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.
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.”
Nokia’s N900 continues to prove itself a firm favorite with the modding community, now managing to get an Android 2.3 Gingerbread port before Google has even managed the official release for the Nexus One. The handiwork of NITDroid team member Alexey Roslyakov – aka DrunkDebugger – the port isn’t 100-percent functional but does allow for cellular and WiFi data access, audio and more.
Roslyakov suggests that there’ll be a stable build of the Gingerbread N900 port available in time for the New Year celebrations – you do celebrate with your N900 in hand, don’t you? – though before then there’ll be a new, stable Android 2.2 Froyo release for the Nokia around Christmas time. If you’re interested in flashing your N900 with the latest public release, instructions are here.
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.
Nokia maintains that regular N900 users will be better served sticking with Maemo than trying to persuade them to jump the device to MeeGo, and it seems that the Finns are at least following up on their promises to maintain the open-source OS. A new software version for the Nokia N900, v.20.2010.36-2, has been released, adding full Ovi Suite support and various bug fixes and speed improvements.
That includes the ability to make on-device music purchases through the N900′s browser and Nokia’s Ovi Music Store, with the downloads non-DRM encrypted. You’ll either need a PC and the Nokia Suite to install the update manually, or wait until the “new software available” alert – a big yellow exclamation point – appears on the N900 itself.
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.
Nokia World 2010 kicks off this morning, and we’re with the Finnish company in London, UK, today to see if they can announce a portfolio of devices and services that will eclipse the last few days’ high-profile exec departures. On the cards is the Nokia N8, the Symbian^3 smartphone Nokia hopes will turn around their mid- to high-tier fortunes, but we’re also expecting quite the spread of featurephones and enterprise-centric devices.
Whether Nokia will be able to truly grab headlines depends on how well they leverage MeeGo, the collaborative platform with Intel that the Finns have already earmarked for future high-end NSeries devices. Twelve months ago, at Nokia World 2009, it was the N900 that surprised us all by being a sleeper-hit of sorts; now Nokia needs another distinctive flagship to pull them through the mire of Android and iOS they find themselves in.
That’s the challenge, and we hope Nokia can rise to it.
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.
Well, it looks like you can finally get rid of that less-than-stable pre-alpha release of Fennec (a.k.a. Firefox Mobile) for Android — Mozillla has just released the full alpha release for not only Android (2.0 and later), but the Nokia N900 as well. The big news with this release is an increase in “performance and responsiveness to user actions” (always a good thing), as well as two new features dubbed “Electrolysis” and “Layers,” the former of which lets the browser interface run in a separate process from the one rendering web content, while the latter promises to “greatly improve performance in graphic intensive actions like scrolling, zooming, animations and video.” You’ll also get full support for add-ons, and Firefox Sync built into the browser to let you have a continuous experience as you move between devices. Hit up the link below for the download link, and for a quick video overview of what’s in store.
