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A quick idea that hit me as I was getting ready to go to bed. I’ve written in the past (can’t look them up or hyperlink them, this is being written from my iPhone) about how I didn’t understand what Nokia’s long-term fit for Maemo is.

I still don’t.

But today, as I was browsing through Microcenter’s website, I saw that 32GB bulk memory cards were being offered for about $60; 16GB cards were less then half that price. It got me thinking again how, if my N800 had any battery life left, decent a music player the Maemo platform would make. In fact, the N800, had Nokia chosen to go down that path definitively, could easily have been a powerful competitor to the iPod Touch, albeit one more oriented to the technically inclined.

The room is still there for Nokia to make such a determination, because frankly I don’t know how Maemo is expected to fit into the various platforms that Nokia has. I suppose it’s another case of a company with too much money, responding to too many new competitors and trying to solve all its problems by throwing money at said problems ala Microsoft of the early 2000s.

We’ll see. I, for one, bemoan the missed 64GB music player opportunity though.

One of the earliest “mobile devices” I had, the Nokia N800, quickly became a sort of mecca for porting efforts. In quick succession, I saw Abiword, Gnumeric and other staples of the Linux world ported over, meaning that with a little bit of luck and a bluetooth keyboard, you could use the N800 as a full-fledged computer. (I would know: I did use it as my primary computer for some three months while HP and I haggled over the warranty status of my main computer.)

By contrast, Android and the successive iterations of OpenMoko’s Neo and various other Linux phones simply do not seem to have inherited this rich set of applications. Even something as trivial as a proper .Mobi or PDF reader has not made it past the initial design stages. (Google “android PDF” to see the littered corpses of PDF readers through the months.)

I attribute this to two main causes:

First, like Nokia did with Maemo, I think that Google almost expects people to come to the platform and write such basic apps, because they are a well known company. On the other hand, unlike Nokia, which basically ignored (or provided not much leadership, at any rate) the Maemo development community until the Maemo 5 announcement, Google is trying to be responsive to the needs of its development communities. This includes things like a single storefront and a paradigm shift (in the Linux world) away from package management to app management, which is simpler and more straightforward for a non-technically minded audience. However, Maemo started life with a lot more apps out of the box; the lack of basic media capabilities on the G1 put me off the phone quite quickly (and by media, I don’t just mean music, but rather the entire stack of video, audio and document handling). From where I sit, as an end-user, Google seems poised to repeat Nokia’s mistake of essentially providing life support to its platform, rather than actively nourishing and sustaining the platform with its active participation in user-facing components.

Second, the G1 is also a cross road between two very different communities: a technically savvy, highly intelligent community of geeks who dig Linux, and second group of users that the first consider the unwashed masses. This is apparent most of all in the storefront: even in the early days of the G1, the first community would post demo code or a how-to for others to learn and be rewarded with feedback like “this application doesn’t do anything” or “what’s a proof of principle” or, even, “first!1″ from the second. While that’s allowed the big, mass-facing companies like EA Mobile or Namco to thrive, along with independents who are there to make a quick buck off the goldrush (much like the iPhone App Store), the Linux buffs have been scared away, along with their years of meticulously crafted and beautiful code, like Abiword and Gnumeric, not to mention VNC apps and H.264 decoders. Google can choose to ignore this community absolutely, if they so choose (there is often more money in the masses, after all), but in doing so, a shallower, less interesting platform emerges and many of the gems of the open source world will never make it to Android.

I’m not laying the blame at Google’s feet here. What I’m trying to point out is that Nokia had time to make mistakes with Maemo because it had huge first mover advantages. Google has more competition and needs to move more nimbly to ensure that its platform not just continues to survive, but thrive, and that can happen only with more Google code in Google’s code.

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.

One of the cooler little gadgets I have is a Nokia N800. Unlike it’s quickly surpassed and killed off elder brother, the Nokia 770, the N800′s basic hardware platform has persisted for a while as the official platform. The successor to the N800, the N810, is cosmetically different and has a few extra things – such as a GPS, a slide-out keyboard and 2GB of fixed internal memory – but is essentially the same platform. However, given Nokia’s propensity to kill off marginally older platforms by simply not supporting them with updates, I was sure that the edition of Maemo that Nokia had released late last year would be the last major update to N800 and the N810 before a switch in hardware design to either a faster ARM chip, or as I believe strongly, an architectural change to an Intel Atom chip.

