Maemo-MeeGo story
On June 21, 2011, Nokia introduced the N9 smartphone with the MeeGo Harmattan operating system on board. I dare say that the N9 is the only wow product after the appearance on the iPhone market. But at the time of the N9 presentation, it was already known that the Finnish IT giant entered into a long-term alliance with Microsoft, and the N9 will be Nokia’s first and only smartphone on MeeGo Harmattan.
Now, probably, few people remember, but, in fact, Nokia was one of the first companies that, even in the “pre-iPhone” and “pre-Android” era, began to produce devices that were positioned as Internet tablets. In 2005, the company released the Nokia 770 device, which worked on the Internet Tablet OS operating system based on Debian Linux. The start of sales of the Nokia 770 took place on November 11, 2005.
Nokia 770
launch xp on nokia 770
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Doom on Nokia 770
Nokia 770, although it was called an Internet tablet, looked much more like a PDA. Therefore (however, probably not only because) a year later, in January 2007, Nokia released the following model in the line: N800 .
N800 Internet Tablet
N800 Hands-On
Nokia N800 Video Internet Calling
Nokia N800 - Maemo Mapper
iPod touch and Nokia N800 media and browsing
KDE on a Nokia N800
Ubuntu 9.10 on Nokia N800
Android OS (NITdroid) running on a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet
In the fall of the same year, Nokia added the N810 to the model range, which differed from the previous model mainly externally: in particular, the N810 had a physical qwerty-keyboard and the appearance of the front panel was thoroughly changed. By the time the N810 was released, an OS based on Debian Linux, on which all three devices worked, was called Maemo. The N810 worked on Maemo 4.0.
Nokia N810 Internet Tablet overview and demo
Nokia N810 review
Installing the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet
Android on the Nokia N810
All these three devices had 4.1 inch TFT displays with a resolution of 800x480 that is still relevant. All three worked on Texas OMAP processors, though of different models. However, this did not compensate for their main disadvantage: they did not have a SIM card slot, that is, they were sharpened exclusively for Wi-Fi internet connection (N810 had a special version with WiMAX communication module, but this is not a 3G phone yet -connection). In principle, this drawback is quite understandable by the technological realities of 2006–2007, when the mobile Internet was just taking the first steps. On the other hand, and with Wi-Fi at that time, in particular in Moscow, it was tight. But besides browsing, communicating via Skype, Gtalk and Jabber (that is, besides those functions that required the Internet), you could do a lot of things on these devices, such as typing, listening to music, FM radio, watching videos. So offline these internet tablets weren't so useless. Yes, by the way, all three devices were equipped with GPS-modules.
But in the same 2007 (June 29), Apple introduced its first iPhone, and Nokia apparently understood that even though it is moving with its Internet tablets in the right direction, in the details of the IT trend, especially in the user interface Apple has clearly outpaced it. Nokia thought about its Internet tablets, and thought about it until September 2009, when Nokia N900 was introduced to the Nokia World on the Maemo5 operating system, which was supposed to come on Nokia's flagship smartphones instead of Symbian. The N900 was a direct descendant of the Nokia Internet tablets, with the only difference being that a sim card slot finally appeared in it and now it was a device, among other things, a smartphone. In addition, the Maemo5 interface has been dramatically redesigned in comparison with previous versions of Maemo. To observe the chronology, we mention right away that while Nokia thought, Google, which bought Android Inc. in 2005, in October 2008, together with T-Mobile and HTC, released the first smartphone on Android 1.0.
nokia n900 russian video test
Hands On Nokia N900
By the time the N900 was released, by most parameters it was ahead of all existing mobile devices by several steps. There was no multitasking in iOS yet (it will only appear in version 4.xx, released in 2010), and in Maemo5 multitasking was full-fledged, as in desktop operating systems, such as in Android, for example, and still does not exist. The protocols Skype, Gtalk, Facebook and others were stitched out of the box in Maemo5. The N900 browser supported not only the notorious Flash, but also opened the pages in their full, desktop version. The N900 was equipped with a 5 megapixel camera, and in the iPhone 3Gs - the actual model at the time - the camera was 3.2 megapixels. The 3.5-inch N900 display (a clear influence of the iPhone, since previous models of Nokia Internet tablets had a 4.1-inch display), although not capacitive, but resistive, but it also had a record resolution of 800x480 at that time (especially for 3.5 inch displays). Finally, in N900, the file structure was opened, that is, the user could copy from his computer to the N900 and back whatever he wanted, using not only the Nokia PC Suite, but also the familiar file manager, or Explorer. In short, the N900 was a full-fledged pocket computer, in addition to everything else, with a qwerty keyboard.
For the sake of truth, I must say that the N900 had some drawbacks compared to the same iPhone. The main disadvantage: the N900 display did not support multi-touch gestures, that is, a picture or page in the browser could not be scaled by the famous Jobs Gesture. Instead, a hardware volume control rocker was used for scaling in the Gallery, and in the browser besides it and double taping into the text area, the page could be scaled with a circular motion of a finger across the display clockwise or counterclockwise, a gesture that did not catch on at all. In addition, the “boxed” version of Maemo5 did not support MMS messages, and the interface of both Maemo5 itself and most of the built-in applications (with the exception of the phone and the browser) did not suggest a vertical scanning mode. On the other hand, these last two circumstances were rather not flaws, but individual, characteristic features of the N900, due to the positioning and form factor of the device, like an Internet tablet with a physical qwerty keyboard. Yes, and also: the N900 had a built-in infrared port! In general, although a specific, but very cool was the gadget. Perhaps it is the coolest at all in the whole history of gadget building.
