Wendong’s Smart Phone Weblog

N810:

~ $ cat /etc/issue
Internet Tablet OS: maemo Linux based OS2008 \n \l
~ $ uname -a
Linux Nokia-N810-23-14 2.6.21-omap1 #1 Tue Jul 1 12:22:23 EDT 2008 armv6l unknown

My laptop:

~$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 8.04 \n \l
~$ uname -a
Linux wendong-laptop 2.6.24-18-generic #1 SMP Wed May 28 19:28:38 UTC
2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

And the user agents for Firefox:
N810:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux armv6l; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/20080606 Firefox/3.0a1 Tablet browser 0.3.7 RX-34+RX-44+RX-48_DIABLO_4.2008.23-14

My laptop:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9b5) Gecko/2008050509
Firefox/3.0b5

Linux tips from Inside Out blog

This news is all over the web. One wiki page on elinux.org claimed that Android was successfully installed on Nokia N810. That page was so hot this morning that I could not even open it. I checked it again tonight and found that N810 and screenshots have been taken away. You can still find it in the Google cached page:

Known to work HW

* OMAP1 based boards (ARM926)
* OMAP2 based boards (ARM11)
* Sharp Zaurus SL-C760
* Sharp Zaurus SL-C3000
* Armadillo-500 (Freescale i.MX31L ARM11)
* OMAP1 based OSK (OMAP5912 ARM926 with only 32MB SDRAM). Really slow, mainly usable as proof of concept.
* OMAP2 based OMAP2420 N810: Android internals ML and OMAP ML

Known to not work HW

* Neo 1973 (ARM920T)

What is going on? Today is not April 1st.

[Update] It turns out to be a server failure that caused data loss on elinux.org. Now the screenshots of Android on N810 are back.

ACCESS (the company who owns Palm OS) provides a Garnet VM for Nokia Nseries (N770, N800, N810). That certainly opens the door to tons of existing Palm OS applications, such as Google Maps Palm OS version. The Palm OS emulator on Maemo OS can either go landscape or portrait. On either mode, it only uses a tiny portion of the big screen. It actually runs smoothly and fast, just like you have a Palm device in your hand. Somebody posted a video on YouTube.

Palm stopped giving away IBM’s JVM since last month. I happened to have an old version on my PC, but I tried to install it to Garnet VM on my N810, it is not working

Ok, I can not really forget about Android considering the amount time I spent on reading and digesting all information available after the SDK announcement.

Everything is perfect. But I would like a real phone in my hand. Playing with emulator on a PC can not replace the excitement of seeing Hello World application running on a real handset. I remember that a few year ago (2003?) when Windows Smartphone 2002 was launched, Microsoft sold a developer package (with a prototype handset in it) to developers. Google should do the same thing. What do you think? I believe there are many people are willing to pay for it.

Forget about Android, let’s play with maemo!

I am one of the fortunate applicants to get a Nokia N810. When it hits the US market, I will buy one at roughly $150 (thanks to a substantial discount from maemo team)!

So what can you do with this baby?

The maemo platform currently offers a native C runtime for developers complemented by officially supported C++ bindings. A complete set of Python bindings are provided by the community, and the runtime will be officially supported by Nokia during 2008. Web runtime with Mozilla Gecko engine and Flash 9 will also be implemented in 2008. Mono, Java and Ruby runtimes are provided by the maemo community, among others.

It will be able to run both CDC applications and Tomcat server.