N900
This section is about the Nokia N900, especially developing applications for it
Programming the Nokia #N900
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 12/18/2009 - 16:24A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about Bright Shiny Tools, where I considered the pros and cons of various programming languages. Since then, my Nokia N900 has arrived and I’ve started programming for that. I’ve also introduced my daughter to Squeak, but I’ll leave that for another day. There is also more exciting stuff in the Matlab world, but that will wait even longer.
Reflections on the Nokia #N900 by a Distracted Old Geek
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 12/15/2009 - 13:58Yesterday, I distractedly started playing with my new Nokia N900.
Depending on your perspective, you can think of this as a cell phone, a camera, a media player, a game console, or a computer, and I’ll try to share a few of my thoughts about this from each perspective.
The N900 Cellphone
When I received the N900, I took the SIM card out of my Motorola Razr V3xx, provisioned by AT&T and slid it into the SIM slot for the N900. Initially, the N900 did not recognize the card. I’m not sure if I didn’t put it in right or what, but eventually, after taking it out and putting it back in again, it fired up.
As a cellphone, it’s pretty nice. It came with nice stereo headphones and microphone so it can be used in a hands free manner without needing to purchase additional equipment. It also supports Bluetooth and I’m going to test my Bluetooth hands free device at some point. The speaker phone works nicely on it and the contacts list is pretty nice. It combines phone contact information with other types of contact information such as email addresses and IM addresses. Skype is fully integrated, so when I select a contact I’m giving the option of how to call them, on Skype, or on their cell phone.
It is a little bit bigger and more bulky than my previous cellphone, but not so much as to be annoying, or at least not yet. I haven’t tried carrying it around with me for an extended period.
My biggest gripe with the N900 Cellphone is that it does not currently support MMS, so I need to send pictures and videos other ways.
The N900 Camera
After working with a Razr with a 1.3 megapixel camera, where the pictures always seemed to come out blurry, the 5 megapixel N900 camera is amazing. Not only does it have a better CCD for processing the image, but it has a great lens and a flash. It shoots high quality video. As a downside, my Canon SD1000 probably has at least as good a lens and a 7.1 megapixel CCD. The SD1000 also has a lot more modes, the ability to zoom and so on. Even the SD1000 pales in comparison to a good DSLR.
In terms of uploading, the Razr was actually better in that I could send pictures to several sites at the same time using MMS. As noted above, the N900 does not support MMS, but I hope it will soon. Because of this, I need to use other tools to upload pictures. The N900 makes it easy, providing you have an Internet connection (more on that later), and provided that you only want to send to one service at a time. Also, the services you can share with seem a bit limited. I will have to work on configuring this better as I experiment with the camera.
The N900 Media Center
I don’t use MP3 players very often, and have ended up using the Razr as my MP3 player. I had a good collection of songs on a microSD card on my Razr. I took this card and stuck it in the microSD slot in the N900 and all my songs were there, sounding great; the same for my videos. It also had some pretty high res videos that came as a sample, much better than anything I ever shot with the old Razr. It has a nice connection to the RCA inputs for an analog TV and we watched a few videos that way. One of my todos is to see if I can rip DVDs and save the videos for watching on the N900. It could be a pretty nice portable DVD player.
The N900 Game Console
When my eldest daughters were younger, I used to tell them that they could play any game on the computer that they could program. The N900 is a great programming environment and I’ve started programming there. With that, I haven’t started playing any games on it yet, although I have heard stories of people playing some classic games on the N900.
The N900 Computer
This takes me to the aspect that I’m most interested in, the N900 as a Linux computer. It connected quickly and easily to my home Wifi. It supported an Xterminal so I could easily get to the command prompt. Yet there wasn’t an easy way to get root privileges.
Not only is the operating system a Linux flavor, it acts very much like Debian or Ubuntu, which means that it has a nice way of packaging and sharing applications. Normally, this is locked down, but there is a ‘red pill’ mode for the applications catalog. The section about the ‘red pill’ mode also provides details on how to get root access.
One of the methods was installing OpenSSH. This allows me to use SSH to connect from the N900 to other computers as well as connect to the N900 from other computers and copy files back and forth.
While it is great to have a keyboard on the N900, I still like working from a full size keyboard, so while I’m working on testing and setting up the computer, I’m using SSH to connect from other computers at home and use their keyboards, as well as copy files over from these other computers.