Thus, it was with some relief I found that the newest version of Maemo, version 4.1, codenamed “Diablo”, was out and running speedily on my N800. While the complete change log is extensive and provides some amount of insight into the ambition that Nokia has to make Maemo a complete Linux distribution, for the end user there are a couple of noticeable changes that matter:

• Most noticeably, the mail client – an utterly non-functional piece of crap written in-house – has been replaced by a community developed client called Modest. When I last looked at Modest, before it was adopted as thoroughly by Nokia, I found Modest anything but modest in its ambitions, but it suffered from Q&A issues. Most notably, there was a memory leak that quickly killed the limited RAM on the N800 and caused the entire OS to respond sluggishly. While I haven’t had a chance to stress-test it yet by trying to get it to download my entire Gmail inbox, it is at least able to connect flawlessly to Gmail, unlike the original Maemo email client, which would connect approximately never.
• While this did not affect this update, Nokia has now added the ability to update parts of the operating system incrementally, like a full Linux distribution. Much like Ubuntu‘s nearly daily notifications of available software updates, Maemo can now strip out and replace almost anything – including its own kernel – without needing to be connected to a computer. This is important for two reasons: (1) Maemo has finally become an OS that is capable of standing by itself, without needing to be tethered for any reason; and, (2) it means that the community can continue to support older devices if Nokia should decide to end support for it simply by specifying new system update repositories. So I look forward to not having to tether my N800 again for a long time.
• Chinese support has improved tremendously, to the point that it can be used in the browser.
• Speaking of the browser, I find that despite no change in the underlying browser engine – it’s still the same version as was used in alpha 1 release of Firefox 3 – the entire browser feels more responsive. I’m sure this is because of tweaks to the windowing architecture, not the browser code per se, but it’s still important to note that much of the sluggishness that made the browser unusable is gone.
• One small thing that seems to have gone unmentioned in the general rejoicing following the release of Diablo is vastly improved UPnP and remote storage detection. Earlier, my N800 would rarely – if ever – see and connect to the half-dozen UPnP devices on my network. Mounting a network drive was a risky proposition fraught with the danger of data loss. So it was a much welcomed pleasant surprise that upon opening the Maemo File Manager, every single device advertising itself as a UPnP server showed up perfectly, as well as every single NFS and SMB server. I don’t know who was responsible for that particular portion of the code, but who ever you are – thank you. I simply do not see the need to connect my device to anything other than power and a Bluetooth keyboard any more.

That said, Maemo still suffers from a couple of problems. A major problem is the (apparent) lack of focus. Unlike Nokia’s other major FOSS announcement of the day – the purchase and open sourcing of Symbian – Maemo seems an odd (and especially in light of the open sourcing of Symbian, redundant) fit at Nokia. GTK-based at the owner of QT, and targeting the same class of device that Ubuntu mobile and a number of other fledgling Linux distributions, it risks being left on the side, simply because no one knows what to do with it. Nokia does not need to announce upcoming devices, nor give up a competitive edge by laying out a detailed roadmap for the future of Maemo, but it would be nice to know what the entire exercise is in aid of. Is Nokia committed to Maemo sufficiently that within a decade it will replace Symbian on high-end phones with it? Or is Nokia branching back into computers with Maemo as its default operating system? Or is this a ten year experiment by Nokia into determining how to work with the FOSS community? Answers to these questions are not easy, but starting at least a dialogue with the community about what the long-term sustainability or viability of the platform is for the next decade will encourage developers to come to the platform. Moreover, it gives evangelists like myself and others the ability to say with confidence to our employers and others – look, Nokia is going to be supporting Maemo for the next decade and we should capitalize on this opportunity to take our applications to that platform. If we are witnessing the birth of yet another new platform – especially one with a long-term commitment – then surely it is time to come out and say it.