Exit N900 was accompanied by a large-scale advertising campaign, the slogan of which was (neither more nor less): “The revolution begins!” But just a few months later, in February 2010, Nokia unexpectedly turned this revolution around, announcing the closure of the Maemo project and its merger with another Linux project developed by Intel and called Moblin. As a result of this merger, after about a year, the multiplatform operating system MeeGo should have appeared. Multiplatform was understood to mean support for both ARM architecture and x86 architecture, that is, the ability to install MeeGo on any hardware platform, from computers and media players built into cars, to smartphones, laptops and desktop computers.
Why was it necessary to close Maemo with a loud voice, while Symbian was significantly inferior to Maemo by the convenience of the user interface? - unclear. I'm not talking about the fact that at the time of the merger with Moblin, Maemo existed in the 5th version of the assembly, four commercial models of devices worked on it. And Moblin existed only in version 1.0 for netbooks and version 2.1 for smartphones, and nowhere, except for engineering samples, was noticed. That is, in essence, this merger was, to put it mildly, not equivalent.
This merger may have been related to the Moorestown mobile hardware platform that Intel was developing at the time. In January 2010, that is about a month before the announcement of the merger of Maemo and Moblin into the MeeGo project, a sample of the LG GW990 smartphone, which worked on the Moorestown hardware platform and the Moblin operating system, was presented at CES. That is, it is possible that Moorestown was supposed to be a “stone” for MeeGo. However, I make a reservation once again, this is only an assumption based on chronological coincidence - on the one hand, the merger of Maemo and Moblin, and on the other, with the announcements of Moorestown. Officially, there is no evidence of a direct connection between Moorestown and MeeGo. Anyway, Moorestown, which was announced for the summer of 2010, did not appear on the commercial market.
LG GW990 Intel Moorestown Atom Smartphone
Nokia promised to release the first devices on MeeGo as early as the end of 2010, and at the beginning of 2011, it was also announced that the update to MeeGo would also receive the N900. During this period, despite the announcement of the closure of the Maemo project, Nokia released three official firmware updates for the N900, thoroughly improving both its functionality and the interface. Third-party developers created many applications, and for the most part, these were not ordinary user applications (clients of social networks, editors, etc., although such applications for Maemo also exist in quite a sufficient number), but various utilities with a narrow professional focus, from programmer to medical). Exact statistics on the number of applications for Maemo, - no. But I think at least a couple of tens of thousands of applications for Maemo5 are available in ovi.store and repositories, and maybe even more.
Smartphone Brain Scanner
Nokia N900 + USB Flash Drive: copy 1.46 GB movie
MyPaint for Nokia N900
Nokia N900 - WebOs games
Aircrack on Nokia N900
Shadow guardian hd
SunVox on Nokia N900
CarMan on Nokia N900
Sygic Mobile Maps 10 on the Nokia N900
Quake 3 on Nokia N900
Nokia N900 USB Mouse host mode
Nokia N900 VNC application
In addition, the Maemo community released several versions of unofficial firmware (CSSU) Maemo5, which provided the N900 with a full-fledged vertical interface and taught, for example, the camera to shoot video at 720p resolution and at 30 fps (out of the N900 box, shot 800x480 video and speed of 24 fps). The single-core N900 OMAP 3430 ARM Cortex A8 processor, which worked at a factory frequency of 600Mg, was overclocked to an operating frequency of 1 GHz, and up to a maximum of 1.7 GHz. And which operating systems were not installed on the N900 by enthusiasts, from webOS and Android of various versions to MacOS, Debian and Windows from version 3.1 to the latest, 7th version.
N900 CSSU review (May 2012)
Record 720P on N900
N900 Running 4 Operating Systems
Nokia N900 dual booting Maemo 5 and Android
Windows 95 working on Nokia N900
Ubuntu 12.04 running on N900 with U-boot
Mac OS X 10.3 on Nokia N900
Windows NT 4.0 running on Nokia N900
N900 running Windows 3.11 in Dosbox
In the fall of 2010, Alien Dalvik was announced for Maemo, which was supposed to allow installing, running and working on the N900 with any Android applications directly from Maemo5. But the application did not become available to users. Although the fact that this is not a fake - for sure. YouTube has a compelling video demonstrating how Photoshop for Android works on the HTC Android device and the N900. In addition, in January 2011, the application was submitted by Myriad at the MWC in Barcelona, ​​and it was announced not only for Maemo, but also for MeeGo.
Myriad alien dalvik
About MeeGo itself at that time almost nothing was heard, except, perhaps, the announcement of the test installation of this operating system in BMW cars, and several posts on specialized programming forums that, say, the work on MeeGo is poorly organized and Most likely, nothing will really come out of this project. But, as regards the Nokia device directly on MeeGo to the Internet, stirring interest in the future product, from time to time informal images of the smartphone leaked out. On the most plausible of them, the gadget was a side slider with a qwerty keyboard that looked like a pocket version of the MacBookPro.
Meanwhile, in September 2010, new CEO Stephen Elop came to Nokia, a man with a very impressive track record: he spent 7 years in various positions, including executive director at legendary Macromedia, after having been merged by Macromedia and Adobe Systems for about a year for operations abroad, Adobe Systems, then transferred as chief operating officer (also about a year) at Juniper Networks, and then at Microsoft, where for two years, up to appointment to Nokia, he was responsible (no less, not a little) for promotion products whether neyki Microsoft Office.
