The Nokia 770 and Maemo: Totally Amazed

There’s been tons of coverage of the Nokia 770 and the open source Linux platform Maemo that goes with it. Everyone is excited, with reason, but I don’t think that the significance of the 770 and the platform have sunk in yet.

We’re talking about a Linux based tablet with good resolution (800×480) running a custom GTK-based UI similar to Series 90 on a device with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, 64 megs of ram, 128 megs of flash memory, and about a 3 hours battery life. The size is right too. Nokia have also been working with open source developers to adapt gstreamer for their uses, and the development environment is right there for you, enjoy.

I’m really excited by this page detailing porting gaim to maemo. The port isn’t trivial, but it’s not far from it looks like a lot of the effort went in to making it look and behave better rather than getting it to actually run. Here’s a screenshot that just knocked my socks off:

I have been (sort of) following these instructions and now have a (sort of) working maemo environment up and running. I’m psyched to see Python (2.3.3) as well as Perl (5.8.4) in the development environment. I hope that both of these end up on the device or at least installable as an option. I’d also really like to see Mono or Java running on this little thing.

I’m going to go tinker a bit more with the development environment (which uses scratchbox) and see if I can’t figure out what I’ve done wrong on the X side of things. It also looks like you can use QEMU to run apps compiled for ARM.

Related reading:

• Forbes pegs the price at $350: I won’t hold Nokia to that price point but I’d buy one in a heartbeat at $350.
• Daily Wireless has some great coverage as always.
• Jim thinks it has what it takes.
• Gizmodo aren’t sure, and are trapped in the internet blackhole called Williamsburg.
• Russ isn’t impressed either. He has some very good points, but I hope that the device proves him wrong in the long run.
• Mobileburn has a hands-on gallery.
• Miguel is excited, GNOME guy that he is.

I get some nasty messages when I run af-sb-init.sh start and end up with the following almost (but not quite) working environment:

I used install.sh and then followed the installation instructions from there. I used this tarball as the rootstrap since I couldn’t find the file mentioned in the docs. I’ve got a shell, which is better than nothing, but I’m still working on a working X session…