Risto H. Kurppa » mobile

Nokia Kinect @ Nokia World, London

Risto H. Kurppa — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 04:26:56 +0000

A new concept device from Nokia: it’s operated by twisting and bending the device itself! That’s quite different from the touchscreen stuff we see all the time.

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BlackBelt Sorvi Hero for N900

Risto H. Kurppa — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:15:14 +0000

Assembly 2011 winning game: Black Belt Sorvi Hero is also available for Nokia N900. Here’s how to install.

root (or sudo gainroot) apt-get install libmad0 libsdl-ttf2.0 libsdl-gles1.2-1 libgles1-sgx-img wget http://media.assembly.org/gamedev/2011/BlackBeltSorviHero-2011-08-03.zip unzip BlackBeltSorviHero-2011-08-03.zip cd BlacBeltSorviHero cp -R data /home/user/MyDocs/BlackBeltSorviHero dpkg --install BlackBeltSorviHero-n900.deb

Now you should have the icon visible in the app list. Enjoy!

Notes

The ‘Continue’ button in the ‘Your mission’ screen doesn’t give any feedback when pressed, just wait for the game to load..
Having the ‘heat meter’ on top of the screen would be easier: now it’s hidden behind fingers
Maybe the profile could be shown on the rotating piece of wood instead of showing it separately on the top of the screen.
Moving the camera is hard.

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Meego and Qt after Microsoft & Nokia: a summary of “facts”

Risto H. Kurppa — Tue, 15 Feb 2011 23:27:59 +0000

Updated 2011-02-17: added FLOSS@WP7

You know the story, Nokia announced their co-operation with Microsoft. Here’s a summary of what’s been said by people who know about these things.

MEEGO@NOKIA: Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.
Nokia Press Release
MEEGO@ELOP: First, we cannot blame Elop for this. He did not kill MeeGo in February 2011. He was one of the finalists for CEO, who had to propose a plan to solve Nokia’s severe crisis. That involved painful cuts no matter how you looked at it. The Board approved a plan in September, where one part meant MeeGo was dead. Elop didn’t kill MeeGo now. It died last September and the Board approved that plan where MeeGo would go.
Communities Dominate Brands – the best analysis so far (based on public information so not 100% accurate..)
MEEGO@INTEL: “Intel is disappointed at Nokia but life goes on. Our decision and resolve on MeeGo is only stronger.”
Intel’s response
MEEGO@NOKIA: #info Elop: Nokia would continue to develop the MeeGo operating system in collaboration with Intel
So, definetly this work will continue.
#meego-meeting irc-logs from 2011-02-15. I’ve heard the same from other people inside Nokia that the work on Meego still continues. Some teams have been told to stop their work but definitely not all of them.
MEEGO@N900: #meego – No way in hell that we’re giving up! #wearemeego and we’re ready for battle and very much alive.
Carsten Munk, MeeGo Nokia N900 hardware adaptation maintainer
QT@KDE: What we in KDE need are calm, stable heads to plot the lay of the land first and then examine how our strategy should be adapted and extended. Change often produces opportunity, but first one has to understand the change to recognize the opportunities. Right now it’s infeasible to speak to what the real opportunities and challenges are without first doing our homework.
Aaron Seigo, KDE developer
QT@NOKIA: Unequivocally, Qt is not dead. This morning we heard top Nokia executives like CTO Rich Green talk about Qt and the future. Qt will continue to live on through Symbian, MeeGo and the non-mobile Qt industries and platforms.
Head of Web and Community & Communications Manager at Nokia
SYMBIAN&QT@NOKIA: Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same. With 200 million users worldwide and Nokia planning to sell around 150 million more Symbian devices, Symbian still offers unparalleled geographical scale for developers.
Nokia’s letter for developers
QT@WINDOWS PHONE7: Qt will not be ported to Windows Phone 7. One of the key benefits of joining an established ecosystem is that there is an established toolchain that everyone uses. All Windows Phone apps will run on all WP7 devices. Adding Qt to the mix would only cause fragmentation.
Head of Web and Community & Communications Manager at Nokia
FLOSS@WP7: But one thing is extremely obvious. Microsoft wants to keep its platform clear of Free Software. Period. Jan Wildeboer
SHAREHOLDERS: We are a group of nine young Nokia shareholders. All of us have worked with Nokia in different capacities in the past. We plan to challenge the company’s strategy and partnership with Microsoft in the next Annual General Meeting scheduled for May 3, 2011.
nokiaplanb.com This was a hoax after all. Forget it.
Backup plans for Nokia, nokiaplans.com.