The first wake-up call about the fate of MeeGo was made a month after his arrival at Nokia, when the company was left by the vice-president, who oversaw the development of the MeeGo device, Ari Yaksi. However, Nokia said that its departure will not affect the timing of the release of the company's first MeeGo smartphone. As proof of this statement, in November 2010, the first MeeGo test firmware for the N900 was released. But it worked so badly out of hand that, in fact, the first appearance of the first Nokia smartphone on MeeGo was hardly believed. Neither at the end of 2010 nor at the beginning of 2011 such a smartphone has ever appeared.
N900 y MeeGo 1.1
And in early February 2011, Stephen Elop published on the corporate website of Nokia his famous letter, in which he compared the company with a man, suddenly we would wake up and realized that he was on a burning oil platform in the middle of the ocean. And, they say, this man has only two ways out: either to burn, stay on the platform, or jump from the platform into the ocean. The hero of the parable of Elop chose the second option and, as a result, survived. Elop offered Nokia to do the same. At the same time, what exactly he had in mind, clearly was not. The letter also stated that in the modern IT world not only devices and even operating systems became crucial, but ecosystems, such as Apple’s iTunce, and it was also stated that Symbian was uncompetitive, and on MeeGo Nokia can not make their main bet, although still does not give up plans to release a smartphone on this OS. To what Elop was driven, partly became clear literally two days later, when on February 11, 2011, Nokia and Microsoft announced the conclusion of a long-term cooperation agreement.
However, in confirmation of the words about the relevance of plans to release at least one device on MeeGo, in March 2011 MeeGo 1.2 firmware for Nokia N900 was released. Those who were not lazy and installed it, it became even less clear why Nokia refused to work, and in a year and a half Maemo5 also developed thoroughly. And this version of MeeGo was so slow that in the near future the release of the device on MeeGo stopped believing completely. Can Nokia make sense to return to Maemo? - Members of fan forums dedicated to Maemo were asking, but the answer was silence. Nokia, meanwhile, has been developing the design of new smartphones for the Windows Phone 7 software platform.
MeeGo 1.2 Developer Edition for Nokia N900 Review
And so, in mid-June, Nokia unexpectedly announced the presentation of the first and only MeeGo-smartphone as part of the Nokia Connection 2011 in Singapore - they say the device was ready and despite the strategic plans to switch to the Windows Phone platform, the company decided to release. It also turned out that it would not be a side slider with a qwerty-keyboard, but a candy bar with a touch screen, which in this case did not have a single button. As for the photos of the side slider that flashed on the network, it turned out to be a direct descendant of the N900, a device with the serial number N950, which, however, will not be available for sale, but will be released in limited edition solely for free distribution among software developers for software platform MeeGo Harmattan.
With the N950, which judging by the information leaked in the media, at first it was supposed to become a Nokia smartphone on MeeGo, somehow not everything met. The question is, why release a separate smartphone for software developers for a platform that they decided not to develop? Well, if we assume that he was just ready and was released only for that, then why not release it for sale, and give it to the developers for free? Yes, of course, the commercial potential of devices with a qwerty-keyboard is not too large, but far from negligible. Qwerty has its fans, besides, the models in this form factor are literally units, so there are no models, and sales of the N950 in any case would hardly have failed. Or, in fact, it was all a cunning marketing device: to release an inaccessible product, thus making it desirable, and eventually cult-like?
But back to the commercial model, the monoblock N9. The IT industry has never seen such smartphones in its own century, though not at all: not by the materials used, nor by the design, nor by the concept of the software platform, nor by the user interface. In theory, it is products like N9 that are called the buzzword: innovative. The body of the smartphone was cut from a single piece of unpretentious, not easily soiled and at the same time durable polycarbonate. Covered with a protective Gorilla Glass AMOLED display with a hitherto unprecedented 3.9-inch diagonal was slightly convex (however, this is from a practical point of view, despite the display security, rather, a minus). But most importantly, on the frontal surface of the N9 there were no buttons at all. That is, on the right side, of course, there was a traditional volume rocker and an on / off key, but only the display occupied the entire frontal surface.
If Android largely inherited the concept of user interface from iOS, the MeeGo Harmattan interface was also clearly inspired by Maemo5, only now the Active Application Manager is not an intermediate (cloud-like) space between desktops and the installed applications panel, but one of the desktops. In total, MeeGo Harmattan has three of them: the screen of running applications, the screen of installed applications and the personal notification screen where messages from various social networks user accounts, RSS subscriptions, calendar, as well as notifications of missed calls, SMS messages or chat messages are collected: Gtalk , Skype, Facebook, etc.
All control in MeeGo Harmattann is performed using a single sliding gesture, or a swipe gesture, which collapses open applications into the Active Application Manager (when swiping along the display from right to left, left to right, or bottom to top), or closing it (when swiping from above way down). All touch keys, for example the return key to the previous page, are located in the interface of the applications if necessary.
However, even this interface difference between MeeGo Harmattan and all other mobile software platforms (Android ICS, in which the three functional buttons became part of the OS touch interface, was released only in October 2011), was the main one. The main thing was that MeeGo Harmattan was both a closed and open operating system. Imagine that the notorious Jilbreak is sewn into iOS as one of its regular options. That is, if the user wants to have a full-fledged open OS in the smartphone with access to the file structure, repositories of unofficial applications, the terminal, etc., then he only switches one touch toggle switch. If he wants to develop software for the OS at all, he already installs special applications (utilities and libraries available for download right there) in the open OS mode and gets access to the complete OS assembly with all the tools necessary for its modification. If the user (a typical housewife, for example) does not need all these geek pranks, then he doesn’t have to do anything - by default, in the “boxed” version, the N9 came with a closed version of MeeGo Harmattan.
