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So two thoughts about iPad:

1. I hate Flash. With a tremendous passion. It is a bug-ridden, resource-hungry abomination that has encouraged bad design to proliferate around the web. That said, if you have a “wicked fast” processor, especially one that isn’t “wasting” cycles on things like managing the overhead of multitasking, there’s no excuse not to have Flash. By all means, leave it off by default – I know, I would – but the choice to not have Flash should be up to the user, not Apple.
2. The more I look at iPhone OS X, the more convinced I am that Apple’s perfect OS in Steve Jobs’ – or whomever is running the OS side of things – mind was System 7. If you’ve never had the … pleasure of running an OS that was not multitasking or multithreaded, you’ve not enjoyed the fun that we System 7 users had; a “favourite” memory that comes to mind is of waiting for minutes or hours for Word or Clarisworks to spool a print job. It was enough to push me to Windows and leave me firmly there until OS X 10.3 “Panther” came out.

In short, let’s say I have a budget of about $1000. I can get for $829 an iPad, with 1GHz ARM processor, 64GB of storage, a 9.7″ screen, a lot of nifty sensors, a 3G radio and the ability to run one task at a time. Or, for $999 – or $799, if you’re shopping at Microcenter these days – I could get a MacBook, with a 2.0GHz dual core x86 processor (remember here the law of x86 inevitability), a 13.3″ screen, 160GB of storage, a beautiful multi-touch trackpad, and the ability to run an absolutely arbitrary number of apps. Oh, and, let’s not forget, I could use Flash on sites where I didn’t have Flashblock running. To me this is a no-brainer: go for the MacBook. You’re trading off a 3G radio*, a bunch of sensors, some amount of portability and some 3 hours of runtime, for a lot more computing power, more storage and the ability to multitask. I’m sure there are people for whom the iPad makes sense. I’m not one of them.

*: Given that WAN is powered by AT&T, it’s highly debatable you actually have a 3G radio. The last conversation I had with an AT&T rep had this choice line from me: “I’ve lived in countries where the annual income is less than what you take home in a week, and they had better networks than you can dream of.”

I found that there are a whole bunch of articles shared by various people on Twitter that I wanted to comment on, but with more than 140 characters. Plus, I come across some pretty interesting posts on Google Reader every so often, and I often find I want to write a response. So this is going to be a semi-occasional roundup of various such articles.

1. Via @atmasphere comes Marketers salivating over smartphone potential: Actually I suspect the apparent willingness to see mobile has less to do with what they’ve identified and more to do with: (a) there’s no irritating, resource-intensive Flash ads on most phones, so people’s desire to tune them out hasn’t kicked in as strongly yet; and, (b) there’s no Adblock for most of these phones yet. Once these ads start slowing phones down and eating through the capped data plans causing overage and grief for users, this will change quickly.
2. Saw what is probably the definitive guide to available-in-the-US e-readers over at dealnews.com. While there are a ton more readers out there if you’re willing to look at importers, this is a pretty exhaustive comparison of the various options out there. The thing that I find most interesting about this is how all the screens are 6″ or larger (basically). I, for one, would welcome an e-book reader roughly the shape and size of a traditional mass-market paperback book.
3. Engadget is reporting on the Symbian app store, joining such stores as the Android, Apple, Blackberry and Nokia stores. And in the last of that list lies the nub: given that just about the only people who use Symbian extensively is Nokia, why is there such a duplication of effort? Let Symbian licence the Nokia store for use on any Symbian-powered devices, if the legalities are a problem. This is just a tremendous waste of resources.
4. Via @bperry comes Mobile first: I agree with the the author’s first two points. Mobile use is skyrocketing, and mobile screen real estate is limited and websites designed for mobile devices are often clearer and more function-oriented than their desktop-bound counterparts. But I disagree with the observation that mobile platforms are more functional; in fact, that’s the biggest challenge in designing for mobile devices has always been the huge disparities in device capabilities. Even if you look at the two platforms currently hogging mindshare – iPhone OS and Android – device capabilities are hugely different. The original iPhone doesn’t have a GPS at all; the 3G has a GPS, but no compass. The Android devices offer multiple resolutions. More to the point, these two platforms occupy a very small market share and if you expand your audience to the entire mobile spectrum – feature phones and smart phones – then good luck getting anything beyond the most minimal of pages up.

