Maemo Harmattan 2010

MobileCrunch has couple interesting articles about rumoured Maemo 6 Harmattan, even with possible early screenshot. Wouldn't be surprised, if that screenshot is actually Maemo 5.

Difficult to see what new they report when compared to Maemo 5 Fremantly, rumoured to be released Real Soon Now (TM) (my preview here). Fremantle already has:

• Internet tablet, vertical or horizontal scrolling touch screen
  
• Home screen widgets, with our without ads
• Qt 4.5 support, with the native Hildon UI compatibility

To make things exciting Maemo 6 Harmattan could have oFono, open source telephony platform, to enable making telephone calls. It could also run on some near future low-power Intel chips. Timetables seem to be in sync.

Interesting to see what happens, when someone releases internet tablet running Symbian OS. Most likely that someone would not be Nokia.

Maemo 5 - Still using Hildon!

Maemo 5 Alpha SDK was released week ago, haven't seen too many comments about it. Nevertheless it is important news, so here's few thoughts:

How long does Nokia have affort to keep maemo project running, especially in these challenging economical times? Sites are closed, people fired and put on forced vacation, and something which to an outsider looks pretty marginal keeps happily running and making new releases?

Within 3+ years Maemo has been used in 4 devices: N770 (no link on Forum Nokia!), N800, N810 and N810 WiMAX - and there are rumours that latest one has been discontinued! Doesn't look like a big success story, so what could be going on at the background?

N770 was a big success. Huge! Nokia couldn't produce enough devices, market demand was enormous - especially in USA. Since decision to drop CDMA phones was done, Nokia market share in USA collapsed catastrophically. Something like N770 is priceless for marketing. Fate of N810 WiMAX is troubling.

Maemo is needed as an alternative. Big organizations cannot put all their bets behind one product. Just look what happened to Motorola after RAZR 3 got old. Nokia has S40 and S60. S90 was discontinued, same as S80. What will happen to Maemo?

Symbian Foundation platform could expand to internet tables, possibly replace Maemo. Can maemo expand to handheld devices? Btw Maemo already runs Qt 4.5, which is very interesting. Could Qt save Maemo (project/team)?

Nokia Netbook

Yesterday evening Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia CEO, was interviewed in Finnish YLE televion A-Plus show.

Nokia is considering subnotebook manufacturing, because in 5 years mobile phones and notebooks, as we know them now, would be merged. True, Nokia already has Communicators product line, as well as new subcommunicator devices such as N97 and E75, but in future both keyboard and screen would be bigger.

What is going to happen with Nokia Internet Tablets, running maemo? New release was expected in MWC 2009 Barcelona, but in vain. Will we see something new based on future Symbian Foundation release?