Dang's Weblog

Okay, I’m no longer cautiously optimistic about the N900.  I’ve officially crossed it off my list, and any claims that Nokians make about the N900 being an actual open source platform are patently false.

This reminded me of bug #176  opened in 2005 (yes, 4 years and 4.5 hardware iterations ago): The N900 still does not have native ogg support.  This means to me that Nokia deliberately removed that support.  They must have; all the underlying software (gstreamer, etc) has it by default.

If the N900 was, in fact, an open source project, ogg support would have been added by the community.  Heck, I looked at adding it myself back in the day.  But it’s not there, therefore the N900 is not open source.   Oh well.  There’s always the N910, that’s sure to come out in 6 months.  Maybe Nokia will have gotten their act together by then.

Tags: Techie by Daniel
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There’s been a lot of chatter on the planets about the N900.  I have to admit, I’ve been very blah about Maemo for the past 6 months or so, despite having a 770 and a n810.   And it’s related to why I’m not exceptionally exited about the n900.  I’ll get to that.

You see, I was hugely excited about the 770.  It was a great little device, and I bought it as soon as it was available.  I skipped the n800, because it wasn’t any improvement for my uses, and because I was pissed that Nokia had EOL’d my 770 after about a year.  But, I was seduced by the hardware keyboard, daylight-visible screen, and extreme prettiness of the n810 to ignore my misgiving about Nokia, and get one.  Again, early adopter.  And the n810 is a fabulous device: well made, very useful, etc.

However, I noticed trend.  Bugs for Maemo on the n810 got ignore, or closed “fixed in freemantle”.   Features and development for the n810 (and n800) stopped. Everything added was not backwards compatible.  Barely a year into my n810 ownership, and Nokia was already quietly EOLing it.  Now, it sits in my car and acts as a GPS.

So, on to the n900.  The hardware looks awesome.  The software, ditto.  I’m extremely excited about it as a device.  But I can’t bring myself to actually care about it, because twice now, Nokia has screwed me.  Come on guys:  for a $400 – $500 device, you have to support it longer than a year!  3-4 minimum!

So, I’m not excited about the n900.  I can’t afford to be burned again.   I’ll stick with my Android phones for now.

Tags: Techie by Daniel
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