Testing and Waiting

This is testing my N900's native blogging application (MaStory); not much to say other than that. Well, okay, if I were to continue on with the subjects of my prior blog posts here there's much that could be said . . . but it'd all be speculation. Nokia's latest phone---whatever exactly it turns out to be, although if it isn't their Maemp/MeeGo device it'll be quite shocking---has been trickling leaks this past week, so it's tempting to get into the details. But so far, all that really seems certain is a slide-out keyboard and a 12 megapixel autofocus camera. Meanwhile, the bi-annual MeeGo conference is just beginning, and Quim Gil's session elaborating on how Nokia's stack differs from the mainline MeeGo stack is . . . missing? And the FCC filing for whatever this new phone is will be entirely released to the public June 24th.

So it would seem we're on the verge of an announcement, but Nokia has been quite successful in preventing any firm details from coming out yet. Patience, I suppose, will be the order of the day . . . although while I'm in France for most of June I can't truthfully claim I won't be constantly checking for news.

Addendum: This is me testing MaStory's editing feature, and while doing so posting this link to a very detailed history of what we know about this phone and where the pieces of info have come from. It is a bit disheartening to remember that the first glimmer was spotted so long ago in phone terms (well over a year ago), but taken together it's like a TV show about to conclude. Hopefully it doesn't go the Lost or Battlestar Galactica route . . .

Tiny update turns into larger trends

Several times I almost posted another tidbit here just about Linux-based handsets, but I never quite got around to it. In the meantime several things have happened; allow me to aggregate them, and I'll try and tie them together.

Apparently Android's kernel is now far more compatible with the mainline Linux kernel (or more accurately I suppose, the mainline Linux kernel is now more compatible with the Android one). Whether this means that the Android devs will bother merging their changes upstream now that the compatibility problem is fixed remains to be seen; it's telling that these patches came from a University professor involved with Novell rather than any Google engineers. Add that to Google's recent decision to withhold the source code for 3.0 for an unspecified period, despite the fact that devices running Honeycomb are in fact already shipping, and Ars Technica's analysis seems sadly accurate.

I wrote the prior paragraph late last month; since then it has somehow gotten more accurate, with Andy Rubin's response and once again a fairly scathing (and as always, with an excellent pic) deconstruction over at Ars Technica.

Meanwhile, I'm increasingly worried that the final Nokia Linux device might just be a tablet, (and I have some semi-private confirmation of that as well, or at least that the final device won't be a phone), which I wouldn't be as worried about if I didn't also notice that the N900 is entirely out of stock on Amazon.ca; at least it's still in on Amazon.com, and for a cheap $350 to boot. Eventually, you see, something gonna happen to my N900. It isn't invincible, and I carry it everywhere, so the math is pretty clear.

Meanwhile GrokLaw (in its final days) has a trenchant analysis of Nokia's recent announcement that, little over a year after open-sourcing Symbian, they're closing the source back up. Personally I suspect this is gearing up for adding some deep hooks into the OS to tie together Symbian and Windows Phone 7 in preparation for the transition; considering the wholesale revolt and disgust with the Microsoft deal from within the rank and file of Nokia, I can't see the WinPho7 devices coming out any time soon; so they do have plenty of time to prepare.

Of course, doubtless much of this comes from the number of managers from Microsoft running things at Nokia (for example, one of the managers of Symbian has long been ex-Microsoft, as now too is the head of Nokia USA, so it's more than even just having Elop at the top); of all the major electronics companies in the world they seem to have the greatest distrust and hostility towards anything open source. It wasn't untrue, the original reports that Microsoft bought Nokia for "Zero Billion Dollars" . . . well, other than that despite what some major websites reported they will in fact be paying off Nokia.