A year or so ago, I came across a book by Cory Doctorow called “Eastern Standard Tribe“; how I came across it is a story for another day. The underlying story involved groups of competing “tribes” that run on the same time compete to ensure success for their tribe – so people in EST would compete against the Greenwich Mean Tribe and so on. While that was an interesting plotline in itself, the notion that most attracted my attention was the idea of working wherever there was a broadband connection.

Thus, I was fascinated to learn that people are already doing that, today.

If I was Jan Chipchase, I’d probably ask “What are the legal implications of not having a mailing address for your business? How is productivity measured? How is sensitive information kept quiet – or not?”

If I was a cynic, I’d say “Hey Washington Post – that’s what freelancers and consultants have been doing for years decades!”

Since I’m me – I say interesting, but what happens when your laptop’s battery dies?

I was taking a look at the release plans for the next few releases of Symbian, when I started to wonder about the possibility of Symbian becoming a more portable system than it is right now. So I wonder what the answers are to a few questions:

1. Can end-users backport whatever release of Symbian is current to an older phone? I’m thinking, in particular of my Nokia N80, which other than being memory challenged and slow, both of which can be rectified by optimization, would be an excellent device to run new releases of Symbian on. Or, can the E71, another phone that has made quite a splash, be upgraded to the latest version of Symbian when it is released?
2. Are there any non-technical reasons that Symbian could not be used elsewhere? For example – one of the crazy ideas I had a few years ago was a digital photo frame that ran Symbian; could a manufacturer use Symbian with no restrictions as one might use, say, Linux or BSD?
3. How much help will the Symbian Foundation give to these porting efforts? I assume that they have an interest in seeing Symbian everywhere – how will they help to increase the number of platforms that can run Symbian? For example, if I wanted to develop a camera that had WiFi and ran Symbian, would there be hep available to develop such a specialized Symbian release? Could it be updated every six months as new releases of Symbian were developed?
4. Related to the above, can Symbian be taken apart, module by module, so I could only take what I wanted? And will the Symbian Foundation develop them to basically run in the absence of any other unrelated modules, or will the release basically be “this is the whole thing, it runs as is, good luck!”

I’m intrigued by the new Symbian, but I find myself wondering what the future of Symbian might be, even as open-source software, since Symbian is now competing with a number of free or close to free mobile operating systems: Android, Moblin, LiMo, and Nokia’s own Maemo come to mind. And we’ve seen how quickly new operating systems like Android have collected applications, while the latest version of Symbian (Nokia’s S60 5th Edition) is still struggling with a shortage of software. This is despite the insular nature of the Android platform which requires significant reworking on the part of developers to run problem free on Android. I’m still hopeful, right now, that Symbian has a long future ahead of it, but as the English say, Symbian lives in interesting times.

Via Slashdot, I came across this Network World article suggesting that it was time to stop building out wired network infrastructure and focus on building wireless networks instead. Some thoughts:

1. I am not at all surprised that the vast majority of consumers are perfectly happy with wireless networks. The fact is, that unless you are doing something that is extremely data-intensive, or live in a place with interference, wireless networks provide a perfectly acceptable network experience. Indeed, a short test a few weeks ago revealed that wireless portion of the D-Link DIR-655 that is the core of my home network isn’t even close to being saturated, despite my best efforts to cause sufficient congestion to slow things down. The fact is, like the Intel Atom is often sufficient for computing, 802.11g is often sufficient for networking.
2. In addition, wireless networking is a very convenient thing – so much easier than dragging a 10-30meter cord from your connection socket to the back of your computer. Since Ubuntu 6.06LTS “Dapper Drake”, Windows XP Service Pack 2, and Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar”, came out, it’s become a lot easier to connect to wireless networks than it used to be – I remember struggling to get a Windows 2000 machine connected to wireless networks back in high school and remember rejoicing when I managed to get my Windows XP SP1 college laptop connected to wireless for the first time.
3. On the other hand, I find myself moving towards a more wired network. Things like my Xbox 360, which were quite contentedly running on wireless until recently, have been switched over to wired. While the statistics show that there was no measurable difference in latency between the wired and wireless connection, there seems to be a human perceivable change (>10ms) in the responsiveness of network-related operations, particularly things like logging into Xbox Live. I’m tempted to attribute this to better code in the wired section of the networking code.
4. Moreover, I’ve slowly become a little more paranoid about the security implications of wireless networks. While WEP had been cracked as far back as 2001, and WPA followed soon thereafter, attacks weren’t practicable until recently. Moore’s Law has made it possible to compute WEP and WPA keys in less than a minute.  That’s frightening. Thus, I’ve been on WPA2-PSK for a while now. While I would love to implement 802.1x authentication, I’ve come to realize that basically most of the home entertainment devices (certainly, the Xbox 360, for example) does not support 802.1x authentication – and there are no plans to bring it over to those devices. Thus WPA2-Enterprise is out of the question.