N9 went on sale far from all countries. For example, it was not officially sold in the United States, although it could, of course, be ordered from Europe through online stores. In Russia, where the N900 was in demand, the output of the N9 was even accompanied by a short advertising campaign, which, however, at best only leveled the negative effect from the statements of the Nokia management about the actual refusal of further OS development. On the other hand, for the sake of truth, it is worth noting that after the release of the N9, Nokia announced that it would release at least 2-3 firmware updates for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, making a total of more than 3,500 changes to the system, and bringing it to a full-fledged state. ready distribution. After that, MeeGo Harmattan will completely switch to the status of open source software and will be developed by third-party developers. Another thing is that new devices on MeeGo Harmattan, Nokia is really not planned. Actually, with Maemo5 a year and a half before, Nokia also acted, bringing the platform to firmware 1.3, and then completely transferring it to third-party developers from the Maemo community.
Immediately, it should be said that on closer inspection, MeeGo Harmattan turned out to be not quite MeeGo. The fact is that MeeGo adopted the standard for the expansion of the installation packages. Rpm, and in MeeGo Harmattan the installation packages have the extension. Deb, the same as in Maemo5. That is, in fact and strictly speaking, MeeGo Harmattan is rather Maemo6, although it has partial compatibility with MeeGo sources.
Shortly after the release of N9, Intel, following Nokia, announced that it would not further develop the MeeGo project. And all the developments on MeeGo, it was decided to merge into a new project, initiated by Intel and Samsung. This project was named Tizen. At the moment, the first device on Tizen Samsung promises to release at the end of this year. In part, under this operating system, Intel created a hardware platform, Medfield, which is a continuation of the Moorestown hardware platform, which did not take place on the commercial market. However, the first engineering samples of the device on the "stone" Medfield while running Android. This spring they were even brought to the demonstration Moscow.
But back to Nokia, which, after the release of the N9, began to prepare its first smartphone on Windows Phone 7. Soon, the company introduced two win-winds at once: Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, and if the latter was more or less original, then Lumia 800 Externally, it was a complete copy of the N9 with the only difference that it had three functional touch buttons needed to control the Windows Phone platform, and the display, respectively, was not 3.9, but 3.7 inches. At the same time, the Lumia 800 did not have a front camera, and Windows Phone 7.5 did not support NFC. I seem to have forgotten to mention above that, among other innovations in the N9, there was also an NFC chip; I'm afraid to make a mistake, but it is possible that the N9 was the first smartphone supporting this technology. For comparison: Windows Phone only in the 8th version will start to support NFC.
At the time of the release of N9 for sale in ovi.store there were not many more than 1 thousand applications for MeeGo Harmattan. However, largely due to the distribution of the developer device N950, the number of applications grew quite rapidly. There is no exact statistics on the number of applications at the moment, but I think that at least 10 thousand applications are currently available for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Unlike the N900, for the N9 applications are mostly custom.
In late January 2012, Nokia released a solid update for MeeGo Harmattan. Now users have the opportunity to create folders for application shortcuts on the screen of installed applications, support for DLNA technology has appeared, the interface for working with text has been significantly improved, the Gallery has the ability to trim video clips, etc. In general, it was clear that Nokia did not abandon MeeGo, and even though in Finnish, slowly, but systematically finish the innovative OS.
Moreover, the Nokia Belle update for Symbian ^ 3 smartphones was released in February, including for the camera phone N8. So, most of this update was rewritten to the source code of MeeGo Harmattan, which suggests a movement to merge Symbian and Maemo-MeeGo. How realistic this is, and which interface will result in it as a result, is difficult to imagine. At the same time, the spike gesture from MeeGo Harmattan partially migrated to the budget line of touchscreen smartphones Nokia Asha, which the company presented in early June 2012. In early July 2012, PR1.3 update for Nokia N9 smartphones was released. There were no fundamental innovations in this firmware, but in general, optimization and power consumption were improved.
What is remarkable, for the N950 official update PR1.3 did not appear. Only in the middle of August 2012, an unofficial firmware PR 1.3 appeared on the torrent for this developer device, and Nokia denies involvement in this firmware. At the same time, starting from May 2012, in the repositories of Maemo.org for the N950, the NeMo Linux build, which is part of the Mer project, is available for testing. Build Nemo is also available for the N900. The future of this project is still unknown. The official Nokia about this, of course, is completely silent.
Nemo Mobile "0.20120614.1.NEMO.2012-07-02.1" running on Nokia N900
After the N9 went on sale, the NITDroid project, which had previously been porting Android to various versions on the N900, started developing the Android ICS distribution for the N9 and N950. At the moment, enthusiasts from NITDroid have developed not only the ICS distribution kit for the N9 and N950, but also a dual-Boot bootloader, which allows you to simultaneously have two operating systems on your smartphone and download one or another depending on the need (for example, all kinds of games in PlayMarket for Android significantly more than MeeGo games in ovi.store, although ovi.store has an emulator for the main game consoles, so by installing it and downloading it to the appropriate game folder, you can ponostalgate by playing the hits of past years).
Android ICS on Nokia N9
As for Nokia's wine backgrounds, after the new year, the company released two more smartphone models on Windows Phone 7.5. One of them is the budget model Lumia 610, on which a special Windows Phone Tango operating system optimized for minimalistic hardware was installed. Some applications, such as Skype and a number of games from the Marketplace on the Lumia 610, do not work, primarily because they are not designed for 256 MB of RAM. By the way, this budget Lumia 610 is about the same as the N900 is now, - from time to time the remnants of this miracle device still appear in online stores.