So is it looking bleak for open source in the brave new mobile world? Certainly it's not as rosy as Google would claim, or it seemed back when Nokia was backing MeeGo, but there's at least one final thing to note and I think it puts things in perspective. ASUS, who've long seemed like they want to get away from Microsoft but can't quite break up with them, is soon releasing their "Eee Pad Transformer", a tablet with a companion keyboard (with trackpad) dock, and which (in a move making it feel that much more like a true successor to the original EeePC) despite being Tegra2-based is reported to undercut all the other big tablets on price. This is notable in that, in full compliance with the GPL, they've already released the kernel source code for it, and thus it has already been rooted. So, perhaps it's getting harder again to buy a device that's entirely open out of the box; but before that box can even arrive, the groundwork for unlocking the device may already be in place. Now add that to the start of this article, where the mainline Linux kernel can now understand and use Android drivers, and I think we may be entering a phase with tablets and phones similar to how it was years ago with laptops; your average users may find it too much hassle, but for those of us who love to tinker and prefer our systems to be our own the possibilities are there.

Low-hanging fruit, even if from time to time we need a stepladder.

Addendum to the N900 Question, Re: Android

As to Android problems...Ah, well, that's a somewhat nebulous area.

In many ways, Android is quite alright. The problem is that also in many ways it's just a clone of iOS built with a Linux kernel instead. So it's not that it's untenable as an OS. Certainly, most of the phones are trivial to root or at least allow "sideloading" of apps (ie. installing them from anywhere other than the official Market), while on most of the decent phones you can outright install alternate ROMs. Although Android has had some noteworthy malware attacks against it they've been fairly trivial on the absolute scale, and Google has been far quicker to react than their immediate competition. Furthermore, they do have that much-touted "app ecosystem", which does mean there are many rather good applications out there for the platform. I have a cheap, spare Android phone that I'm sure would be really aggrevating to use as a primary device, but works wonderfully as, for example, a remote for XBMC (and unlike the XBMC remote for Apple's iOS, this app is officially sanctioned, free, and open source).

But, it's . . . well, it's just not Linux, really. It's a fair enough OS on its own, but once you zoom out to include the mainline kernel and associated userland, and Android's general disconnect from that side of things, it all starts looking less rosy. As far as links explaining the issues, GregKH made a rather definitive post back in December: http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/android-kernel-problems.html

I had forgotten, but at the end of the post he mentions looking into getting an N900, heh.

As to issues not covered by GregKH's post:

It's strange, actually. People I know who are Apple fans seem to see huge differences between Android and iOS, and Android fans the same, but it's almost a Democrats and Republicans kind of thing; sure, when it was either Obama/Biden or McCain/Palin the choice was pretty stark, but that doesn't mean I was at all happy with the choice. Actually, the more I think about it, the more perfect that off-the-cuff analogy is.

So, you have Apple's draconian control of their App Store and manditory DRM for applications, which makes the Android Market a relative haven for open source apps and just generally people who prefer freedom. But that contrast masks how similar the models are; I may strongly prefer Google's version of a Store/Market, but far more than that I prefer actual repositories. Now, from a commercial standpoint repositories may not make much sense, it's true; that, I assume, is at least part of why Intel is pushing their "AppUp!" store, which is set to be an option for MeeGo and would work then for commercial developers and companies to target MeeGo. But I mean, 99% of the programs I use on my main computers are open source projects; I don't want to be using a system set up for the benefit of commercial apps.

There are definitely solutions to the problems of the Android Market. For one, there's FDroid, which is an alternative market only including OSS. It's fairly small in scope, but it saves a lot of lengthy searching sometimes to check in it first (the signal-to-noise ratio in the Android Market is at least 25 times worse than in the Maemo repos, no exaggeration). And Google has been improving things in terms of the functionality of the Market. But it seems unlikely that we're ever going to be able to go "apt-get upgrade" on the Android Market; so when I speak of Android having problems, that's the other kind I'm referring to, I guess.

Upon being asked if it would be a good idea to buy an N900 at the moment

(click here for the TL;DR)

Hmm.  That's a tough call; in some ways, there aren't any real alternatives to the N900 out there right now, and software-wise the N900 has never been in a better position.  On the other hand, it is somewhat old now, and in theory sometime this year (no ETA, but they've committed to "2011" and that, at least, seems certain) the successor device is set to come out. But how that will end up is far from certain, and it's already getting tought to find N900s And . . . well, it gets complicated, let me do this with more structure. Here's my attempt at "the state of the N900", although much of it you probably already know, and complex issues don't split into bullet points easily, at least it should make it more readable:

PRICE/AVAILABILITY

-The first notable upside is that it's gone down in price quite a bit; last time I walked into OmegaCell it was $500, which for an unlocked smartphone is pretty good.  On the downside, I don't see it on Omegacell's listings anymore, which may not be a good sign for long term availability . . .