Thus given the options (possibly insecure wireless, secure wireless with many unsupported devices, secure wired), I’ve chosen the least effort option and started wiring the house. There’s still a ways to go until every device is connected via wires, but until someone finds a truly unbreakable wireless networking system, and it is universally supported, I’ll go the 19th century way with wires.

One of the pretty nifty new features of Ubuntu 9.04 is its global notification system. Just like Growl for Mac OS (and clone Snarl for Windows), this basically creates a single, unified, neat little notification system that shows up in one spot on the desktop. Not only does this cut down on clutter significantly (just take a look at the mess that is the Windows task tray notifications, if you don’t believe me), but it also makes the whole OS less intrusive, yet highly communicative.

It got me thinking, though, about a universal notification system – as in, for every computing thing in the world. That includes things like “Machine with MAC ID 00:11:22:33:44:55 (‘Varun-Nangias-Mac’) connected to the router” to “Updates available”. In fact, most of the messages (“New SMS on Blackberry”, “Printer on fire”, “New Yahoo! IM from Kats Gupta“, etc.) all fit in 140 characters. Sure you could have longer messages but for the most part, 140 characters is more than enough to communicate the jist of the message and to provide a no-nonsense summary of the event; if you really need more information, you should be able to take further action on by looking up a syslog, or the requisite application. And putting this information in an RSS feed or a Twitter-like stream on the Internet means that it’s easily accessible from almost any device with a web browser.

Given that Laconi.ca already exists and can be deployed to your own server, basically what is missing is software that links clients to the Laconica backend. Ubuntu and Mac OS already have most of that support – the notification systems can forward events that they receive. Windows support is sort of there in the form of Snarl (though very, very few applications use it). A J2ME application is needed for the vast majority of phones out there; an Android phone can have this sort of background daemon running all the time, anyway. Apple would likely need to build some sort of support into its push notification system in order for iPhones to mimic this functionality.

Put all of this together, and you’ve suddenly got a way to aggregate your digital life into a single, very easy, stream of information. Add the ability to respond to certain events via replies (ex.: “Updates available. Reply ‘install’ to install available updates”) and the cost of your remote management system has dropped to pretty much zero. How cool would that be?

If you believe the hype, electronic paper (“e-paper”) displays are going to take over the world. Unlike traditional emissions-based displays like LCD screens, or CRT screens, e-paper displays reflect light and thus look exactly like a piece of paper does. The huge advantage of such a display is that it only draws power when it is changing and that it (supposedly) is easier on human eyes, as it does not flicker and has a wider viewing angle. The Amazon Kindle and the Kindle 2 are the first mainstream e-paper based devices I’ve seen in the U.S. – though e-paper based gadgets have been available commercially ever since the Sony Librie came out in 2004. These are my thoughts about the Kindle 2.

A cousin of mine has the original Kindle. The device was a weirdly shaped wedge, and in the few minutes I had to play with it, I found much to criticize with regard to its industrial design, but I also held out hope that the next generation of the Kindle might have a better designed future. He also was not entirely happy with the catalog of books available, but in browsing the catalog myself, I found that a majority of the books that I am interested in were indeed available in the Kindle shop; since then, the Kindle online shop has only increased in size, though the genres from which books are available have not increased dramatically. Thus, if you’re a science fiction buff, then you’re going to enjoy the Kindle’s selection; a more mainstream fiction person is likely not to enjoy the Kindle store much – and good luck finding any Harry Potter on the Kindle, legitimately.

