Guest post by MeetMeego.org has the dirt on the details of Nokia’s next two MeeGo devices [German]. To sum up: the first device, the (very) long-awaited N9, has a similar design to the N900 – a horizontal sliding 4-line keyboard, but this time with a tiltable screen, a 1GHz ARM Cortex A8-based processor, a 12MP camera with Carl Zeiss lens, and HDMI out. It will be a developer device, distributed at developer conferences such as the MeeGo Conference in San Francisco in a couple of days.
MeetMeego also managed to get their hands on photos and a video teaser of the N9; however the video has been taken down and now all we have to rely on is the description of it on the MeetMeeGo site [German]. Superturbo instant update: Here‘s a mirror for the video.
The second device will be marketed toward consumers and will likewise be coming out in “a few weeks”. It will ditch the keyboard but be pimped out with a 1.4GHz processor. All of this is kind of exciting, just for the fact that *some* MeeGo-based devices are finally hitting the market.
On a side-note, meanwhile in tablet-land, the Intel/MeeGo-based WeTab (featuring essentially the same hardware as the Windows-based ExoPC) is available at all-time-low prices (at least in Germany/Europe). And as previously posted on this site, the new MeeGo SDK featuring QML goodness is ready. So as long as you don’t think too much about the question of whether the platform will still be around in a few years, it’s a great time to be a MeeGo developer.
All this information (about specs) is unconfirmed. So far no announcements were made about these devices on Meego conference.
Edited 2011-05-24 21:54 UTC
No kidding, in February it was running Atom, now it is on ARM.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yghf-EL7pFg
Design looks similair though
ARM 8, even.
C’mon, I hope they’ll at least put an OMAP4 in one of the devices.
I heard a horror stories of buggy video drivers for WeTab (at least a week ago). As expected from Intel.
So what? You can make buggy video drivers for any OS.
Unmanaged outsourcing and Windows monoculture mean that Intel is famous for its buggy linux drivers, especially since the Poulsbo fiasco.
AFAIK, the other Intel drivers (i.e. all those for actual Intel hardware) are fairly fast and functional.
A direct counter-example:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_snb_natty&…
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_2639_borks…
Yeah, Sandy Bridge. It’s still fairly new, and the drivers are still under heavy development. However, there’s an update to one of those articles right here:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_snbsds_com…
The counterexample to your counter-example:
This is great news. I can only hope they’re as open as the N900 was/is. My dream is to see modern hardware that I can dual boot android/meego as well as run X applications. The N900 is great for this, for sure. But it’s showing its age.
keyboard only for the developer version and not consumers? that sucks!
The N900 also has HDMI out already, just like every Nokia smartphone.
No it doesn’t, you’re confusing it with the N8.
N900 has RCA outs. Got the cable in my bag beside me.
I hope you’re just kidding saying that HDMI is the same as the ages old analog composite output. You can’t be real, seriously.
Edited 2011-05-25 12:44 UTC
“Yup, it includes RCA not HDMI out” provided in response to the comment questioning HDMI out not the first comment claiming HDMI out. Otherwise, I’d have said “Nope, I only got RCA cables with mine”, had I responded to the first comment directly.
But, I could have been more clear about that one.
As I can’t edit my comment any longer, here goes: sorry about that. I get easily pissed in Nokia topics, especially when a defender (the OP) applies the Reality Distortion Field.
“Nokia does (too)” is just plain wrong IMO.
Edited 2011-05-25 13:40 UTC
No biggy. We all have our hot button topics.
Sorry, that was my bad. The N900 does not have HDMI out, but I am not a defender in a RDF. The N9 is also a Nokia phone so I was not trying to make a “Nokia does too” statement. I just made a mistake. The irony of it is that I own a N900 so I should know. I plug it on my TV but my TV does not have an HDMI port, that is why I can not plug my E7. My mind was confused.
The N8 (which I have with me) has an analog out in the headphone jack, just like old times. The HDMI is just a bonus.
Judging from the E7’s specification page at http://www.forum.nokia.com/Devices/Device_specifications/E7-00/ (Local connectivity -> Nokia AV 3.5mm), the same cable should here too
You mean I can use the cable from the N900 on my E7? Will try that, thank you.
VZsolt > Quite the opposite, he was backing up your point.