SOFTWARE

-In terms of applications, there are no other phones that have the same ability to just up and run normal Linux applications. Now, obviously many take some adapting UI-wise, but at this point that's often been done; there are versions of Marble, KOffice, Pidgin, Firefox, etc etc. So as far as alternatives go, the N900 is literally the only option on the market right now for a full Linux stack, sadly.

-That brings up another salient point: others like Android do have terminal emulators, but the general system is set up so differently that they aren't always so useful, and most of the GNU userland tools are, at best, unintegrated. I actually feel less at home in Android's terminal than I do in OSX's terminal; in Maemo, though, it's comfortably standard and full (certainly by comparison), and it's hard to overstate how nice that is.

-Cool stuff continues to come out; I noticed the other day that the repos now have a TV-B-Gone desktop widget now, for example, and it works quite fine indeed.

-Although Nokia has ceased support, there's a rather excellent de facto 'official' community update project (the "CSSU"), so updates to the underlying OS are going to continue for quite some time.

-The method of handling multitasking, especially UI-wise, is still the best implementation out there IMHO. And of course it also is actually multitasking, unlike Android or iOS, which is a downside in the hands of a user who doesn't know what they're doing so I can understand why these mass market OSes hobble it, but even for my own part I think it'd drive me mad if I had to use that kind of fake multitasking.

-Even if Maemo becomes unmaintainable, the N900 is currently the reference handset (in lieu of any others being on the market) for MeeGo, and it's quite easy to dual-boot. The MeeGo implementation already has the basic stuff (internet, texting, that "phone call" thing I hear people do sometimes, etc) down.  There's also the NITdroid project, although there are a few issues with that install still. Nonetheless, it has the interesting position of being a phone you can choose which OS to run on---again, it's the only one out there right now that this can truly be said of.

HARDWARE

-It's still kindof middle-of-the-road, spec-wise:

 

--The screen's resolution isn't at the absolute top of the line anymore (it was at the time), but beats many newer phones, and equals most (the Samsung Galaxy S, for example). The touchscreen is untrendy in being resistive, but it's a very, very good resistive one, so the main downside is that, being plastic, it scratches far easier than many of the newer handsets with nearly unbreakable glass (like the N8). It also can only accept one point of contact, so no multitouch. Although that isn't a huge problem, because...

--The hardware keyboard is still better than any contemporary competition, and it's solid enough that in over a year of constant use the only issue so far seems to be the paint on the keys chipping somewhat, ie. purely cosmetic.

--The camera, while not the best out there anymore (that again goes to the Nokia N8) is still well above average (to give an indication of where it stands in the market, it easily beats the iPhone 4; the normal app doesn't do HDR photos, but there are alternative applications that do).

--The video out is over RCA, which unfortunately makes it rather pointless for tasks more involved than watching episodes of The Daily Show on an old CRT TV or such, unlike some (unfortunately fairly rare, the N8 is again one of the few) which sport mini HDMI connectors, which would be immensely useful and nice.

--The processor is aging, although it's still in the same generation of processors as most of what's on the market (but not in another few months). It's paired with a co-processor that takes care of the telephony part, and a pretty decent graphics card, so it does punch above its weight as they say. It's also easily overclocked, although with a phone that quickly means "shit, I'm out of battery."

-As alluded to in the "software" section, it has an IR port, and that's quite fun sometimes! And, also, something that's hard to come by on a phone, and even harder to get one which LIRC has full access to, yaknow?

-The battery is easily swappable, which has saved me more than once. While I'm on that, it certainly doesn't have the same kind of battery life that a dumbphone or Symbian phone has, but it's pretty much identical in real life to other smartphones from Apple or of the Android persuasion (actually, in my experience it seems to slightly outlast my friends' iPhone 4's).