Also, in a desire to keep my mobile phone charges to a minimum, I have not been connecting to the AT&T data network most of the time, and have only connected to my local network. With that, I found two tools that I like that really help. One is ‘Personal IP address’. This displays the IP address that the N900 currently uses. It provides a nice way of keeping an eye on if you are connected, and if so, how. The other is Personal Dataplan Monitor. It keeps track of how much data usage you’ve used from your mobile provider.
I set these up and they took default places on the desktop. Later, I installed the Facebook Widget and Photo Updater. Unfortunately, as I experimented, I managed to remove the Dataplan monitor from the desktop and loaded the Facebook Widget on top of the IP address.
It took me a while before I figured out that by clicking on the background, I could bring up the Desktop Menu, which allows me to move items around on the desktop. Now I have each of these applications loaded where I want.
I experimented with the browser a little bit and found it fairly hard to read. You can’t use that two fingered stretch to zoom in on the page the way you can with an iPhone. Instead, you need to draw circles. Clockwise zooms in, counter clockwise zooms out. You can do this with your finger, but I’ve found making very small circles with the stylus works much better. Likewise, I later figured out that I could change the font on the Xterminal to make that much more readable as well.
With all of this working nicely, I was ready to start playing with the programming. This takes me to my other largest gripe with the N900. Currently, it does not support Java. There are notes on the Maemo Wiki about Java for the N900. I’ve started the process of downloading (Build 39) Early Access Headful EABI, glibc 2.5, Hard Float (VFP) Little Endian Java SE for Embedded 6.0 Update 10 ARMv6. Sun sure makes it hard to download the software and then makes it available for only 90 days, so I’ll probably abandon Sun and go with OpenJDK in future tests unless Sun becomes better to work with. I did manage to install the Sun Java but can’t get it to run in the browser. I’ll probably try some other Java tests later.
What has been more promising has been working with QT. I tried installing pyside-qt4-gui, but that was enough to use up all of my space in the root file system and I ended up being unable to receive anymore text messages, so I removed that and autoremoved the other packages that it installed. I also found some other trash I could remove, so I have a little more space in the root file system.
I also managed to take a little bit of the QT programming I had done in C++ and ported it to the N900. One was QWaveClient. It doesn’t look very good on the N900 yet and has been crashing. Time to do a little debugging on that. The other was a simple counter written from pieces of code I found laying around. It works pretty nicely and maybe a framework for a future blog post about programming for the N900.
Distracted
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Mon, 12/14/2009 - 15:44Normally by this time of the day on a Monday afternoon, I would have read through many of the emails that came in overnight and sent several responses. I would have visited a couple hundred blogs, glancing at what was going on and perhaps added a few comments and I would have done a little programming, spoken with some clients, or done other business activities.
Yet today, I am distracted. The distraction started at about three A.M. when Fiona came into our bedroom. She had had a bad dream. She cuddled in the bed with us for a little while as she calmed back down and then went off to bed. However, my sleep was interrupted and I’m still tired.
Then, when it was time to go to school, she wasn’t feeling well, so she has stayed home, mostly sitting on the couch playing on a laptop, watching television, and from time to time asking me to get her a drink or something to eat.
I did glance at some of the emails today. One was from a cousin about my Aunt June. A little over a month ago, my brother wrote a great blog post about Aunt June. I also made a pilgrimage to Aunt June’s house soon after I was out of school; it wasn’t as striking a visit as my brothers, but it was meaningful.
The email my cousin sent says, “She is a hospice patient now and they are very good at maintaining comfortable care…Cards, prayers and meditations are more than welcome and I am sure she would want to know we all love her very much and are thinking of her.”
Distracted by tiredness, caring for a daughter home from school, and a dying aunt, I needed some other form of distraction and that has come today as well.
Kim and I decided that she would get me a Nokia N900 for Christmas. The plan is to replace my existing Motorola Razr V3xx cellphone with it. However, some N900 enthusiasts bristle when you talk about this as a cellphone. It is a mobile computing device.
Well, this morning, the N900 arrived. My initial thoughts have been to test it to make sure everything is working properly, and then decide whether to put it back in the box and use my Razr for another week and a half before switching over to using it as my primary device.