In its opening letter to you on the Kindle, Amazon states that its goal is to make the Kindle disappear as you’re reading – that they would like you to think of the Kindle as you would any book. After reading a few books on it, I realized that they had largely succeeded. It takes me a few minutes to get into the mode of reading it, but after I do, it goes a lot faster. There are, however, some important caveats that make it possible:

• First, I have always been comfortable reading from a screen – in college, and even to some extent before that, in high school, I was equally happy reading from a screen or from a piece of paper; many people are not.
• Second, I choose to use the Kindle at its smallest font size, which gives approximately the same number of lines on screen as a page from a mass market paperback, meaning my brain accepts the switch reasonably easily; on the other hand, when I was using the Kindle with its default font size (about four points larger), I was getting frustrated how quickly I ran out of text. If I were able to adjust the line spacing slightly down, the Kindle would likely be indistinguishable from the layout of a mass market paperback, but it works closely enough that my brain doesn’t bother distinguishing the two.
• Finally, I do not write in my books or printouts. Call me old-fashioned if you must, but I grew up in a household where murder was less of a crime than writing in books, and I refuse to write in books, or bend their pages to make a bookmark and so on; it pains me to see people scribbling in their books, and I wince if I should end up with a copy of a book that someone else has written in (hence why I rarely, if ever, buy used books). Those heathens of you who do write in your books, however, will find it painful to annotate with the Kindle.

So, there is a target audience that the Kindle can fill the needs of very well. Certainly, it is not yet ready to have replaced the 20 kilos of books and laptop that I was carrying around in college, but it is an important stepping stone on the way to that dream being fulfilled.

Amazon has also gone out of its way (some, including myself, would say intrusively so) to make buying books easy on the Kindle; pressing Menu at any time pops up a menu with “Shop in the Kindle Store” selected by default. From there you can search by starting to type, or by browsing through the Kindle’s quarter of a million books, or hundred odd periodicals. Buying is as easy as clicking Buy; in fact, the combination of a slightly stiff and unresponsive directional pad and Amazon’s decision to make “Buy” the default selection has caused me to buy at least a couple of books accidentally. (I should note here that you are, as always, reliant on Amazon’s continued goodwill in order to return those accidentally bought books). Nonetheless, the store is easy to use, is very convenient (at least, in areas with a Sprint signal) and encourages people to buy books the same way that they would in a bookstore.

Of course, there is a lot more content that is out of copyright, and more recently, available under copyleft licences. Through the Kindle’s free internet browser, a quick visit to a site like freekindlebooks.org or feedbooks.com will net you thousands of out of copyright books, stories and the like – all downloaded directly to your Kindle through the magic of Sprint’s wireless network. More problematic is modern content available under a copyleft licence. For example, one of my favourite modern sci-fi stories, Charles Stross‘ Accelerando, is a collection of nine short stories, all available under a Creative Commons licence, and freely available from accelerando.org. However: 1) Amazon sells a $8 copy in the Kindle store; and 2) Stross does not offer a Kindle optimized file (nor can you, legally, create one, as Stross prohibits creating derivative works); I resorted to sending my Kindle the HTML file and tracking through the story that way, a most unpleasant way of doing so (it also shows me as the author, which is flattering, but wrong).

On the other hand, getting Cory Doctorow‘s Eastern Standard Tribe was as simple as browsing over to Doctorow’s site and downloading the Kindle-optimized file. A proper directory of Kindle-optimized modern stories under a copyleft licence would be very helpful. And I’m guessing that it may even be in Amazon’s interest to establish and provide this directory as it would provide an alternative content stream for their device. Simply adding native PDF reading ability would solve a huge usability gap – even the modern Sony Readers have that ability, and it’s truly a sad day when Sony, that bastion of proprietary formats, has a more open device than any Amazon, a supposedly web- and standard- friendly Internet company.

Ultimately, it’s hard to know exactly what to do with the Kindle – and that comes from someone whose needs are met by the Kindle. As someone who is willing to suspend some of the disbelief that this is not paper, the Kindle 2 is an excellent reading device: light, high contrast and sporting easy access to an extensive content library. To be sure, the always-on connection helps tremendously – it means that I can look up a term on the go (ever tried to read a Neal Stephenson novel?), and download my next book as soon as I finish one. That said, even I, an enthusiastic early adopter, have some reservations with the device itself.

