qt. Still the "MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan" way of wording is not optimal, even though for application developers MeeGo API == Qt API (http://apidocs.meego.com/1.2/) and the same Qt SDK can be used to develop for both MeeGo and Harmattan. The platforms themselves are still as different as eg. Fedora and Mint are.

For application developers, given automatic enough packaging work by the Nokia/MeeGo SDK:s (both using Qt Creator), Harmattan is however quite close to MeeGo 1.2 because it's the same Qt in both. But for LWN readers they are completely different beasts as distributions go. Also if not talking about application developers but platform developers, Harmattan is of course very different and they offer a separate Scratchbox-based (from Maemo times) platform SDK: http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Wiki/Harmattan%3...

Warning: This is not MeeGo

paulj — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:08:42 +0000

Oh, and the Meego article says that N9 uses Meego:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeeGo

(Who you going to believe, some random LWN commenter or Wikipedia? :) )

Warning: This is not MeeGo

paulj — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:05:50 +0000

Better update wikipedia, it seems to think Harmattan == Maemo still:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo#Naming

Warning: This is not MeeGo

arjan — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:48:30 +0000

Despite Nokia's best efforts to confuse things, the N9 phone DOES NOT RUN MEEGO.

It runs the Harmattan OS, which isn't related to the MeeGo project at all, and is not compatible with MeeGo even.

It's very unfortunate that these mixed messages are happening, but at least at LWN we can be accurate about it.

-- Arjan who works on MeeGo

Nokia's N9 handset launched

tajyrink — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:15:56 +0000

No, they do not want to be 100% Windows Mobile shop - they've just announced also that Qt will be in the next billion devices, ie. the whatever mass-market ("non-smartphone") phones there will be:

http://www.developer.nokia.com/Community/Blogs/blog/nokia...

So Qt is for those, Symbian^3 devices and the N9 flagship product. However I guess the future flagship products and other higher end / enterprise products are planned to be based on Windows Phone.

Nokia's N9 handset launched

bronson — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:06:53 +0000

My guess is that people wonder if Nokia is in this one for the long haul. Maemo/Moblin devs have been burned a bunch of times and now Nokia is making irrational indications that they want to be a 100% Windows Mobile shop.

Would you want to spend months of your life writing for a platform that's likely to change incompatibly or get axed at any time?

Nokia's N9 handset launched

kragil — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:40:01 +0000

That thing looks quite good. Although the UI is proprietary (contary what a few people here used to say about Nokias Meego UI).

So why exactly can't Nokia build a "ecosytem" around this nice device (and future devices)? Most Qt-Apps from Symbian are an easy port. Most OpenGL games are ported quite easily. Is marketing really so important that you have to have 100K+ apps although most of them are useless junk?

Nokia's N9 handset launched

jospoortvliet — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:36:26 +0000

Completely different as it has the same processor, memory and screen resolution and probably the same camera, gps, usb and all other internal hardware and of course the same software but it's slightly bigger, has a keyboard and aluminum body.