Maemo Summit – Day Three Highlights


News — By Sami on October 11, 2009 at 5:54 pm

Day Three and the whole Maemo Summit is now in the past. Great presentations, Oprah moments, community bonding and good times were on the menu. Coming year before the next Maemo Summit will be by far the most exciting and interesting for Maemo community and mobile computer landscape in general. While waiting for the videos and presentations to come online, here’s the run-down of the Day Three highlights.

Highlight 1: Rock star Fremantle apps presented their Maemo 5 versions

  • eCoach
    • GPS Tracking for recording your sports activities (similar to Sports Tracker on Symbian)
    • Support for bluetooth heart rate monitors
    • More information
  • Mauku 2.0
    • Micro-blogging client for e.g. Twitter
    • New back-end with open plug-in architecture (for Identi.ca, Qaiku and more coming)
    • More information

Mauku

OSM2GO

Highlight 2: Maemo Browser introduction

Maemo Browser has been introduced many times in the hands-on videos from community as well as from Nokia. In the summit, they went a bit more technical and explained the nuts and bolts behind the amazing browsing experience witnessed in the videos. Maemo browser is based on Mozilla Gecko and runs full Flash (9.4) content. Design and engineering goals have been around desktop-like performance, high resolution usage (full screen) and the various interaction modes (like the “mouse pointer” mode).

Highlight 3: Maemo security framework

Maemo has two running modes: open and closed. Open is the current way of total freedom to do/hack/break anything you wish with full root access. Closed mode checks for integrity on boot ROM and user level and thus allows commercial and e.g. DRM content and applications to “protect” themselves. User can switch between these two modes (and I hope the operators will keep it so indefinitely and not disable the open access…).

Highlight 4: KOffice

Office document viewing is enabled in Maemo by the venerable KOffice familiar from desktop Linux versions. It can handle almost any MS Office files (including the Office 2007 file formats). Nice practical use case is e.g. managing a work related Powerpoint presentation with KOffice and the N900’s video-out capability, without lugging your 7-pound Windows laptop along. See video at Suresh Chande’s blog.

Highlight 5: Telepathy

N900 does not (yet) enable telepathic capabilities for its users, but this particular Telepathy is still communication on steroids. It is basically a framework layer, glueing many communication protocols together. Or as the Telepathy website puts it: “Telepathy is a flexible, modular communications framework that enables real-time communication via pluggable protocol backends”. Very powerful and promising, but the future implementations will be ones showing its true capabilities in practical daily usage. Telepathy website has good documentation.

Telepathy

Highlight 6: Hugs and kisses

Maemo Summit brought together people who rarely see each other in person and communicate mostly online with each other. It was a great opportunity for the Maemo community to meet old friends, create new ones and get excited again for the future of Maemo platform. Nokia made also some serious leaps into transparency and community involvement (I wonder when we will see this level of smooching with community in the Symbian side of things?)

Only one year left to the next summit…

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