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.

Nokia Developer Summit 2009 Offsite

Nokia Developer Summit 2009 was held at Monaco, 28-29 April. I wasn't able to join, but still wanted to know what's going on. With today's technology, it was actually both easy and a pleasure.

First news came realtime via twitter hashtag search #nds09. Several reporters, occasionally even in different sessions, offered good selection of facts, opinions and background info. Thanx to at least @mobilejam @smashpop @AAS @bryanrieger @gloom303 @rayval @inti @mobiliser @henriquemartin onsite, as well as several offsite commenters.

Next there's some more or less realtime blogs, most notably Nokia Conversations and the official event website. They do have an advantage, having access to restricted insider info, and did a splendid job. The official website is most likely the best ever after-event site I've seen. Take a look, if you're interested in getting into the feeling of almost being there!

Talking about blogs, have to mention the old reliable All About Symbian. They might not be the fastest, but provide thoughtful, insightful analysis worth following. Podcast AAS Insight #69 contains NDS summary starting at 21+ minutes. Also Qt-based Orbit UI supersedes S60 AVKON in Symbian^4 article is an excellent overview of the future of Symbian platform. Check the comments, too.

Another interesting blog this year was Forum Nokia Blogs, where FN Champions were requested to blog from the event. Personal touch was a nice addition, great idea!

I'm not a fan of real-time video, with all the background noise, people walking by and coughing and seeing too many talking heads almost in focus. Talking backs of the heads are even worse, can't even try to read from the lips! These videos by Nokia Conversations are something else: professionally edited, short and to the point, with excellent picture and sound quality.

Main news from my offsite view, mainly via twitter (my comments inside parenthesis):

• It's not resolved yet how to get flash apps into Ovi Store (but I'm sure they will get in there)
• Forum Nokia delivers resources to 4+ million registered developers, website receives more than 1.5 million unique visitors per month. (Personally I've always "wondered" about that 4 million registered users, but 1.5 million "unique visitors" is an impressive number.)
• WRT is an abstraction layer. (Nokia keeps pushing WRT so hard, guess it will become a serious development platform)
• Ovi Store accepts only certified apps: Symbian Signed or Java Verified. (Flash is a bit open, hopefully Flash solution could be reused with python apps.)
• Finally a form of Map API will be available from Nokia (with restrictions and only for selected partners, but finally it's available)
• Developer focused twitter feed from Symbian Foundation @symbiandevco (great to see they embrase latest tech)
• QT Orbit announcement via Twitter, to replace AVKON. (Major major news. Truly surprised how little analysis there has been about this. Too big to understand or devs are just too skeptic)
• Application suite re-factored and re-written to take advantage of Qt APIs, Orbit widgets, and Direct UI. (This means S60 will fallback one year vs competition. Can they use the option to their advantage?)
• Maemo 5 Beta SDK was released around this time (there is a future for Maemo)

Wondering whether expos will become like big sports events: want to be there onsite, but will have no idea what's happening. Calling offsite friends to ask where to go, what to see.

Android 1.5 SDK preview

Lifehacker is reporting brand new Android 1.5 SDK pre-release, good short summary. Here's my additional comments:

First of all, nothing about Android Developer Phone 1 issue where developers are not allowed to download and install their own copy-protected applications. This was not important enough to fix - or the situation is much more complicated that it originally looked like. We'll hear more later, I'm positive about that!

Refinement of all core UI elements sounds good, but we need to see what it means. Very positive sign that it was first on the release note! "UI polish" and Google Talk status integration for Contacts, the most used mobile phone application ever. Faster Camera startup and (first) image capture. Assisted GPS.

On-screen keyboard, landscape and portrait. There are also predefined SDK emulator profiles for HVGA landscape and portrait screens. Looks like there's going to be both vertical touch screen devices, like iPhone and Nokia 5800, as well as horizontal, like Nokia Communicators.

Homescreen widgets, reminding about Nokia N97. Widgets everywhere and I still can't quite understand why. Even David Wood, the Catalyst & Futurist of Symbian Foundation, is doing widgets! Well, have to admit that WRT 1.1 has some potential.

Web browser update, based on webkit. Wonder how many lines of code Google Android, Apple Safari and Nokia browser really share. Left hand cooperates, right hand competes.

Multimedia APIs, speech recognition framework, redesigned sensor APIs, better OpenGL support, improved JUnit support and easier performance profiling. Good mix of consumer and developer features. Now waiting for G2 device.

Mobile Games on Demand

Gazimoff's geekBlog has a good story about a potentially new, potentially revolutionary gaming system. After seven years of development, OnLive has announced Gaming as a Service. We could call it Cloud Gaming, since these times everything is Cloud Computing.

Lots of benefits in such system, same as in every SaaS system. Longer lifetime for "old" handsets (N93i), market for used devices, recycling phones, more data traffic for operators. Some additional drawbacks, like people who might want to own an actual physical copy of their favourite games.

I would like to see Mobile Gaming as a Service, as a Games on Demand. Great for end-users, easy setup and updating, available anytime and anywhere, instant community, automatic networking with people with similar thought, sharing of pictures, video and add-on material.

Could be built on top of widgets platforms already today. Apple Dashboard, Windows Mobile Widgets, Nokia Web Runtime Widgets, Opera Widgets, Yahoo! Widgets, NetFront Widgets, Plusmo Widgets, etc. Widgets are the new black.