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Now, probably, few people remember, but, in fact, Nokia was one of the first companies that, even in the “pre-iPhone” and “pre-Android” era, began to produce devices that were positioned as Internet tablets. In 2005, the company released the Nokia 770 device, which worked on the Internet Tablet OS operating system based on Debian Linux. The start of sales of the Nokia 770 took place on November 11, 2005.
Nokia 770
launch xp on nokia 770
')
Doom on Nokia 770
Nokia 770, although it was called an Internet tablet, looked much more like a PDA. Therefore (however, probably not only because) a year later, in January 2007, Nokia released the following model in the line: N800 .
N800 Internet Tablet
N800 Hands-On
Nokia N800 Video Internet Calling
Nokia N800 - Maemo Mapper
iPod touch and Nokia N800 media and browsing
KDE on a Nokia N800
Ubuntu 9.10 on Nokia N800
Android OS (NITdroid) running on a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet
In the fall of the same year, Nokia added the N810 to the model range, which differed from the previous model mainly externally: in particular, the N810 had a physical qwerty-keyboard and the appearance of the front panel was thoroughly changed. By the time the N810 was released, an OS based on Debian Linux, on which all three devices worked, was called Maemo. The N810 worked on Maemo 4.0.
Nokia N810 Internet Tablet overview and demo
Nokia N810 review
Installing the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet
Android on the Nokia N810
All these three devices had 4.1 inch TFT displays with a resolution of 800x480 that is still relevant. All three worked on Texas OMAP processors, though of different models. However, this did not compensate for their main disadvantage: they did not have a SIM card slot, that is, they were sharpened exclusively for Wi-Fi internet connection (N810 had a special version with WiMAX communication module, but this is not a 3G phone yet -connection). In principle, this drawback is quite understandable by the technological realities of 2006–2007, when the mobile Internet was just taking the first steps. On the other hand, and with Wi-Fi at that time, in particular in Moscow, it was tight. But besides browsing, communicating via Skype, Gtalk and Jabber (that is, besides those functions that required the Internet), you could do a lot of things on these devices, such as typing, listening to music, FM radio, watching videos. So offline these internet tablets weren't so useless. Yes, by the way, all three devices were equipped with GPS-modules.
But in the same 2007 (June 29), Apple introduced its first iPhone, and Nokia apparently understood that even though it is moving with its Internet tablets in the right direction, in the details of the IT trend, especially in the user interface Apple has clearly outpaced it. Nokia thought about its Internet tablets, and thought about it until September 2009, when Nokia N900 was introduced to the Nokia World on the Maemo5 operating system, which was supposed to come on Nokia's flagship smartphones instead of Symbian. The N900 was a direct descendant of the Nokia Internet tablets, with the only difference being that a sim card slot finally appeared in it and now it was a device, among other things, a smartphone. In addition, the Maemo5 interface has been dramatically redesigned in comparison with previous versions of Maemo. To observe the chronology, we mention right away that while Nokia thought, Google, which bought Android Inc. in 2005, in October 2008, together with T-Mobile and HTC, released the first smartphone on Android 1.0.
nokia n900 russian video test
Hands On Nokia N900
By the time the N900 was released, by most parameters it was ahead of all existing mobile devices by several steps. There was no multitasking in iOS yet (it will only appear in version 4.xx, released in 2010), and in Maemo5 multitasking was full-fledged, as in desktop operating systems, such as in Android, for example, and still does not exist. The protocols Skype, Gtalk, Facebook and others were stitched out of the box in Maemo5. The N900 browser supported not only the notorious Flash, but also opened the pages in their full, desktop version. The N900 was equipped with a 5 megapixel camera, and in the iPhone 3Gs - the actual model at the time - the camera was 3.2 megapixels. The 3.5-inch N900 display (a clear influence of the iPhone, since previous models of Nokia Internet tablets had a 4.1-inch display), although not capacitive, but resistive, but it also had a record resolution of 800x480 at that time (especially for 3.5 inch displays). Finally, in N900, the file structure was opened, that is, the user could copy from his computer to the N900 and back whatever he wanted, using not only the Nokia PC Suite, but also the familiar file manager, or Explorer. In short, the N900 was a full-fledged pocket computer, in addition to everything else, with a qwerty keyboard.
For the sake of truth, I must say that the N900 had some drawbacks compared to the same iPhone. The main disadvantage: the N900 display did not support multi-touch gestures, that is, a picture or page in the browser could not be scaled by the famous Jobs Gesture. Instead, a hardware volume control rocker was used for scaling in the Gallery, and in the browser besides it and double taping into the text area, the page could be scaled with a circular motion of a finger across the display clockwise or counterclockwise, a gesture that did not catch on at all. In addition, the “boxed” version of Maemo5 did not support MMS messages, and the interface of both Maemo5 itself and most of the built-in applications (with the exception of the phone and the browser) did not suggest a vertical scanning mode. On the other hand, these last two circumstances were rather not flaws, but individual, characteristic features of the N900, due to the positioning and form factor of the device, like an Internet tablet with a physical qwerty keyboard. Yes, and also: the N900 had a built-in infrared port! In general, although a specific, but very cool was the gadget. Perhaps it is the coolest at all in the whole history of gadget building.