Too bad you ruined it by being aggressive.
Edited 2011-05-25 13:04 UTC
When I got my N900 and perused the box contents this is exactly what hit me; nowadays HDMI is almost ubiquitous and it’s only going to get more and more widespread, whereas RCA-out is almost dead. So, why stuff an outdated connection on a ‘mobile computer’ that’s aimed specifically for advanced audience?
Well, it’s three or more years old now so at the time RCA was still common. It may have been adequate for the video out quality the device is pushing.
Another thing that comes to mind is the likelyhood of patent and DRM madness involved with HDMI. While it should simply be a new connector and cable, it’s been heavily leveraged by the media mafia to impose end to end DRM.
I’m not sure now if they’ve got some *nix native patent/drm crap out of the way or if it’s simply going to push the lower quality video that non-DRM’d hdmi seems to allow.
For me, the more intersting thing is getting a full Linux distro that will support more of the same tools and toys I carry on all my bigger machines. Sadly, Maemo’s Ruby implementation and closed drivers have already hosed a few of the things that attracted me to it so I’ve been hopeful about Meego being’s promise of a full distro with more open hardware support.
(I don’t get the tilt screen, if I’m holding the slider keyboard then I can tilt the entire device and setting it on a table at a viewing angle is easy enough without weakening the segment rails.)
If Nokia can deliver a true upgrade to the N900 with an OS that does what I want then they may get my money once more else I may be going back to a hand-top with full distro plus a cheap feature phone. Maybe Android if a developer device apears with a slide keyboard and running the stock core image with regular updates. I’d have to look at replacing all my existing and desired functions plus how much effort it takes to run it without storing all my data on Google’s indexing servers.
N900 came out on November 2009, so it’s only about a year and a half old. There were plenty of devices with HDMI out. As such I just feel it was short-sighted from Nokia, especially since it would have really beefed up N900’s multimedia capabilities.
For some reason Nokia always does this: on every single phone I’ve had they’ve always done one or another thing that’s really short-sighted and should have been obvious if they had actually given the phones thorough testing. I am just afraid of how bad things will go when WP7 phones start rolling out.
The headphone jack location. You know, I read about that and it didn’t really affect me until I started doing more with the device while listening to tunes.
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why that was considered a good location and, having decided on location, why the headphone jack did not come with a 90 degree bend in the plug. When in my hand, I don’t want to type around a three quarter inch or more obsctruction. When in my pocket, I don’t want it floating around bending the cable at the end of that nearly inch long lever. A 90 degree plug header would have solved both issues resulting on less grief during use and less stress on the jack all around.
I sure won’t clame all the design decisions are brilliant. Even now though, I’m not seeing an attractive hardware upgrade on the market. None of the Android developer devices have physical keyboards and the OS has it’s own issues. As such, I may be living with the N900 for a while before my next device.
You’re not the only one, really. N900 is just too awesome even with its flaws, the other phones don’t really feel like upgrades. I’ve always especially hated on-screen keyboards, they simply cannot be as comfortable to use as actual physical ones. An android phone _might_ suffice if it had an actual physical keyboard, but I am not aware of a single one that does.
Look at the Motorola Droid line among a few others. The slab form factor seems more popular but there are a few side-flip and slide type phones kicking around.
For me, it’ll be storing my information on the phone without a duplicate being transfered over to Google’s indexing servers. Better management of the app repositories would also be desirable among other security related improvements. In terms of functionality:
– full userland or at least a complete set of userland commands. Bash would be nice but bugbear may be what’s available.
– good cli package management
– ssh client and server (think it’s there now but I’d have t confirm if it works with rsync.
– scappy, aircrack, kismet, Wifieye style gui scanner, the latest SVN metasploit download so that means a current and maintained Ruby, rails and gems
– Zim for notes that can easily be synced between my systems
– a PIM app that syncs clean with other *nix PIM (Ideally Korganizer; I just can’t abide by the Evolution dependencies)
– a strong community of infosec nerds packaging the latest utils would be a big bonus
– python and such for infosec utils not natively packaged by a robust infosec nerd community
– I’d like to see skype with video support
The rest of the features are not commodities; gps (I’d like non-Google options in addition to the google earth default), wifi radio, bluetooth radio, cell network radio.