So Meego will live on, both inside and outside Nokia. Qt will live on, both inside and outside Nokia. Symbian will die. Qt will not be ported to QP7. KDE will survive.

The bad news is that no FLOSS on WP7 (Market?) – and many (up to 5000?) Meego, Qt and Symbian devels in Finland will loose their jobs. Feeling sorry for you guys. Maybe now it’s time to start a new Nokia?

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Setting up N900

Risto H. Kurppa — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 01:55:46 +0000

I bought a second-hand Nokia N900 in November. At some stage I noticed that the USB charger didn’t charge the phone and found out that the USB connector on the phone was loose. Taping a screwdriver in the charger plug allowed me to charge – but it wasn’t really handy. So two weeks ago I took it to Mobile Spa to be fixed. As all N900′s have 2 years of warranty, I was on the safe side. They sent the phone to factory and I got it back today. Everything else was new, except the back cover & battery. So now I have a new N900 with new 2 years of warranty.

This is a walkthrough of the steps I went through to set the N900 up for more or less daily use. PR1.3 was preinstalled.

Install SIM & battery. Plug in your charger.
Go through the first run wizard that asks for time settings
Open Phone app & import contacts from SIM
Connect to Internet, preferably over WLAN
Enable Extras-devel & Extras-testing & wait wait wait …
Install rootsh
Go to X-Terminal and run root; apt-get install screen openssh-server. You’ll be asked for a new root password.
Ssh in to N900 as root. Start screen.
run apt-get install flashlight-applet 3g2g-mode-selection-applet katana hex-a-hop sopwith adventure-tablet decoders-support fmradio blessn900 sib theremin sharing-twitter-multi maemo-mapper mastory cell-modem-ui htop fapman nano-opt contacts-merger marble media-im-status-updater bluetooth-dun tweakr appdownloader smscon-editor fmms facebrick freoffice autodisconnect guitar-chords dropn900 frontview900
Click on Facebook icon on programs to install Facebook widget & photo upload support
Configure IM accounts: Skype, Facebook & Google Talk
Configure dropn900 – great tool to sync photos/videos directly to Dropbox!
Configure SMScon
In Settings / Media sharing, configure Facebook, Twitter, Flickr
In Settings / Profiles, disable system sounds, keyboard sounds, touch screen sounds.
In Settings / Screen, disable haptic effect, turn the brightness down a bit (to save battery)
In Settings / Notification led, enable led for call, SMS, IM, E-mail, disable for charging
Clean your Gmail My Contacts list & export it in vCard format. Copy it to N900 & import to contacts.
in Contacts, realize you imported all 1700+ contacts Google has recorded. Go back to previous step & make sure you only save ‘My contacts’, not ‘All contacts’.
In Contacts, run ‘Find duplicate contacts’. Click through the list of 311 contacts and accept all of them individually. After this solve the conflicts in the names the tool cannot solve – maybe 30 of them?
Build the desktop: Remove unwanted icons, add contact & application shortcuts
in Settings / Exchange, configure calendar & e-mail sync with Google. This one takes a while and then reports connection error to Exchange server. Frustrating. Didn’t get to work this time.
Install Firefox by going to firefox.com/m
Install browser-switchboard and in Settings, change Firefox to be the default browser
In Firefox, install Adblock and Youtube enabler plugins
Change the default browser back to the default and install apps from Ovi store. Slow. Bambuser Airport Touch Demo Tower Bloxx Deluxe Zen Bound Demo Electric Beams Touch SPB TV

That’s a start. What else do I need?

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Meego 1.1.80.10.20101214.1 on N900

Risto H. Kurppa — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 23:16:53 +0000

Another quick Meego@N900 test. Earlier tests here and here.