Second, Maemo’s usability leaves a lot to be desired. One of the major issues I had, when I gave someone reasonably technologically literate but unfamiliar with Maemo my N800, was they explored the Home screen and pressed the buttons, but weren’t able to figure out how to get to any of the applications. This lack of discoverability could be easily rectified – on the first boot, if no backup is restored, put some very simple animation on the applications icon. Doesn’t have to be fancy, doesn’t have to last more than a few seconds or repeat more than once; just a simple shine effect or light glow is sufficient to prompt people to say “Oooh, what does this do?” and press it. Similarly, it takes a while to discover the menus in an application, especially if you’re hurrying about looking for a save button. A simple sparkle about the down arrow will be enough to provoke exploration. In short, the entire Maemo UI team needs to read this book and give devices to those who are not just unfamiliar with Maemo, but those who are technologically illiterate. God knows, they’ve got enough in-house talent.

Along these lines, some amount of work needs to be done to develop (and/or update) UI guidelines. I know it sucks to write documentation rather than code, but you need the documentation to get more code. There are by my count six different ways (including third party apps) to play music on the N800 and seven widget sets supporting these six UIs. None of them, including the built in music player, look anything like the rest of the Maemo applications. For that matter, what does a Maemo application look like? Nokia needs to sit its developers down and show them what Mac OS X 10.5 and its bundled apps look like, develop a set of UI guidelines to follow, and then, most importantly, follow them. Also help the ecosystem: highlight applications that follow the UI guidelines as models to follow, and reach out to help third-party (particularly volunteer) developers bring their applications more in line with UI standards. One of the reasons I love my Ubuntu installation is because it looks so incredibly similar. Unlike almost every other Charlie Foxtrot mish-mash of applications pulled from different widget sets with different design philosophies, Ubuntu (and each of the official derivatives) all look like someone carefully picked applications that look similar and belong together. It’s not perfect, of course, and if they had a monopoly on built-in applications, like Apple does with Mac OS, it would look better. But it’s still not as bad as Microsoft’s contribution to UI standardization, nor Maemo’s explosive dissimilarity.

Finally, Nokia needs to determine what to do about installing applications, and do a better job about following the process. The second point first, illustrated: as per my usual procedure, when I updated to Diablo, I started with a clean slate and started to install applications from scratch. Despite being given notices that very clearly say “Nokia Corporation End-User Licence Agreement” and agreeing with them, installing the camera app brought up a warning that I was installing an unsupported and non-Nokia product. Ditto the FM Radio and others. I can understand that Nokia may be hesitant to claim responsibility even for its partner’s products – think mnotify (by Google), the Garnet VM (by Access) – but there is no reason that they should attempt to disclaim responsibility for their own products. Someone in the Maemo team needs to sit down with the lawyers and the suits and make a decision on this. The preferred way is the Apple way – if you put it into an “official” Nokia repository, then Nokia has checked it and certified it. Alternatively, do not offer any software at all besides what is required to run the device. A middle ground should simple be that there should be no arbitrariness about ownership and responsibility – if it has a Nokia EULA on it, Nokia should say it supports it; if it doesn’t, you’re on your own.

Speaking of repositories, this is a pet peeve of mine: I don’t go in search of repositories; I go in search of applications. Nokia needs to follow the lead of Ubuntu (and for that matter, just about every other serious Linux distribution) in putting together a central repository where users can go to. It can be as tightly integrated with Maemo as Synaptic is with Ubuntu, or as separate as Mozilla’s add-ons for Firefox or Thunderbird. But there is no reason I should have to go trawl through the bowels of InternetTabletTalk to find my statusbar clock or Abiword. By all means, leave open the option of adding repositories, but create a central source, and encourage developers to submit their applications there after some minimal quality assurance and testing. For all of Nokia’s vaunted resources, the thoroughly unofficial, unsupported and Apple-condemned jail-broken iPhone community does a better job at making applications discoverable. It should shame Nokia that it’s easier for me to find an SSH server and client on the iPhone than on the N800. And once there is a central repository, and once there are applications in there, ensure that it can be searched, no matter what the official characterization – and ensure descriptions are useful. If I need Gnumeric, I should have to look under “Office” or “Productivity” or “Utilities”: a universal search should start when I start typing “gnumeric” into a search box. If I’m looking for a calendar, “GPE packaged with MUD” is less clear than MUD.