First the form factor is awkward. I would happily forgo the keyboard, or accept a tiny little keypad ala Blackberry, for a much smaller, thicker device. Something physically the size of a paper back, even one of the larger trade paperbacks, would not simply be an easier form factor to carry, it would also make it a little easier to mentally accept the Kindle as a book replacement. Second (and I know this would push the Kindle from book-replacement to full-fledged computer), the OS leaves something to be desired in the customization department. For example, to get to the browser (easily the most used experimental function), I have to go to the device home, click Menu, go down several options to “Experimental” (no easy thing when the screen refresh is so slow) and only then can I open the browser – by which I’ve forgotten what term it was that I was searching for in Wikipedia. Meanwhile, that “Shop in Kindle Store” function is in every menu, sitting unused except for moments when I’m actually interested in buying a book.

Finally, there’s the question of why Kindle the device exists at all. At this moment, I have a very fine little Kindle app on my iPhone, and I cannot help but think that Kindle for Android-based phones, J2ME phones and the like are not very far behind. While those applications certainly lack the all of the Kindle’s features (like shopping in the Kindle store), those are certainly things that can be added to future revisions of the Kindle software. And there are certainly some very compelling reasons to use those existing devices, not the least of which is that they already exist and already have a huge marketplace presence. The Kindle adds yet one more device to carry (and in an uncomfortable form factor at that), and while I go back and forth on the one device or many device argument, a book reader is not one of those additional devices that I would want to necessarily carry – no matter how nicely designed or what advanced screen technology may lie within.

While I don’t doubt Kindle 3 is coming, the only question I have for Amazon is: will the Kindle 3 be the last dedicated device? Because from where I sit, Amazon seems to have solved the most vexing e-book problem of all (content) and is now merely creating more problems by continuing to insist everyone carry yet one more device. There’s a limit to the number of pockets that I have – and I’m not sure the Kindle 2 has earned its own pocket on its own merits. But it is pretty cool to be the first on the block with the future of displays and to have a device that can go weeks between charges.

I keep mentioning Alastair Reynolds and his Revelation Space universe whenever I read and review a science fiction book or series. As you can probably see, I’m quite fond of his work, and for some reason, I just have never got around to publishing a review, though it’s been sitting in my drafts since 11th March, 2008. I tossed the old review, and started anew, since I’ve read a few more things since writing the review.

Let’s get this out of the way so you know my biases: Alastair Reynolds is, to date, my favourite author of science fiction and his Revelation Space universe is a compelling story, with characters that are both familiar and alien all at once.

In chronological order, the books are Chasm City, Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap; sprinkled throughout are the stories contained in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days and Galactic North. I have not yet read The Prefect; I’m waiting for the Ace paperback version so that the set matches up. The premise of Reynolds’ Lovecraftian science fiction horror is a case of Menschendämmerung – the twilight of man. Set mainly in the next thousand years, the universe is one where humans have split into many factions, the star-faring Ultras, the planet-hugging Demarchists, and the hive-minded Conjoiners, chief amongst them. The main arc of the Revelation Space universe relates the story of the human discovery of Inhibitors – a race of machines that silently seek out and destroy intelligent life. There are a few unique things about the Revelation Space Universe that are worth noting, however.

The first thing you need to know about the books is that Reynolds is an actual astrophysicist. As such, you will get into the nitty gritty of how the ships work, how some of the weapons function, and yes, even gravity will work as advertised. Mostly. So if you don’t have some idea of – or interest in reading about – the Casimir effect, or Brane theory, then you’ll likely find it slow going. And you must have some idea of the Fermi paradox to understand why Reynolds writes in the first place. He’s a scientist and is writing fiction to be able to explore some of the things he can’t publish in a peer-reviewed journal.

No matter. Reynolds writes in an extraordinarily straightforward manner. Sentences are precisely as long as they need to be to get the point across. You need not suffer Virginia Woolf-like run-ons, nor will you be left with incomplete thoughts, like many other authors (*cough*Vinge*cough*). It’s also a very culturally neutral story, as one would hope a sci-fi novel that talks about a world very fundamentally different from today. The nice thing about this aspect of the story is that having grown up in a non-Western culture and household, I don’t find myself running to look up some obscure biblical reference, or extinct gods or such. Excellent. I quite like it. Simmons, for example, requires an intimate familiarity with various Western pantheons, which is one of the reasons I’ve resisted reading Illium and Olympos, for fear of needing to stop and refer to Wikipedia constantly.

Second, because Reynolds is an actual astrophysicist, the universe obeys the same laws as our own: no causality violations, entropy still increases, and time doesn’t suddenly speed up and slow down. As an effect of this, Reynolds’ universe is slower than light. Plus side: humans routinely live a thousand years, both because of the effects of time dilation, and the development of hibernation. In many ways, the period it is set in is quite dystopian, with humans on their way out as a species. Unlike many such dystopian universes, it is also quite optimistic about humans and human chance for survival.