I want a pocket sized computer that happens to also do phone network functions not a smartphone that happens to do a few computer tricks.
And sometimes they come up with genius “minor” features.
Some Nokia phones have transflective screens. This, along with glare-free screens, should be put on every single screen-equipped device that is meant to be used during summer. It just makes reading incredibly easier without having to turn screen brightness all the way up.
Edited 2011-05-25 19:52 UTC
I agree! It’s a real shame that starting from the N78, Nokia started to cut costs through the screens – no more transflectivity, no more partial refresh screensavers, shit quality all around.
It’s a real miracle that the CBD worked out okay.
i hope if the phone will have a cortex a8 than the price will be a lot lower than other phone…
now, top is dual core cortex A9 with 1 gig of ram
And 1 hour battery life!
stop FUD, there are already some dual core phone and their autonomy is not 1 hours…
Actually, dual-core phones have existed for years already. For example N96 sports 2xARM9 cores and it was released already back in 2008. So yeah, they’re definitely not a new thing and even back then it managed to last the whole day without recharging.
True, but they were not both available for user applications.
I believe that one of the cores is dedicated to running the baseband.
Technically most dual core phones are triple core. Two application cores (running Android etc) and another arm 9 running baseband (running a real time microkernel).
Edited 2011-05-25 10:50 UTC
Sorry to ask this, but exactly is the “baseband” ? Network signal demodulation/decoding and analysis ?
Don’t be sorry.
Yes it does that (in a dsp) and holds the telephony stack (GSM etc) . Telephony functions are exposed to the OS as a service and the application (that is the main os) does not (and can not) govern them in order to maintain network access.
So the baseband chip provides a sort of low-level cellular network handling API, which the phone OS then “calls” when it wants to make calls or data transfers ? And it makes sure that compromised phone OSs cannot be used to break the famous SIM cipher ?
Edited 2011-05-25 13:38 UTC
Yes, sort of.
So now that I’ve used this “sort of” to get an imprecise qualitative view of the thing, what does actually happen ?
This will help:
http://www.netmite.com/android/mydroid/development/pdk/docs/telepho…
it is only for android of course but I imagine the process is similar for most modern Smartphones and oses.
Symbian is different (I believe) in that it maintains much more direct control over the baseband chip (do correct me if I’m wrong).
Like there is no vendor-specific “RIL” hardware abstraction layer ?
Edited 2011-05-25 14:52 UTC
There’s a book titled “Symbian OS Internals” detailing how exactly this kind of stuff works with Symbian.
In short, in case of Nokia phones: Nokia’s internal OS (sometimes called as ISA or domestic OS) runs below/aside Symbian and handles everything radio- and otherwise hardware-related events and processes. The two OSs communicate with each other through IPC. Look up NokiaTSY for example, if you can find the Symbian Foundation sources – this component was opensourced too.
Earlier dual-core CPUs ran the DOS and Symbian on the two cores. It was an actual evolutionary (more like cost-cutting) step to share a single application processor among the two systems. An advantage was the cost, a disadvantage is that if either OS enters a busy wait cycle, it can starve the other, resulting in either slow network speeds, slow telephony event handling (like Symbian freezing for seconds after a hangup), lags and whatnot.
It is speculated in the book, that later Symbian would take over radio handling, ruling out the domestic OS. But that didn’t happen as far as I know, not on the current S^3 generation at least.
BTW, this Nokia-internal OS is also working on the N900 (see phonet) and all the S40 devices. I’m not really sure about the S40 architecture but you can imagine the picture.
So it’s kind of like a standard BIOS for ARM devices ?
It’s like firmware or discrete GPU BIOS.
Do you mean the baseband as a standard BIOS? It’s something like that, but not an ARM standard per se. The theory is shared (handle radio related stuff separately from the application OS), but different SoC/handset manufacturers implement this in various ways.
Personally, I like the Qualcomm idea and implementation the most (integrated network tracing and diagnostics! how cool is that?).
No, N96 did indeed use both cores for applications. After all, why even market it as a dual-core phone if only one was in use? The problem — as far as I understand it — was that all applications ran in single-threaded mode, which obviously means that they’d still use only one of the cores at a time. And since both cores were clocked at only 264Mhz — half of what competing phones did at the time or even less — it made all the applications really sluggish and slow.