Exit N900 was accompanied by a large-scale advertising campaign, the slogan of which was (neither more nor less): “The revolution begins!” But just a few months later, in February 2010, Nokia unexpectedly turned this revolution around, announcing the closure of the Maemo project and its merger with another Linux project developed by Intel and called Moblin. As a result of this merger, after about a year, the multiplatform operating system MeeGo should have appeared. Multiplatform was understood to mean support for both ARM architecture and x86 architecture, that is, the ability to install MeeGo on any hardware platform, from computers and media players built into cars, to smartphones, laptops and desktop computers.
Why was it necessary to close Maemo with a loud voice, while Symbian was significantly inferior to Maemo by the convenience of the user interface? - unclear. I'm not talking about the fact that at the time of the merger with Moblin, Maemo existed in the 5th version of the assembly, four commercial models of devices worked on it. And Moblin existed only in version 1.0 for netbooks and version 2.1 for smartphones, and nowhere, except for engineering samples, was noticed. That is, in essence, this merger was, to put it mildly, not equivalent.
This merger may have been related to the Moorestown mobile hardware platform that Intel was developing at the time. In January 2010, that is about a month before the announcement of the merger of Maemo and Moblin into the MeeGo project, a sample of the LG GW990 smartphone, which worked on the Moorestown hardware platform and the Moblin operating system, was presented at CES. That is, it is possible that Moorestown was supposed to be a “stone” for MeeGo. However, I make a reservation once again, this is only an assumption based on chronological coincidence - on the one hand, the merger of Maemo and Moblin, and on the other, with the announcements of Moorestown. Officially, there is no evidence of a direct connection between Moorestown and MeeGo. Anyway, Moorestown, which was announced for the summer of 2010, did not appear on the commercial market.
LG GW990 Intel Moorestown Atom Smartphone
Nokia promised to release the first devices on MeeGo as early as the end of 2010, and at the beginning of 2011, it was also announced that the update to MeeGo would also receive the N900. During this period, despite the announcement of the closure of the Maemo project, Nokia released three official firmware updates for the N900, thoroughly improving both its functionality and the interface. Third-party developers created many applications, and for the most part, these were not ordinary user applications (clients of social networks, editors, etc., although such applications for Maemo also exist in quite a sufficient number), but various utilities with a narrow professional focus, from programmer to medical). Exact statistics on the number of applications for Maemo, - no. But I think at least a couple of tens of thousands of applications for Maemo5 are available in ovi.store and repositories, and maybe even more.
Smartphone Brain Scanner
Nokia N900 + USB Flash Drive: copy 1.46 GB movie
MyPaint for Nokia N900
Nokia N900 - WebOs games
Aircrack on Nokia N900
Shadow guardian hd
SunVox on Nokia N900
CarMan on Nokia N900
Sygic Mobile Maps 10 on the Nokia N900
Quake 3 on Nokia N900
Nokia N900 USB Mouse host mode
Nokia N900 VNC application
In addition, the Maemo community released several versions of unofficial firmware (CSSU) Maemo5, which provided the N900 with a full-fledged vertical interface and taught, for example, the camera to shoot video at 720p resolution and at 30 fps (out of the N900 box, shot 800x480 video and speed of 24 fps). The single-core N900 OMAP 3430 ARM Cortex A8 processor, which worked at a factory frequency of 600Mg, was overclocked to an operating frequency of 1 GHz, and up to a maximum of 1.7 GHz. And which operating systems were not installed on the N900 by enthusiasts, from webOS and Android of various versions to MacOS, Debian and Windows from version 3.1 to the latest, 7th version.
N900 CSSU review (May 2012)
Record 720P on N900
N900 Running 4 Operating Systems
Nokia N900 dual booting Maemo 5 and Android
Windows 95 working on Nokia N900
Ubuntu 12.04 running on N900 with U-boot
Mac OS X 10.3 on Nokia N900
Windows NT 4.0 running on Nokia N900
N900 running Windows 3.11 in Dosbox
In the fall of 2010, Alien Dalvik was announced for Maemo, which was supposed to allow installing, running and working on the N900 with any Android applications directly from Maemo5. But the application did not become available to users. Although the fact that this is not a fake - for sure. YouTube has a compelling video demonstrating how Photoshop for Android works on the HTC Android device and the N900. In addition, in January 2011, the application was submitted by Myriad at the MWC in Barcelona, ​​and it was announced not only for Maemo, but also for MeeGo.
Myriad alien dalvik
About MeeGo itself at that time almost nothing was heard, except, perhaps, the announcement of the test installation of this operating system in BMW cars, and several posts on specialized programming forums that, say, the work on MeeGo is poorly organized and Most likely, nothing will really come out of this project. But, as regards the Nokia device directly on MeeGo to the Internet, stirring interest in the future product, from time to time informal images of the smartphone leaked out. On the most plausible of them, the gadget was a side slider with a qwerty keyboard that looked like a pocket version of the MacBookPro.
Meanwhile, in September 2010, new CEO Stephen Elop came to Nokia, a man with a very impressive track record: he spent 7 years in various positions, including executive director at legendary Macromedia, after having been merged by Macromedia and Adobe Systems for about a year for operations abroad, Adobe Systems, then transferred as chief operating officer (also about a year) at Juniper Networks, and then at Microsoft, where for two years, up to appointment to Nokia, he was responsible (no less, not a little) for promotion products whether neyki Microsoft Office.
The first wake-up call about the fate of MeeGo was made a month after his arrival at Nokia, when the company was left by the vice-president, who oversaw the development of the MeeGo device, Ari Yaksi. However, Nokia said that its departure will not affect the timing of the release of the company's first MeeGo smartphone. As proof of this statement, in November 2010, the first MeeGo test firmware for the N900 was released. But it worked so badly out of hand that, in fact, the first appearance of the first Nokia smartphone on MeeGo was hardly believed. Neither at the end of 2010 nor at the beginning of 2011 such a smartphone has ever appeared.