I did have a few difficulties getting going. On the first test, it didn’t manage to read my SIM card, so it only worked with the WiFi in the house. Yet after fiddling a little, the AT&T SIM card started working. Also, I took the microSD card from my Razr and put it into the Nokia. Media, like pictures, videos and audio that was on the Razr all shows up nicely on the Nokia.
I have run into various difficulties getting it to behave the way I want. It took a little while before I had ssh access to the device as well as root access. Of course the method for gaining this sort of access is described in detail on the Nokia website, so it was pretty easy to get going. Now, I can use ssh from any of my computers and access the N900 just like I would access any other computer. Slowly, I’m finding out what I can and can’t do with the cellphone. At times, I’m pleasantly surprised, at others I’m disappointed. Perhaps some of this should get saved for after Christmas, but today seems to be a day that the distractions of the new mobile device provide an important counterbalance to the other distractions of the day.
"Can Nokia Recapture Its Glory Days?"
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 12/13/2009 - 11:49Can Nokia Recapture Its Glory Days? This is the question that Nelson Schwartz, the European economics correspondent of The New York Times asked today on the front page of the business section. He acknowledges that Nokia ”still commands 37 percent of the world’s handset market”, but quotes “Francois Meunier, an analyst with Cazenove in London” who said at an analysts meeting, “I don’t think anyone in this room is expecting an improvement in earnings next year”. Everyone is too busy thinking about iPhones and Blackberries. Even the Google Android platform doesn’t get mentioned until much later in the article.
This is, after all, an article in the business section not the technology section, and Mr. Schwartz goes on to talk about the corporate heads and the relationship between Nokia, its competitors and the carriers.
“The market in the U.S. has always been dominated by the carriers, so they call the shots,” says Carolina Milanesi of Gartner. “And Nokia has had a difficult relationship with the carriers.”
This has hurt Nokia in the short term, with their smartphones accounting for less than 4% of the smartphone market in the United States, even though they have nearly 40% of the global smartphone market. This illustrates, I believe, how the U.S. phone carriers have inhibited competition and innovation in the U.S. market. While I hope that the U.S. Government will step in to force phone carriers to allow more competition, I don’t expect to see this any time soon. Nonetheless, while Nokia’s distancing itself from U.S. phone carriers might be hurting in the short term, I am hopeful that it will pay off in the longer term.
Near the end of the article, Mr. Schwartz observes, “Nokia has been written off before” and finally gets around to talking about Nokia’s new handsets. Nokia’s executive vice president for markets, Anssi Vanjoki is quoted as saying, “we’ve always had points where technology hit a plateau and had to be reconfigured”. It seems as if the cell phone market and especially Nokia is at a place like that right now. He goes on to observe that Nokia has been “aiming at too geeky a community”.
The article finally gets to talking about the N900. This does seem to be the coveted device of the uber-geeks. One blog has a poll up about the Best Mobile phone of 2009. Currently, 85% of the votes are for the Nokia N900. People have accused Nokia N900 supporters of cheating by voting many times from a signal IP address, which the polling software doesn’t allow, or by all being from Finland. In reality, the Nokia Phone owners have talked on their bulletin boards and votes are coming in from around the world supporting the N900.
Another interesting data point about the N900 is that it is significantly back ordered. Last month, when I started writing about the N900 my wife ordered me one for Christmas. For quite a while, it looked like the biggest surprise would be whether or not it actually ships by Christmas. I’ve read various discussions about people ordering their N900s, waiting, and then waiting some more, and eventually breathlessly announcing that their new phone had arrived. It doesn’t generate the same mass media market frenzy that the new iPhones did when they came out, but it is something the geeks are paying attention to.
This leads me to my final observation. Mr. Schwartz noted that Nokia offered the first touch screen technology for cellphones back in 2004, three years before the introduction of the iPhone. Like many innovators, they have not capitalized on their innovations as effectively as other companies that have come along since then.
The Nokia N900 may not have substantial innovations in and of itself, yet its application development and distribution platform invites innovation from the geeks that will carry them, and these innovations could end up being the real story and what helps Nokia recapture its glory days.
Bright Shiny Tools
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 12/05/2009 - 10:55While I never was diagnosed with ADHD, my approach to technology these days have felt a little bit like there is some sort of attention deficit disorder. I’ve found myself hoping from bright shiny tool to the next. As I started playing with yet another platform last night, I thought I would bring you along on my latest technological ramblings.
