Ignored Highlights of Nokia N8

Nokia N8 is shipping today.. here are a couples of highlights that Nokia did not strongly emphasize:

1) "Free of PVC, free of brominated & chlorinated compounds and free of antimony trioxide as defined in Nokia Substance List, bio-based materials in inner parts of the product" ---> Envrionment friendly!

2) Clear Black Display on N8 is "Blacker than Black". Look at CBD comparision with iPhone

3) HDMI output and 5.1 dolby digital , it's not just owesome but superb!!



4) USB host, you can connect your gadgets to your N8, thus use them as slave drives.

QNX joins crowded mobile market

Blackberry just launched their PlayBook, joining the iPad, presenting themselves in 7 inch mobile device market. What's shocking is they used QNX, which is in embedded system market for really long time. People in mobile phone world has never heard bout it. Well, customer wouldn't care what OS runs in it. But most heard mobile OS is: Symbian and Android, iOS...

The famous QNX is a serious mission critical real time operating system. Linux in general is not a RTOS. A special distribution, RTOS linux, is close to real time performance. But would you put it to control your Nuclear plant? Right you will think it twice about it. Symbian is a real time operating system but its UI is not fashionable. Look at the following video, it feels the UI is up to expectation.



Now the point is Blackberry is in need of another OS, not blackberry OS, to run higher HW specification: such as 1GHz processor, 1GB memory, HDMI, Open GL, High resolution. The OS is QNX who would not be abusive as Google was suspected to be in the near future.. because QNX got no services to bundle. Blackberry will heavily rely on iPad developers to port their applications over. I guess Blackberry will give more freedom to developers, thus to compete against iPad.

Sony Ericsson Abandons Symbian?!

That's not true! By reading the post on OSnews.com, I disagree that Sony-Ericsson abandons symbian. Android gave a deep breathe of Sony-Ericsson but I doubted it will last long. Look at the original news post, Sony Ericsson just don't have any plan for products using Symbian platform FOR NOW and Aldo Liguori did not say definitely that they won't have ever.

For mobile manufacturer like Sony Ericsson, who does not have their own operating system, they will be always the situation where their nose was dragged by operating system vendors. Sony Ericsson was doing Symbian phone, but is bearing big loss lately. If it should not be Android gave a hand of profit, the company would either be bankcrupt or bought by others. Android did help Motorola too. For the time being, Android is the shining star, mobile company saver. However, the question is how long the honeymoon will last? When the Google boat will not have enough food to eat, they will come back to Symbian boat or Meego boat. Samsung has forseen this. Samsung has Bada operating system and had LiMo, like Meego.

So, For Sony Ericsson, it will be good to have their own operating system, to boost their portforlio.

gtk+ for S60 project is dead?

If you google "gtk for s60", you will get the following link upfront.

http://code.google.com/p/gtk-for-symbian/

GTK for symbian. The statements says once cairo, pango and font-config were done, gtk+ for s60 will start...

If you click through "cairo for symbian",

http://code.google.com/p/cairo-for-symbian/

You would find cairo, pango, font-config were ported successfully to Symbian. However, there's no activities at all. Is this project dead?

I questioned myself : why gtk for s60 were not done? Hence the next link will tell:

http://www.wikivs.com/wiki/GTK_vs_Qt

"GTK requires X server and a window manager to be able to show the hello world..."... I questioned if it's true?.. Because I have used GTK+ for windows, I don't think my gtk hello world used X server or window manager at all.. That means, GTK for symbian/s60 would not require X server nor window manager.

I guess technically it's viable to get GTK for symbian. The immediate question next is:

What for?.. It takes time, takes effort.. Assume GTK was in Symbian, what's the benefit of it? what great thing people would see?

I could not answer those questions myself. Unless GTK proves its usefulness in mobile space, such a porting job would be meaningful. Geek's passion and hacker's feeling of achievement could be the motivation too. Qt entered mobile space already, to get GTK for symbian , better to have even a strong reason why is GTK better than Qt..? Unless there is superb application written GTK could have been ported to symbian after gtk was ported.

The key question lies here: what will GTK bring to mobile space, which s60, andriod, Qt, windows mobile, iOS4 does not have? What's the uniqueness of GTK in mobile?

The pain of using Symbian^3 PDK

First of all, the developer wiki of symbian org has messy documentation on the usage of Symbian^3 PDK. That made me realize why each newspaper need an chief editor. It's very time consuming to get out useful information in a good order. Not easy to use.

Second, downloading of the PDK zips take too long time and error prone. What's funny is: at the end when you got all zips, wiki says "current version does not have fully functioning Full UI rom image, wait for patch please".. What? I spent so long time downloading it and in the end, I don't get what I want.

Thirdly, the tools.. there are just so many tools: PDK kit 1.7.. active perl, active python, hg.. Why can they be bundled togather..? LAMP, XAMP were together , weren't the

Let's use this note as my public book mark page:

Release notes plus ROM image bulding instructions:
http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/PDK_3.0.0_Release_Notes

How to rebuild packages:
http://developer.symbian.org/wiki/index.php/Foundation_Build_Framework/How_to_build_the_Platform

Use your N8 or C7 as a torch?

My indian friend told that the torch phones were very popular. On a dark village road, walking with a torch phone is more high-tech than walking with the real torch.

Now with Symbian^3 phones, you can use the torch feature. Where is it?... Do I need to download an app from Ovi Store? ... It comes with the firmware. On Nokia's touch phones, there is a lock switch. The switch can be used to lock the phone so that you can put it in your pocket or bag. Now, move the lock switch to the direction which locks the device but don't release it. Hold the position there for long time, up to 8 seconds, the camera flash light will be on. To switch it off, you perform that action again.

SymbianLogo_TextShell not usable in Symbian^4 Kernel Taster Kit 4.1

After a long summer holiday, the author started learning how to do open source programming as a novice. The first disappointment came from Symbian^4 Kernel Taster Kit. Well, open source things are famous for broken-fixing-bf-N-times-before-stability. The last state, openly "stability" is better than commercially "stability". That's why commercial world likes open source projects, maybe.

The individual case is: I compiled and ran SymbainLogo_TextShell in QEMU in windows. That application crashed for many different reasons:

1) No Symbain.bmp file include KTK4.1 and KTK4.0, thus nothing to be read
2) the screen resolution of KTK4.x is 640x360, while the program hard coded to 640x479,... bang!
3) the size of the symbian.bmp is hard coded to 480x480 so if you used picture of 360x360... crash!

Since it's normal to get disappointment as like learning to swim will not avoid the chances of drinking water using nose, I shall not complain. No use, isn't it? Therefore, do something positive, as you would suggest. Here're the error reports to Symbian Foundation:

A)SymbianLogo_TextShell application has fixed screen resolution to: 640x479
http://developer.symbian.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=3696

B)SymbianLogo_TextShell application in KTK4.1 does not include symbian.bmp
http://developer.symbian.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=3697

Before those bugs were fixed, my suggestion to newbies like me is: DO NOT TRY IT AS IT DOES NOT WORK.