N900 y MeeGo 1.1
And in early February 2011, Stephen Elop published on the corporate website of Nokia his famous letter, in which he compared the company with a man, suddenly we would wake up and realized that he was on a burning oil platform in the middle of the ocean. And, they say, this man has only two ways out: either to burn, stay on the platform, or jump from the platform into the ocean. The hero of the parable of Elop chose the second option and, as a result, survived. Elop offered Nokia to do the same. At the same time, what exactly he had in mind, clearly was not. The letter also stated that in the modern IT world not only devices and even operating systems became crucial, but ecosystems, such as Apple’s iTunce, and it was also stated that Symbian was uncompetitive, and on MeeGo Nokia can not make their main bet, although still does not give up plans to release a smartphone on this OS. To what Elop was driven, partly became clear literally two days later, when on February 11, 2011, Nokia and Microsoft announced the conclusion of a long-term cooperation agreement.
However, in confirmation of the words about the relevance of plans to release at least one device on MeeGo, in March 2011 MeeGo 1.2 firmware for Nokia N900 was released. Those who were not lazy and installed it, it became even less clear why Nokia refused to work, and in a year and a half Maemo5 also developed thoroughly. And this version of MeeGo was so slow that in the near future the release of the device on MeeGo stopped believing completely. Can Nokia make sense to return to Maemo? - Members of fan forums dedicated to Maemo were asking, but the answer was silence. Nokia, meanwhile, has been developing the design of new smartphones for the Windows Phone 7 software platform.
MeeGo 1.2 Developer Edition for Nokia N900 Review
And so, in mid-June, Nokia unexpectedly announced the presentation of the first and only MeeGo-smartphone as part of the Nokia Connection 2011 in Singapore - they say the device was ready and despite the strategic plans to switch to the Windows Phone platform, the company decided to release. It also turned out that it would not be a side slider with a qwerty-keyboard, but a candy bar with a touch screen, which in this case did not have a single button. As for the photos of the side slider that flashed on the network, it turned out to be a direct descendant of the N900, a device with the serial number N950, which, however, will not be available for sale, but will be released in limited edition solely for free distribution among software developers for software platform MeeGo Harmattan.
With the N950, which judging by the information leaked in the media, at first it was supposed to become a Nokia smartphone on MeeGo, somehow not everything met. The question is, why release a separate smartphone for software developers for a platform that they decided not to develop? Well, if we assume that he was just ready and was released only for that, then why not release it for sale, and give it to the developers for free? Yes, of course, the commercial potential of devices with a qwerty-keyboard is not too large, but far from negligible. Qwerty has its fans, besides, the models in this form factor are literally units, so there are no models, and sales of the N950 in any case would hardly have failed. Or, in fact, it was all a cunning marketing device: to release an inaccessible product, thus making it desirable, and eventually cult-like?
But back to the commercial model, the monoblock N9. The IT industry has never seen such smartphones in its own century, though not at all: not by the materials used, nor by the design, nor by the concept of the software platform, nor by the user interface. In theory, it is products like N9 that are called the buzzword: innovative. The body of the smartphone was cut from a single piece of unpretentious, not easily soiled and at the same time durable polycarbonate. Covered with a protective Gorilla Glass AMOLED display with a hitherto unprecedented 3.9-inch diagonal was slightly convex (however, this is from a practical point of view, despite the display security, rather, a minus). But most importantly, on the frontal surface of the N9 there were no buttons at all. That is, on the right side, of course, there was a traditional volume rocker and an on / off key, but only the display occupied the entire frontal surface.
If Android largely inherited the concept of user interface from iOS, the MeeGo Harmattan interface was also clearly inspired by Maemo5, only now the Active Application Manager is not an intermediate (cloud-like) space between desktops and the installed applications panel, but one of the desktops. In total, MeeGo Harmattan has three of them: the screen of running applications, the screen of installed applications and the personal notification screen where messages from various social networks user accounts, RSS subscriptions, calendar, as well as notifications of missed calls, SMS messages or chat messages are collected: Gtalk , Skype, Facebook, etc.
All control in MeeGo Harmattann is performed using a single sliding gesture, or a swipe gesture, which collapses open applications into the Active Application Manager (when swiping along the display from right to left, left to right, or bottom to top), or closing it (when swiping from above way down). All touch keys, for example the return key to the previous page, are located in the interface of the applications if necessary.
However, even this interface difference between MeeGo Harmattan and all other mobile software platforms (Android ICS, in which the three functional buttons became part of the OS touch interface, was released only in October 2011), was the main one. The main thing was that MeeGo Harmattan was both a closed and open operating system. Imagine that the notorious Jilbreak is sewn into iOS as one of its regular options. That is, if the user wants to have a full-fledged open OS in the smartphone with access to the file structure, repositories of unofficial applications, the terminal, etc., then he only switches one touch toggle switch. If he wants to develop software for the OS at all, he already installs special applications (utilities and libraries available for download right there) in the open OS mode and gets access to the complete OS assembly with all the tools necessary for its modification. If the user (a typical housewife, for example) does not need all these geek pranks, then he doesn’t have to do anything - by default, in the “boxed” version, the N9 came with a closed version of MeeGo Harmattan.