It was a really half-assed attempt at dual-core systems from Nokia and it would have been a bigger hit if they had actually redone their apps to use multi-threading and added support for that in the OS itself. I owned a N96 for a while and moved on to N900 later on, haven’t regretted it even once :]
You must be joking! This is Nokia. They’ll cut out everything, make it low power as it gets and charge you as much as everyone else.
For a dev device Cortex A8 is pass~A(c)
The thing is, this worked with Symbian, because Symbian was designed for mobile and embedded devices in the first place. But since Nokia apparently now wants to go “the wow starts now”, and get into Microsoft OSs on one side and Linux with lots of GPU-accelerated eye candy on another side, they’ll also have to put very fast and power-hungry hardware before things work smoothly, whether they like it or not.
Edited 2011-05-25 09:55 UTC
I agree.
I think the major issue with Symbian was that they never managed to bring the OS API up to date.
PIPS and QT were a nice addition but you still needed to get dirty with Symbian C++ and the horrible toolchain.
This was one of the reasons that many developers jumped to other platforms.
Back in the day I had hopped that when the ABI was broken, the API would be improved. Instead they introduced API level controls with certificates and DRM.
The major issue for developers maybe. If Symbian had had a fighting chance of battling the iPhone, it wouldn’t have mattered–apps would be developed for it one way or another. But sadly the UI in general–both the frameworks and the OS itself–simply couldn’t compare to the iPhone’s slickness, so the consumer demand wasn’t there, so the developers ignored it….
Are you saying that there is no consumer demand for Symbian? In which world?
I guess he lives in the US.
What I meant was that the iPhone killed Symbian. Yes, once upon a time the market share was there, but only “early adopters” of the whole smartphone concept bought Symbian devices. The iPhone was the device that brought the smartphone to the masses.
For the record, I live in Europe but used to live in the U.S. And I’ve owned a couple of Symbian devices.
Edited 2011-05-25 15:55 UTC
In which world? Down here on earth the iPhone is still a premium gadget in the high end price range. The masses who are interested in smartphones are still buying Symbian and since just recently Android phones. The bigger masses are still buying feature phones with S40.
They don’t need hardware which is more power hungry than iPhone or the tons of Android phones out there. They need roughly the same hardware.
And I’m sure that Nokia will tailor the hardware and software to be as power savy as it gets. That’s why I love my Nokia phones, beside making quality hardware that can be used for years, the battery lasts a lot comparing to other phone brands.
This is the kind of hardware which I called very fast and power-hungry. As compared to usual Nokia hardware, I mean, which tends to be a bit underpowered for Symbian already, but also have crazily long battery lives as a compensation.
Eseries used to do their job nicely with only ~350MHz ARMv6 chips at hand, as an example. I don’t think this will work anymore if Nokia shift focus on lots of smooth eye candy and want larger, higher-resolution screens.
Yeah
Past Nokia cells have been very good for me, too. I’m worried about the future, though. Everyone seems to go to heavy OSs that are close to desktop ones, and put faster hardware in phones to run them. As batteries rarely get more capacity (I don’t know for how many years phones have dealt with a few Wh in their batteries, but I think it’s safe to say that an order of magnitude improvement is not coming soon), and CPU efficiency is already very high in the mobile world and does not get much higher, I see low battery lives becoming a fatality, and mid-end phones becoming increasingly sluggish.
I think Samsung’s decision to have the bada OS use two different kernels depending on which hardware it runs on is best in the long run. RTOSs are best for low- and mid-end phones with not so much processing power. Heavier kernels with much less snappy event handling, like Linux, should only be used on high-end devices (that have, like, 1GHz processors), where other priorities mandate their use.
Edited 2011-05-25 13:40 UTC
I am afraid that is the very reason they waited so much to release a Meego phone (despite thousands of R&D engineers and millions of $ already spent) and went the WP7 route: as Meego is a bleeding-edge (btrfs, wayland), full linux stack, they have a hard time making it efficient.
That battery efficiency comes due to a lighter OS on a lower spec hardware.
Do they mean “first but available through retail channels in a few months”? Or, provided the hardware justifies the upgrade, will I be shopping a developer N9 on ebay?
Apparently they’re not distributing it at the San Franscisco conference after all. And MeetMeego took the photos down too… oh well.