Efforts to put Android 2.3.1 on the Nokia N900 came to fruition last week, and now there’s a video demo to prove it. DrunkDebugger has released footage of the platform transplant – which is still a work-in-progress for the moment – and while the resistive touchscreen of the N900 might not be up there alongside capacitive displays, the whole experience looks solid.
Video demo after the cut
Some of the elements still being worked on may give would-be platform hoppers a pause, with the camera, voice calls, audio codecs and GPS all still giving DrunkDebugger trouble. This is billed as an experimental build; a release version was tipped for distribution at around the new year.
Running Android on the Nokia N900 has been an ongoing theme for the better part of the past year — and with hardware designed from the ground up to be both hackable and high-end, we’d expect no less. Indeed, Android 2.3 is the latest victim of an N900 sneak attack, and impressively, core components like messaging already seem to be working — likely thanks to the fact that hackers had already gotten pre-2.3 builds rock solid. What’s even more impressive, though, is how smooth and generally non-janky everything seems to be — smooth enough so that you might be able to do this as your daily driver if Maemo 5 is starting to wear thin for you. Nokia might not approve, but then again, we don’t approve of the N9 still not being announced… so yeah, tit for tat, as it were.
The Nokia N900 continues to show its appeal this week; after getting Android 2.3 Gingerbread on Wednesday, now the Maemo smartphone has become the next way to control Parrot’s AR.Drone. As we found in our AR.Drone review, Parrot only offers iOS remote control apps officially, and has left the APIs open for developers to create Android and other apps themselves. That’s just what Maemo chief engineer Kate Alhola has done with her N900.
Video demo after the cut
Unlike the iOS versions, the N900 app for controlling the AR.Drone uses two on-screen joysticks rather than the accelerometer to control the quadricopter. Still, we’re guessing that could be addressed in future versions. Otherwise you get the same live video stream and direct WiFi connection, together with all the AR.Drone’s own intelligent auto-hover and object avoidance.
While the project has been a way of letting the N900 work with a new toy, Alhola also has another motivation: to prove that neither the N900 nor Maemo are dead. Responding to speculation that both device and platform are facing an imminent demise, she instead suggests that “the best option today is to develop with maemo5 with Qt and Qt Quick and when a MeeGo handset is released, just deploy your application for it, it is that easy.”
Following hot on the heels of the PR 1.3 update for the N900 comes the official MeeGo v1.1 build for handsets with U-Boot support. For developers, or anyone who simply likes to hack around, that means that the Nokia N900 is now ready to dual-boot into your choice of Maemo or MeeGo environments. If that sounds like fun then boy do we have the image repository for you (Hint: it’s in the source link below). We’ll let everyone else know when the community has made the process idiot-proof. Until then, why not play an unmodified webOS game or catch a glimpse of the dual-boot process in action in the video after the break.
Ah, standards. Palm and Nokia know what we’re talking about, which is why they support similar methods of developing native Linux apps, namely SDL 1.2. Add on the hardware similarities between the Palm Pre and the N900 (OMAP3430, PowerVR SGX, Open GL ES 2.0 support) and you have a beautiful recipe for cross-platform gaming. Some hardcore Maemo users have taken this to heart and released a new “Preenv” package for the N900 that allows the phone to run unmodified webOS games. Of course, you’ll need to root your Pre to get at those games, and if you want to make a launch icon for the game on the N900 you’ll have to root it as well. Still, this is exciting beyond the potential for playing Need for Speed on much-lauded Nokia hardware: with easy portability between platforms, there’s all the more reason for a developer to be attracted to MeeGo and webOS in the future.
The addition of support for the full Ovi Suite and “performance improvements” are the only two items listed in the Nokia N900′s latest published firmware update, but there’s a third item skulking around that Nokia seems less willing to talk about: “easy” (albeit experimental) MeeGo dual-boot support, as promised in a recent posting on MeeGo’s official site. We suppose the capability isn’t mentioned because Nokia has said on no uncertain terms that the use of MeeGo on the N900 is an unsupported configuration — but seeing how the N900 has been a hacker’s delight from day one, we fully expect hundreds of thousands of the machines to be happily booting up the new platform within a day or three of this firmware breaking loose. Have fun, folks!
The addition of support for the full Ovi Suite and “performance improvements” are the only two items listed in the Nokia N900′s latest published firmware update, but there’s a third item skulking around that Nokia seems less willing to talk about: “easy” (albeit experimental) MeeGo dual-boot support, as promised in a recent posting on MeeGo’s official site. We suppose the capability isn’t mentioned because Nokia has said on no uncertain terms that the use of MeeGo on the N900 is an unsupported configuration — but seeing how the N900 has been a hacker’s delight from day one, we fully expect hundreds of thousands of the machines to be happily booting up the new platform within a day or three of this firmware breaking loose. Have fun, folks!
News earlier that the Nokia N900 would be getting a dual-boot MeeGo option cheered up a lot of people, who had begun to suspect that the Finns intended to leave them and their open-source smartphone in the cold. Now, however, the official word from Nokia has come through to The Nokia Blog that consumers still won’t be offered a dual-boot option: it’s only intended for developers to use.
“The Nokia N900 is used as development hardware for platform developers working with MeeGo on ARM hardware architecture. While the software from the MeeGo project runs on the Nokia N900 for development purposes, Nokia does not intend to provide a dual-boot OS option to consumers in upcoming N900 commercial software releases as we want to ensure that we provide the best possible experience designed for that device. The meego.com blog post was primarily targeted to the audience reading the blog: MeeGo developers.” Nokia statement
The news echoes official statements back in May which amounted to much the same thing: that there will be no commercial MeeGo roll-out for the N900 in the interests of maintaining the best, most stable experience on Maemo. Disappointing, yes, but we don’t doubt there’ll be plenty of people going the developer route with their N900 and loading whatever ROMs are out there.
Whatever else you might say about Nokia, the company knows how to keep a promise. Back in March, we were told there’d be a dual-boot solution for the N900, providing users of the Maemo 5 phone with a taste of the MeeGo life, and, even though it might have taken a while, that firmware is now on the precipice of becoming available. Mind you, there’s quite a distance between offering users the option and supporting the dual-boot experience (which Nokia isn’t doing), but given the choice between some MeeGo and complete NoGo, we know what we’d prefer. Hit the source to get fully educated while waiting on the dual-booting PR 1.3 update to drop.
Two weeks ago you’d have to pay an Australian importer for a specialized USB key. Four days ago open-source software let you roll your own. Today, there’s no need for any of that — you can hack your PS3 with a tethered smartphone. Working closely with the PSGroove team, hacker Kakaroto adapted the same jailbreak to the Nokia N900, and the open-source community lost no time porting it to the Palm Pre as well. If the videos after the break are any indication, both versions work just as well as the original, and you too can get your game on with downloads and detailed instructions at the source links below.
Sadly, the aforementioned Australian importer OzModChips is a casualty of this little story, with all its shipments of the PS Jailbreak dongle seized (and the item subject to injunction) by an Australian court, but we suppose knowing its product has enabled the hardware hacking community thus might somewhat soften the blow.
