Maemo OS 5 Technical Introduction

Maemo OS has surprisingly (to many out there) long history from 2005 when it was first time used in a commercial and public product from Nokia. This was Nokia Internet Tablet 770. Naturally actual development on Maemo started at least 1 year earlier. This was also not first time Nokia has Linux based OS on device, it was used earlier in TV related products like digital TV boxes.

Maemo uses Linux and Debian flavor at its core and its’ UI is based on GNOME/GTK+.  Debian is very widely used Linux distribution and GNOME/GTK+ for UI elements etc is also one of the top 2 UI libraries, so Nokia has gone with trusted base components. Actual UI framework is called Hildon at this point of time and is the one developers use to build actual UI elements. Hildon then runs on top of GNOME and especially using the GTK+ widgets which have been extended in Hildon. Debian was and still is considered very strong linux distribution but in recent years Ubuntu has gained more users and mind share. Nokia smartly also used something called Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) technology to hide actual underlying hardware from applications running on top of Maemo. This way Nokia can change and introduce new hardware without necessarily breaking the application compatibility with the device and can hide complex interaction with HW from the software developers in addition to handling properly things like sharing same HW components with multiple applications running at the same time and utilizing these same HW components.

Nokia used originally Opera web browser but switched to Mozilla based Internet Browser in 3rd device, N810. Maemo 5 still has Mozilla based browser, not exactly the same Mozilla Firefox browser that we have in PCs but similar. Nokia claims this can handle all websites there are including having full Adobe Flash 9.4 support (not Flash Lite as Nokia today has on mobile phones like N97).

Maemo OS is open source but not 100%. Thus many parts of it are open to developers to improve and extend. There are proprietary components that Nokia keeps closed and close to their chest but roughly 80% of code is open and available thru garage.maemo.org. There are many famous open source libraries, frameworks and applications included in the Maemo OS releases, like GStreamer multimedia library, DBUS system communications, SQLite database etc.

N900 is the first commercial product to utilize Maemo and its major 2009 release 5. This mobile computer is already available for pre-order for certain countries and for example costs in Germany 599 euros. For the first time Maemo devices are now phones with full voice stack on board but these devices still are for the most part mobile computers. For example default usage mode is in the landscape orientation, which is automatically switched to portrait mode when there is incoming call. In same way when user wants to call someone this is done simply by orienting the device in portrait mode and call application is automatically opened and brought to foreground. SMS is of course also now fully supported but looks like first Maemo 5 release on N900 on launch date will not have support for MMS. Reminds me of iPhone 3G in this aspect but not on almost anything else.

Maemo 5 & N900
Maemo 5 Community Site
GNOME
GTK+
GStreamer
DBUS