UPDATE: Someone correctly reminded me that it isn’t very fair to review latest unstable images that go through major changes all the time. So when reading this post, remember that ‘there’s more than this’ and nobody is telling this is the image to use! And I’m using a slow, class4 uSD card so don’t take me seriously when I talk about speed!

Starting Meego on N900 with Ubuntu

wget http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/builds/1.1.80/1.1.80.10.20101214.1/handset/images/meego-handset-armv7l-n900/meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.10.20101214.1-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2 wget http://repo.meego.com/MeeGo/builds/1.1.80/1.1.80.10.20101214.1/handset/images/meego-handset-armv7l-n900/meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.10.20101214.1-vmlinuz-2.6.35.3-13.8-n900

Make sure you have bzcat pv and flasher-3.5 installed
Insert mmc in card reader of your desktop computer, check with dmesg where it is (/dev/sde here). Then run:
bzcat meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.10.20101214.1-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2 | pv | sudo dd bs=4096 of=/dev/sde

Remove MMC from card reader, install it in N900, shut it down (yes!). Then run
sudo flasher-3.5 -l -k meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.10.20101214.1-vmlinuz-2.6.35.3-13.8-n900 -band connect the USB cable of N900.

Quick test results

Menu is quite slow
Settings menu now has more items but most of them have no content.
At least Language & Keyboard and Applications have content but most others don’t.
Connecting to open Wifi was no through settings -> applications -> wifi
After this I tried to connect to my Twitter account but with no success.
Tried to connect to Google Talk but could’nt add . with the hardware keyboard
On-the-screen keyboard is a mess, it needs to be taught to write what I want, not remove characters when I try to add new and so on.. (I think I actually have seen the same bug on Openmoko Freerunner on one of it’s browsers. Can’t remember which one, though, but it was in SHR.
All strings (including menus, buttons etc) have !! in front of them. Doesn’t really improve usability, maybe they are there to remind that the strings are not final.
The top bar shows a small aeroplane icon. Am I not registered to the GSM network? Tried to call N900 and nothing happened.
However I was able to place a call using Meego so after all it’s registered.
The test call automatically used the phone speaker again
Top bar also shows that I’m soon running out of battery (surprise, it’s N900 :), bluetooth icon, WLAN icon and time. Also some simple unidentified green icon.
The screen sometimes goes black, then maybe flickers, shows the image unsharp and then later again settles back to normal.
Meego now recognizes the orientation of the phone and rotates the screen accordingly. Quite smooth. I can even turn it upside down!
On Fennec, the web browser, the on-screen keyboard works OK
I was able to get to yle.fi website. Very slow but eventually it was there!
I would like to know how to take screenshots. Maybe for the next review. Or how do I start terminal?

Not so encouraging this time. In it’s current state I can’t recommend Meego for anyone with N900, unless you’re a real haxxor interested in improving Meego. In that case, please do try it! Waiting for Meego 1.2 to come out.

UPDATE: Someone correctly reminded me that it isn’t very fair to review latest unstable images that go through major changes all the time. So when reading this post, remember that ‘there’s more than this’ and nobody is telling this is the image to use! And I’m using a slow, class4 uSD card so don’t take me seriously when I talk about speed!

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Samsung Galaxy Tab

Risto H. Kurppa — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 18:52:32 +0000

I today had the possibility to play a bit with Samsung Galaxy Tab that tries to challenge the Apple iPad. Tab runs on Android and the user interface looks very much like the one of Galaxy S phone.

7″ screen is nice, plenty of room to have a decent sized on-screen keyboard, watch videos, read e-books or PDF files
Galaxy tab was maybe a little heavy – but it also fealt very strong built that most likely will not break easily
What else.. Volume & power buttons, 4 buttons below the screen.
Camera had a nice panorama feature. I took a 8 photo panorama inside: photos were not sharp but the panorama stitching was done very well and fast!
Android Market with lots of software – this is what makes the device really useful

What I recently bumped into was the fact that yes, even though you can buy apps from Android Market to all (Google-authorized) Android phones, all the software will not run on all hardware.. Not enought computing power, too small screen… It’ll be interesting to see how Google manages this in the future.

