Finding Maemo
Symbian is toast, at least for Nokia’s future top of the range devices. Maemo is the new Symbian. First used in Nokia’s internet tablet in 2005, the brand new N900 runs the latest Maemo incarnation. Looks very sleek, and with Mozilla as its web browsing technology, should be yum. Like just about every other new mobile OS, e.g. Palm WebOS, iPhone OS, etc, Maemo is also based on Linux. The latter may not have succeeded in dislodging Microsoft Windows from its pc throne, but it is a clear winner in the mobile world.
Ditching Symbian on its high-end phones is probably a good move on Nokia’s part. Symbian is solid, but old, and still can’t probably handle rich text format HTML emails. It also falls short in many other areas such as web browsing and on-line video. The latest Symbian adaption for Nokia touchscreen phones like the N97 and Express Music falls way short of the competition in terms of its user interface. Anyone that has used either of these phones will know about the confusing way in which you have to double-press in some places and single-press in others.
The best feature of the N900 is arguably its 3.5 inch 16 million colours touchscreen. But why another resistive touchscreen Nokia? It is time for a multi-touch capacitive screen. Everyone else has one, even Winmobile! I can understand that the Fins don’t want to take their gloves off, but it is warm where I am. No gloves here.
WinMo could always do this. Android could do it from the start. Palm WebOS can do it. Symbian has already forgotten that it can also do it. Until now the iPhone couldn’t. What am I talking about?
It is multi-tasking. You know, that thing that women can do and men can’t. Never mind that I am typing this while talking to my 2 year old, and trying to wake my 12 year old for school. And trying not to listen to cbeebies blaring in the background.
Now your jailbroken iPhone can do it, or rather can do more than one it at a time. Thanks to a 3rd party application called multifl0w. Check out the video demo below. Will cost you around US$5. Doubt that my friend’s iPhone is jailbroken. He is very law-abiding.
Nokia announced at the 2009 Maemo Conference that Maemo 6 will support capacitive multi-touch, so we may even see such a device towards the end of this year.
Do you have a N900? I am dead keen on getting one, even though Nokia has no plans to bring it to South Africa. Just have to find a way to push my Lotus Notes email, calendar and contacts to the N900 first.