-There's just no getting around it, it's bulkier than the rest of the stuff out there.

ALTERNATIVE: NOKIA'S FINAL LINUX DEVICE / MEEGO

-The next MeeGo conference is in late May, and it's widely expected that a number of companies will be announcing products then.

-Nokia has stated that their current policy on announcing releases is basically "only once we're very, very close and entirely sure". It also would seem like a natural time for them to announce, and the product has been pushed back somewhat already yet the countdown until most of their R&D goes over to Windows Phone 7 is ticking. So, likely we'll see what they've come up with then.

-Worryingly, they've yet to say publicly that it's a handset, so it actually might not be. On the other hand, it's been stated that it's a "successor to the N900...the 'N950', if you will" and that it'll fulfill the "same role". But what, precisely, does that mean? No one outside of Nokia seems to know.

-I mentioned the N8 many times above; it's a perfect example of the kind of engineering Nokia can put out. The hardware is, in many respects, still far above the competition despite lengthy delays and having been out for quite awhile (in handset terms) now. But of course, it's running Symbian; if Nokia puts out an equivalent piece of hardware using entirely contemporary components, and if it is indeed a handset, the "N950" will be a serious contender. But those are some unsubstantiated "ifs" there.

-It's quite possible that someone other than Nokia will announce a MeeGo handset; there are a number of companies that seem to be working on them internally, but whether any of these projects see the light of day remains unknown. Again, the late-march MeeGo conference will be the thing to watch.

ALTERNATIVE: HP WEBOS

-Of course, the caveat to all this is that this is HP we're talking about. On the other hand, they hired the guy who was running Nokia's Maemo division (Ari Jaaksi) to run their WebOS division.

-Although the environment is using entirely in-house and thus it isn't at all a normal Linux setup like Maemo is, the stack underneath is far more normal than Android is.  All the things that Android re-invented under the hood are (mostly) untouched in WebOS, so although GUI programs won't just compile and run natively AFAIK, CLI ones will fine.  So, no Transmission, but rTorrent works.

-This all puts WebOS in a kind of limbo between Android and Maemo.

-Here's a list of the Optware packages for WebOS, which might make my rambling points more clear: http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/unstable/

-There are two new smartphones coming out "this summer"; the flagship is the Palm Pre 3, although the Veer is oddly interesting too. It's the same size as an old dumbphone, with a 2.7-inch screen. Both have slide-out portrait keyboards (so, more tightly packed than the N900's landscape one, but I've heard they're nonetheless really good ones). Both are, spec-wise, basically normal modern high-end smartphones 

-Yeah, this is another "soon...but not yet" phone option.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

-The N900 is, at this moment, still a very good smartphone on its own, and is unquestionably the most "Linux-y" one you could buy right now.

-Hardware-wise, the N900 is definitely behind the times in many respects.

-It is quite possible better, but still "really Linux" devices will come out this year, but it is unfortunately far from certain.

-Failing potential MeeGo devices, WebOS is looking quite interesting, but that HP umbrella makes one cautious.

Well.  I've written quite a lot of text, but I don't know how helpful it'll actually be, heh. For my own part, if I had the spare cash, I'd be quite tempted to turn that cash into a spare N900 just in case a true successor doesn't come around.  Right now, it seems like there could be a number of potentially better devices just around the corner.  But tons of interesting development is, as I babble on here, being done for both Maemo and for the MeeGo builds for the N900.  The uncertainty of future devices that Nokia's partnership with Microsoft has created energized a lot of people (at least for now), and the general thought seems to be "okay, if we don't know when we'll get another device like the N900, then we're going to make this the best Linux handset we can."

TOO LONG; DIDN'T READ

In my opinion, the software situation on the N900 (both now on Maemo, and in future with MeeGo too) is without peer. The hardware, alas, is starting to show its age. The alternatives all either have tradeoffs (although I didn't really mention it, we all know the various issues with Android) or aren't out yet, and thus are immaterial to degrees. So . . . the choice isn't really clear, I guess.

Hopefully somehow this all was helpful, because it certainly was long!