This all makes for a very compelling and very realistic story. Economic booms and economic busts exist and force distinct choices for the characters. Mucking about at slower than light speed means huge risks for traders – the technology a trader has spent a fortune bringing to the isolated worlds inhabited by humans may be obsolete before the trader gets there (similar to Vinge’s A Deepness in the Sky, but far more realistic in its implications). And space is big. Really big. It’s not like Star Trek or Star Wars big, where it takes a while, but you can still get there quickly enough if Scotty or Chewbacca tweaks the engines a little; it’s big the same way the distance from earth to the moon hasn’t been covered more than a dozen times by humans, or the way the Voyager probes have spent two decades in transit to the heliosheath.

I don’t really know what else I can say about the story without giving away large chunks of its plots. Suffice to say, humans make contact with this race of machines committed to eradicating intelligent life – and the humans are not entirely successful in their efforts to contain it. There’s also a dozen dead or hidden civilizations, and many mysteries that cannot be explained – and that Reynolds makes no attempt to explain, indeed. Unlike Simmons, Reynolds doesn’t make an attempt to tie up all loose ends – you’re left to figure out the various (non-human) races and their relationships to each other and the artifacts that humans encounter through space. If you search carefully through the web, you’ll find both on-going debates, and remainders of such debates, about the nature of various artifacts and their relationship to the story.

Ultimately, it’s that kind of story: Reynolds has created a universe, told the story of several important characters and their reactions to a major event in human history, and tossed it out for others to finish, either in their heads, or through fan fiction. It is almost certainly the most exhilarating new series I have read. I find myself both craving more and filling in the story in bits and pieces nearly nine months after I finished reading as insights into characters and events occur.

All I can say is this: read it. It’s amazing.

T-Mobile is my “choice” of carrier here in the US, inasmuch as one can have a choice in a closed and stagnating mobile telephony market like the US. Google is my choice of cloud computing platform – from email and IM to news and weather, I use Google. I have also been an ardent supporter of open-source solutions wherever possible. Thus the T-Mobile G1 phone, powered by Google’s Android, an open-source, Linux-based mobile platform sounded like a marriage of all my favourite things: Google, open-source, and T-Mobile. Toss in some Lego, and I think we’d be all set.

Coming from a background of Nokia S60 and, lately, the Apple iPhone, I am a power-user in many ways; except an instance of theft, and an instance of a lost SIM card, I have not been without a mobile phone since I first got one, the better part of a decade ago. What drew me first to the Nokia S60 platform was the applications – and the browser. My experience with the N80 were dismal; an awful in-warranty experience at Nokia’s NYC flagship convinced me of the folly of supporting a company that had no interest in supporting its users. While Apple has much of the same “thanks for the money, goodbye” mentality to its customers, both the community of Apple fans (rabid and otherwise) and the iPhone itself has over the months left me happy with the iPhone experience. That said, I am aware that few companies have the UI and hardware expertise of Apple and was willing to forgo some creature comforts in order to put my money where my mouth is: in open-source products. This is a review of the T-Mobile G1. It’s also a comparison, because I believe that Google has started a quiet revolution, that needs support, encouragement and criticism to make it truly the best product money can buy. (If you’re only interested in the bottom line, though, skip down to the antepenultimate paragraph – begins with “In its current form…”)

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I’m getting most of my news second-hand (and third-hand, really) from the inaugral Maemo Summit, but I hear that it went off reasonably well. What I gathered from Ari Jaaksi’s keynote is essentially that a number of my concerns about Maemo have been addressed.

Going back to my Maemo Diablo post that is to date the second most popular post on my blog, I find that a lot of the things on my checklist are at least being addressed. Without seeing the implementation, I can’t say whether my concerns will be alleviated, but it’s nice to know I’m not the only person who wants to see Maemo succeed. So a quick rundown of what I wanted and what we all got:

• Modest (har har) improvements in email – check.
• Faster browser – sort of inevitable, really.
• Where does Maemo stand in a newly, um, FOSS-ilizing company like Nokia: sort of. I’m still unconvinced Maemo is the future of Nokia, but knowing that this is not just a ten year experiment in FOSS is reasssuring. I would’ve liked to hear more about (and maybe I will as news trickles down in the forums and blog entries) how Maemo fits with the entire FOSS “ecosystem” at Nokia, including the new FOSS Symbian stack and such, but I understand why Nokia may be reluctant to talk medium-term plans.
• Usability – CHECK! Praise the lord and pass the ammunition!
• UI guidelines/UI excellence – even better, Nokia will help offer UX consulting. I could not ask for more.
• Application store – check. However, as good as it is that Nokia is offering such a store, it really needs to move aggressively to make the store work. Just today Android’s App Market went live, and that’s three months after the noisy arrival of the iPhone/iPod Touch App Store. Nokia must also be prepared to: (a) publish clear guidelines on what can and cannot be in their application store, so a Podcaster-like debacle cannot happen on the Maemo platform, no matter how well intentioned; and, (b) be prepared to accept lower revenue than they see Apple and others earning from their stores. The simple fact is that this is an open platform that has so far been marketed towards the technorati who are both more willing to look around for a free alternative and willing to build a free alternative if none exists. Nokia cannot loose interest in the store as it has with Download! for the S60 platform, which, in most cases is a moribund pit of piddling links to carrier-specific crap.

In addition, Nokia seems to be dedicating significant resources in making the platform faster, both from a hardware perspective (hello OMAP3, how nice to meet you!) and a software perspective (Upstart, GSTOpenMax, even OHM). There’s also a substantial improvement in store for the multimedia component of Maemo which has been more than a little weak; I prefer to use the term “brutally non-existent”, personally.

Finally, while HSPA is welcomed with open arms, it also makes it harder for me to decide what to do with Maemo. Maemo sits at an uneasy border: it is under assault from the portability side by Nokia’s own ever improving S60 and other superphones* like the iPhone; on the other side – power and functionality – the Intel juggernaut is shrinking the Atom ever faster and bringing the gift of a full, x86-compatible OS down into the same price range and package size. Heck, the Nokia N810 officially retails for more than my brand new and much adored Atom-based Acer Aspire One does, and I have way more functionality in a package that is only about twice the size. So I’m a little confused what the future is for Maemo (going back to my first point about where Maemo sits in the FOSS-adopting Nokia world).

HSPA (and the other improvements, like high-res cameras and better screens) means that in a sense, Maemo is going towards the superphone category. There it faces some entrenched competition: RIM’s BlackBerry, Apple’s iPhone, Google’s Android, Windows Mobile and, of course, Nokia’s own S60, and increasingly, Series 40 platforms. Quite aside from whether Nokia is ready for a potential civil war between its Maemo and Symbian divisions, time is short for Maemo to be in that market as a major competitor.

It remains to be seen what the future of Maemo is. For me, though, I suspect this is the end of my Maemo line. I loved – and still do adore – my spunky little N800. However, given the coming processor switch and the need for new hardware, unless Maemo 5 makes it back to the N800, I will not be buying a Maemo 5 device. For me, and I fear many others, the calculation looks a lot like this:

1. Buy a Maemo 5 device for about $400. I duplicate the functionality of my phone with the HSPA, but I don’t gain the ability to run a full x86 OS.
2. Buy an Atom-powered netbook for about $400. I don’t duplicate the functionality of my phone, and I get the ability to run a full x86 OS – like Windows.

Given these choices, it’s pretty much a no-brainer: you go with the Atom-powered notebook. If the Maemo 5 device was cheaper (say, $200), then it’d be a much harder decision, but given the history of Maemo, that is unlikely. One last option is that Nokia sees Maemo 5 as a media device. As a media device, especially one that is advertised as being able to browse the web, it might yet be a device worth the money. Cram it with 32-64GB of memory, give it a decidedly media-centric feel (including dedicated play/pause buttons), the ability to download music and movies on the go (no bloody tethering needed) and Nokia could go head to head with the likes of SanDisk, Microsoft and Archos. At the very least, it would shake up the market, since as beloved as Apple is, Nokia is a much, much bigger brand in most of the world.

So: better clarity what the future of Maemo is in the short to medium term. Long-term however, I’m still scared for the platform that has travelled nearly a quarter of a million miles with me around the globe.

*: A superphone = a phone that can be conceivably used without needing to be teethered to install apps. I’m aware of the music limitations on the iPhone, and quite frankly, that’s data and not applications. The App Store works perfectly over EDGE or WiFi.