This has turned into a much longer post than I had hoped. I had hoped mainly to highlight that Nokia had released a new edition of Maemo, something which got buried in the news about Symbian*. Instead this has turned into a bit of a rant. That was not my intention. With the release of the Diablo edition, Maemo has become the mobile OS I’ve dreamed about – one that doesn’t need to be tethered for any reason at all, including updates. Which is why the niggling problems and the lack of long-term strategy announcement bothers me so – is this just a passing fad at Nokia or can I come to rely on this as my primary OS for a mobile device? I am doubtful anyone at Nokia will read this, but if you do – you don’t have to answer my questions or even comment. Just indicate somehow that you’ve understood the gist of this article and that you will continue to make improvements to make Maemo the best mobile platform, bar none. The iPhone maybe the platform du jour, but Maemo has been out longer, matured longer and is in a position to really take Linux mainstream the way few other distributions – Ubuntu included – are ready to do and capable of doing. But it needs help doing so and Nokia as the official patron needs to step up and provide that help to make it happen.

*: Another suggestion, Maemo team – please check with your PR office that no other major FOSS-related news is due to be announced the same day as your new version’s release. It ensures maximal coverage of your contribution to FOSS.

A friend pinged me about a month ago to tell me that there was a new version of Erminig out. Erminig, if you remember, is the program that ostensibly offers the ability to two-way sync calendars between Google Calendar and the N800′s GPE Calendar.

I got around to trying it today, and miracles of miracles – it worked!

Or so I thought.

The program is a vexation of the spirit.

Erminig crashed the first time trying to sync entries. Rather than write a log entry noting that it had crashed, or checking for identical entries (god forbid a programmer should write error checking into a program), it wrote every single entry in the local GPE calendar back to Google Calendar.

So for every single event in my Google Calendar, I now have two entries. Naturally, this will in time populate to all of my calendars, and I will have to manually delete events from now till infinity.

So, if you can takeaway two lessons from my misfortune:

1. Erminig is junk and do not, under any circumstances, allow it to run on your calendar.
2. Never trust an application – especially a FOSS one – with any critical data, unless it has been thoroughly vetted by someone else reputable.

Now I look forward to months of doubled notifications and doubled alarms and days weeks months years of going through my calendar removing the double entries. Thank you so much, TahitiBob for your unhelpful craptastic program!

I might as well toss my calendar out and start afresh.

Daniel Gentleman, something of a local legend in the Maemo circles, put up an interesting post about what niches the Nokia N810 can fill for the average person. The money quote here is: “‘the N810 is for a specific set of people who need more internet than a phone but more mobility than a laptop.” Absolutely – and unfortunately, that’s a very small market. In fact, it’s shrinking as phones are becoming more capable. Already, I can see the internet almost as it was meant to be on the S60 browser and the iPhone browser, which are both based on the marvelous WebKit engine. Even the Java-based Opera Mini is a huge, huge step forward, making the WAP of yesteryear seem like so much Gopher. In short, the market is small and it’s shrinking. That’s not a good place to have a product and a repositioning is in order.

I commented on this post with things I think are missing from the current internet tablets and I wanted to flesh out some of these points:

• The most glaring lack is a basic PIM. I understand that Nokia’s strategy has been to look at this as complimentary to a phone (a Nokia one, naturally) that makes the PIM redundant, but the simple fact is that for an increasing number of people – and certainly the technologically minded ones that would purchase a device like this in its current incarnation – expect to be able to access their calendars, contacts, and to dos where they are with the device they are closest to. Calendars, contacts, to dos, with some basic syncing capacity – either against an online provider, or a full-fledged computer – would go a long way to making the device significantly more useful and capable.
• Not having a built in viewer for commonly used file formats reduces the usefulness of the device on the go. While I can understand that there maybe legal encumbrances to proprietary formats from companies like Microsoft, given Nokia’s financial and business clout, I find it difficult to believe that the formats could not be licensed. Since there are already binary blobs in the Maemo stack, the addition of something more in binary format is unlikely to deter supporters.
• Working email out of the box is a point I cannot stress enough. Despite advertising the tablet as being fully ready to go on the internet, the lack of a decent email client is truly distressing. Modest, while functional, is hardly ready for prime time. Claws is neither intuitive nor entirely stable. That leaves only webmail as a solution for checking much email and is a poor substitute.
• IM is another core internet functionality. Through Nokia’s partnership with Google, we have an excellent XMPP client. I understand a new beta is in progress to replace the IM module and this is promising. The only thing I could in fact wish for is that the functionality is better exposed.
• Cryptic error messages are a standard feature of Linux and many other Unix-derived systems (Mac OS X is the sole outlier I can think of). By and large, the only way this sort of boondoggle will ever be pushed out of existence is slow maturity of the code base and an expansion of the user base to include the less technically minded. However, cryptic error messages should rarely be encountered in a new, out of the box system, and updating something that is shipped with the OS should not result in a error that suggests the update comes from another source. It simply should not.
• One pet peeve of mine is the non-existence of a clock in the tray on Maemo I understand that there are space limitations with the system tray, but there are space limitations on almost every single thing when it comes to portable devices. If nothing else, Nokia should have at least stepped up to the bat to offer an official system clock that can be downloaded and installed. Better yet, the tray applet should come installed. It’s 2008. For the last 30+ years, there have been clocks visible somewhere on the desktop or another. It’s expected. It’s a hassle to have to switch back to the desktop or home screen. It needs to be fixed. End of story.
• Faster response times. While there have been some intelligent suggestions of late by programmers more familiar with programming native code on Maemo than I, I find it weird that the system is significantly non-responsive and sluggish immediately after startup. The web browser, for reasons I’m not entirely clear, insists on “Updating” something at every startup. The file manager will take its sweet time parsing things before it opens. OS 2008 is a speed demon compared to OS2007, but that’s also because the processor is running over 20% faster. When you factor this out, the times are roughly comparable between a fresh OS 2007 boot and a fresh OS 2008 boot. More optimization is necessary, as is better control over threads by users. The ability to terminate a rogue thread immediately is the key to a stable and responsive operating system. We can do it in Windows – the operating system the least technically inclined people use. There’s no reason to believe that it shouldn’t be entrusted to the power users of the N800.
• Java. It’s incredible. It really is. It’s one of the most used programing languages on the planet. There is a greater demand today for Java programmers than any other language, except, possibly C#. Given Java is now open, and ARM ports exist for it, I’m unsure why there isn’t a Java VM on the Maemo platform. Or at the very least, a JavaME-class VM that can be pulled from Nokia’s other operating divisions.
• Finally, there needs to be a solid repository of software that is verified by Nokia to work with the internet tablet and easily available to every user. Every other serious Linux distribution includes such repositories through apt, rpm and their derivatives. There’s no reason that Nokia does not do so except to shield itself from liability. That’s fine and well, but (a) it’s a lot harder to break a Unix-derivative than any other OS on the planet; and, (b) they have resources unheard of in the open source world. I would argue that Nokia’s reluctance to offer such applications except through a partner program (where I’m sure vast amounts of money are involved) hurts Maemo’s easy expandability. By all means, Nokia can disclaim responsibility if something goes wrong and make sure that even their American legal department approves it; but to not do so is to severely limit the growth of the platform as a serious contender on the Linux stage. I know there’s a list of repos on Maemo.org – but that’s not even close to enough. Make a best of breed program that can not only be showcased as it is on Tableteer, but something that is widely available and indicated on the tablet. I have to go seeking such programs; they should invest the time in bringing the programs to us.

I know this sounds like a list of whines. It isn’t. It’s the realization that I’ve had as I’ve started using other platforms that there are good things and bad things about how platforms are put together, and there really isn’t enough crosstalk to learn from each others experiences. I’m not asking for the iPhone’s interface, which I’ve loved so far, but I am asking that the Maemo platform and its supporter step up and make Maemo a serious and complete distribution for its intended market. Not including a PIM can be explained away, but not including a clock or a working IMAP email client out of the box seems downright petulant.