Don’t know what else to say. I’m sure there are people out there who find it useful – I myself would like to have a tablet with more open Linux OS :)

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Meego 1.1.80.7.20101119.1 on N900

Risto H. Kurppa — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 22:01:28 +0000

As I earlier wrote, I had hard time figuring out how to try Meego on N900. Now I know how it works and decided to try the latest build, 1.1.80.7.20101119.1

Here’s a quick list of things that have changed and other:

Overall look is a bit more finished than it was in 1.1
Wifi still works :)
Couldn’t any more see any icons in the top part of the screen indicating the status of GSM network or anything else
Starting web browser (Fennec) is quite slow (but hey, optimization comes later, I’ve been told..)
period (.) key still failed in the browser, it moved the cursor to left :/
UI buttons have a touch of Maemo: Close on top right and ‘Exposé’ or similar in top left
Couldn’t really use the zoom function of the browser but zooming with HW buttons works nicely.
Closing the HW keyboard of N900 shows the on-screen keyboard. Nice! (I guess this is only when I had a text field activated)
Sliding finger to left/right on Fennec shows tabs or settings/navi bar
Coulnd’t find Xterm in the menu any more to try command line interface. In 1.1 it was still there.
While making a test call I did hear the ‘connecting’ tone this time – but still from the speakers, not from the ear piece.
I couldn’t call TO the Meego@N900 for some reason, Meego gave me no indication of incoming call.

Now I’d need a way to SSH in to Meego@N900 over WLAN and figure out a way to take screenshots for you :)

KDE elements or mostly Plasma on Meego looks promising, check this:

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First experiences with Meego

Risto H. Kurppa — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 19:47:34 +0000

I finally got so interested in Meego that I had to do something about it.

First I installed the Meego Software Developer Kit. It was easy, copying commands and things worked fine. Got QTcreator up and running, I was even able to create my first Meego RPM package. QEMU-meego also started fine and I was able to SSH in there.

Then I got interested in Meego itself.. and decided to install it on 8GB MMC. Pretty straight forward again – awesome instructions. I used the images meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1.80.7.20101119.1.

Flasher uploads the kernel, I see some text on the screen but with no backlight so the text is not readable. Yellow led is on. Last line says “stdoops: ready 5, 6, (no erase)”.

Now I wonder if this normal, do I need to wait longer or did something fail?

Retrial

Tried on two-three images – when I finally figured out (someone pointed out that to me) that you need to dd it to the card, not partition! So here are the commands to use:
bzcat meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1-mmcblk0p.raw.bz2 | pv | sudo dd bs=4096 of=/dev/sde

then install the MMC on N900, close cover and run
sudo flasher-3.5 -l -k meego-handset-armv7l-n900-1.1-vmlinuz-2.6.35.3-10.3-n900 -b

and connect the USB cable. And it boots!

Meego

These tests have been made with meego-handset-armv71-n900-1.1.

You’ve all seen the screenshots – and I have no idea how to take one. But colorful background, menu at the bottom.
Photo viewer works fine.
Overall speed decent.
Phone software – horizontal only.
Making a call – actually was quite successful: didn’t hear the dialing voice at all. Audio came out from phone speaker, not from where it’s supposed to come out, the ear piece.
I was able to connect to our open WLAN and even open Firefox.
Navigating and using it is hard as period (.) and arrow keys don’t work. However I was able to google for google and the page opened.
I also tried to SSH in with no success so far.
Animations are smooth. The demo video ‘Big Buck Bunny‘ plays also smoothly (240p). Playing with videos made Meego stop working, nothing happened except from power button that restarted (to Maemo5).

Summary

1.1 not recommended for you unless you’re a developer and want to have hardware to test your software on. However don’t forget that Meego 1.2 should already be much more usable:

MeeGo development continues forward on a six-month cadence. MeeGo 1.2 is scheduled for April of 2011 and it will include a Handset UX release with a complete set of applications, and support for other device usage models.