N9 went on sale far from all countries. For example, it was not officially sold in the United States, although it could, of course, be ordered from Europe through online stores. In Russia, where the N900 was in demand, the output of the N9 was even accompanied by a short advertising campaign, which, however, at best only leveled the negative effect from the statements of the Nokia management about the actual refusal of further OS development. On the other hand, for the sake of truth, it is worth noting that after the release of the N9, Nokia announced that it would release at least 2-3 firmware updates for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, making a total of more than 3,500 changes to the system, and bringing it to a full-fledged state. ready distribution. After that, MeeGo Harmattan will completely switch to the status of open source software and will be developed by third-party developers. Another thing is that new devices on MeeGo Harmattan, Nokia is really not planned. Actually, with Maemo5 a year and a half before, Nokia also acted, bringing the platform to firmware 1.3, and then completely transferring it to third-party developers from the Maemo community.
Immediately, it should be said that on closer inspection, MeeGo Harmattan turned out to be not quite MeeGo. The fact is that MeeGo adopted the standard for the expansion of the installation packages. Rpm, and in MeeGo Harmattan the installation packages have the extension. Deb, the same as in Maemo5. That is, in fact and strictly speaking, MeeGo Harmattan is rather Maemo6, although it has partial compatibility with MeeGo sources.
Shortly after the release of N9, Intel, following Nokia, announced that it would not further develop the MeeGo project. And all the developments on MeeGo, it was decided to merge into a new project, initiated by Intel and Samsung. This project was named Tizen. At the moment, the first device on Tizen Samsung promises to release at the end of this year. In part, under this operating system, Intel created a hardware platform, Medfield, which is a continuation of the Moorestown hardware platform, which did not take place on the commercial market. However, the first engineering samples of the device on the "stone" Medfield while running Android. This spring they were even brought to the demonstration Moscow.
But back to Nokia, which, after the release of the N9, began to prepare its first smartphone on Windows Phone 7. Soon, the company introduced two win-winds at once: Lumia 800 and Lumia 710, and if the latter was more or less original, then Lumia 800 Externally, it was a complete copy of the N9 with the only difference that it had three functional touch buttons needed to control the Windows Phone platform, and the display, respectively, was not 3.9, but 3.7 inches. At the same time, the Lumia 800 did not have a front camera, and Windows Phone 7.5 did not support NFC. I seem to have forgotten to mention above that, among other innovations in the N9, there was also an NFC chip; I'm afraid to make a mistake, but it is possible that the N9 was the first smartphone supporting this technology. For comparison: Windows Phone only in the 8th version will start to support NFC.
At the time of the release of N9 for sale in ovi.store there were not many more than 1 thousand applications for MeeGo Harmattan. However, largely due to the distribution of the developer device N950, the number of applications grew quite rapidly. There is no exact statistics on the number of applications at the moment, but I think that at least 10 thousand applications are currently available for MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. Unlike the N900, for the N9 applications are mostly custom.
In late January 2012, Nokia released a solid update for MeeGo Harmattan. Now users have the opportunity to create folders for application shortcuts on the screen of installed applications, support for DLNA technology has appeared, the interface for working with text has been significantly improved, the Gallery has the ability to trim video clips, etc. In general, it was clear that Nokia did not abandon MeeGo, and even though in Finnish, slowly, but systematically finish the innovative OS.
Moreover, the Nokia Belle update for Symbian ^ 3 smartphones was released in February, including for the camera phone N8. So, most of this update was rewritten to the source code of MeeGo Harmattan, which suggests a movement to merge Symbian and Maemo-MeeGo. How realistic this is, and which interface will result in it as a result, is difficult to imagine. At the same time, the spike gesture from MeeGo Harmattan partially migrated to the budget line of touchscreen smartphones Nokia Asha, which the company presented in early June 2012. In early July 2012, PR1.3 update for Nokia N9 smartphones was released. There were no fundamental innovations in this firmware, but in general, optimization and power consumption were improved.
What is remarkable, for the N950 official update PR1.3 did not appear. Only in the middle of August 2012, an unofficial firmware PR 1.3 appeared on the torrent for this developer device, and Nokia denies involvement in this firmware. At the same time, starting from May 2012, in the repositories of Maemo.org for the N950, the NeMo Linux build, which is part of the Mer project, is available for testing. Build Nemo is also available for the N900. The future of this project is still unknown. The official Nokia about this, of course, is completely silent.
Nemo Mobile "0.20120614.1.NEMO.2012-07-02.1" running on Nokia N900
After the N9 went on sale, the NITDroid project, which had previously been porting Android to various versions on the N900, started developing the Android ICS distribution for the N9 and N950. At the moment, enthusiasts from NITDroid have developed not only the ICS distribution kit for the N9 and N950, but also a dual-Boot bootloader, which allows you to simultaneously have two operating systems on your smartphone and download one or another depending on the need (for example, all kinds of games in PlayMarket for Android significantly more than MeeGo games in ovi.store, although ovi.store has an emulator for the main game consoles, so by installing it and downloading it to the appropriate game folder, you can ponostalgate by playing the hits of past years).
Android ICS on Nokia N9
As for Nokia's wine backgrounds, after the new year, the company released two more smartphone models on Windows Phone 7.5. One of them is the budget model Lumia 610, on which a special Windows Phone Tango operating system optimized for minimalistic hardware was installed. Some applications, such as Skype and a number of games from the Marketplace on the Lumia 610, do not work, primarily because they are not designed for 256 MB of RAM. By the way, this budget Lumia 610 is about the same as the N900 is now, - from time to time the remnants of this miracle device still appear in online stores.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/149913/
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