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Test post from N900

Risto H. Kurppa — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 06:49:19 +0000

This is a test blog post from Nokia N900. I found Mastory from repositories and seems to work great!

edit from PC: ok, had to resize the image manually + add the link to it.. Other than that, not bad.

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N900

Risto H. Kurppa — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 20:24:56 +0000

Bought Nokia N900 phone two weeks ago from huuto.net, Finnish on-line flea market. 200 euros less than buying a new one.

Details to improve

~short battery life, especially when you can’t leave your new N900 alone for a second but have to play with it. But it’s OK for about a day for me.
When talking, the charger plug is on top of the phone, pointing up, not down, as ‘normal phones’ have it
Using the keyboard is hard with charger/usb or headphone connected as the plugs are on the side of the keyboard, where I have my hands
No DEL or ALT on the keyboard
In the ‘Desktop view’ or inside ~any running app pressing the top left corner of the touch screen shows you thumbnails of all open apps . Pressing it another time shows all apps. Pressing Sym/Ctrl + Backspace on the keyboard also shows the thumbnails of open apps. Maybe pressing the same buttons again could show me all apps?!
In popup windows one has to click outside the popup window to close it. There are no buttons to click, you just need to know this.
Categorizing apps might be a good idea maybe? Catorise fixes this, except that all apps don’t have the categories set up very well.
The home dir configuration is a bit unclear. Must be because of the ‘used device’ thing so that people won’t mess up their system.

Hilights

On the day I bought it, Nokia released new firmware. To celebrate my purchase, I guess. Updating was smooth over wlan.
About 4 days later Nokia released Meego 1.1. I’m very interested in trying it out as soon as I have the time.
Integrated instant messaging. I’m able to add Facebook chat, Google Talk, Jabber, Sip and Skype account details and get all my friends listed on my contacts. There’s also some automatization to match these accounts to the phone numbers from copied from my SIM, but having phone book names in the KurppaR (for Risto Kurppa) form and IM names showing Risto Kurppa, the automatization really doesn’t work that well.
Having contact shortcuts on the ‘desktop’ also shows their IM status. Veeery useful!
Being able to call Skype calls over mobile broadband! I have 384 kbit/s from dna and I’ve successfully used Skype over it to call my family in Finland and abroad. Awesome!
Web radios and Youtube over 3G – works fine!
Ripping DVD with Handbrake and watching it from N900. Great!
Camera – this is the first actual camera I carry always with me. I had Nokia 6170 earlier but the camera really was of no use.
Integrated social media. It’s c00l to take a photo and send it to Flickr or Facebook within seconds from anywhere!
Web browser works like a web browser is supposed to work. It supports modern techniques to show Gmail and Facebook without any glitches.
Calendar and e-mail sync from Google. Seems to work both ways. Priceless!!
Terminal & root privileges. I’m able to install whatever I want.
Huge screen. Big enough to watch films. Haven’t tried really yet, need to find a way to decode DVD’s.
OVI Store. I know it isn’t perfect, but for sure it’s nice to have a place to easily browse through apps to install/buy.

Apps

catorise – to categorize icons
jammo – music game for kids
jenirok – to search for Finnish contacts, also show names for unknown incoming calls
fapman – fast application manager to replace Nokia’s app manager
bounce – nice 3d technology demo game
como llego – public transportation router
battery-eye – analyze power usage
mappero – map software
syngic mobile maps 10 – navigation software. Got this with the phone, preinstalled
panorama – photo app from Nokia. Nice but unstable
Katana – bible reader
SP Brain Evolution – brain trainer
khweeteur – Twitter client
gpodder – podcast aggregator

What are your favorite / must apps? Do you know of any better than tese for the same tasks?

Summary

Maemo5 isn’t fully open, there are lots of closed bits that no-one really knows much about. Nokia does the work behind closed doors, release notes can be very subtle: ‘speed improvements’. I hope Meego will improve this a bit as it’s lead by the Linux Foundation. With N900 I’m able to install lots of cool (free/open) stuff, have decent control on the phone, and use great (also closed) services.

Freerunner, welcome N900 to join the team.

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