Ari Jaaksi's Blog

No strings attached. Enjoy!

2011-10-18T06:31:00.004-07:00

We released a new software release (3.0.4) for the HP Touchpad a few minutes ago. It gets downloaded over the air and is automatically updated to your devices. As always, no strings attached. Enjoy.

We have a big number of TouchPads out there, and we wanted to continue serving users and developers. We improved performance, added better support for the camera, made connectivity with non-HP phones possible, improved messaging, touched the UI in many places, etc. Also, we’ve got over 1000 applications available for TouchPad through Application Catalogue.

We have also continued longer term architectural development for webOS. We are working hard around webKit and V8. Those are core engines for the whole webOS. The Enyo framework and developer tools are getting a lot of attention now. We have also some very cool development around UI especially in the area of working with many task simultaneously, and using the table screen even more efficiently. The web development model, strong cloud integration, and a fluid and beautiful UI are the cornerstones of webOS.

WebOS is a good operating system. I’ve done my own polls lately, too. I can see many TouchPad’s in Starbucks, Peets, and other such places. I often go and ask a user what they think about it. I’m getting very positive feedback! Last week I had my car in a repair shop for maintenance. I was in the waiting room working on my TouchPad when a mechanic came to me to deliver the keys. “Hey, I’ve got a TouchPad, too. I love it!”.

I’m really happy being able to ship this latest release to you. So, go ahead and try it!

P.S. No, I don’t have a tablet for you.
P.P.S. No, I don’t have news about that.

The first webOS update for TouchPad available

2011-08-02T00:45:00.011-07:00

We started selling HP TouchPad about a month ago. Yesterday, we made the first OTA update available. Already, prior to that, we made a few important application updates, such as Kindle and HP Movie Store. And more and more apps are available every day. I think pretty good, eh?

In my previous blog post, I tried to explain some of the concerns raised by early reviewers. I'm happy to see that other people have reported what I explained. James Kendrick says: "Some speculate that the crashing reported by reviewers was likely due to the way webOS Synergy does a lot of background syncing with social networks. I don’t know if that is the case, but my experience with the TouchPad has been completely different after day one with the tablet, and it is a good difference." It is not speculation. I know. TouchPad didn't handle the first hour of sync, logging in, indexing, and other admisinstrative task well while reviewers were pushing the performance tests at the same time. But after things settle, TouchPad performs much better. And now the new update addresses also some of these concerns.

In our first OTA update, we have made several performance improvements, added functionality, fixed errors, and generally improved webOS. My team is working hard. We keep on improving webOS, work on the next software and hardware releases, and work closely with developers and partners. I do not have any news on timing yet. I know never fast enough for some of you. But as you can see, they keep on coming.

And, by the way, thank you for your comments. They are helpful.

Go and judge for yourself!

2011-07-10T20:57:00.008-07:00

7 first months

It’s been now a bit over 7 months since I started to run webOS software and services for HP/Palm. We got the HP Veer out a month ago. A week ago, we started selling the HP TouchPad running webOS. I’m proud of the progress we’ve made. It is so important now to get products out and get webOS to developers and customers.

As we expected, WebOS is extremely well suited to a large tablet screen. Multitasking, rich notifications, Flash, integrated email accounts, and other goodies work well on a large screen. You can work any way you want. You don’t need to suspend and stop ongoing activities because something else happens or comes to your mind. Also, gestures for moving to different phases of your workflow work so well on a big tablet screen.

But I’m the first to admit that the work has only started and we still need to improve. Our products are very good already now, and they are only getting better through oncoming software updates; over-the-air, of course. We are extremely committed to take the webOS experience further

Some reviewers have been concerned about some aspects of the webOS and HP Touchpad. Let me comment a few issues.

Multiple accounts, data, and advanced features

Some reviewers are pushing the first hours of the TouchPad usage harder than we expected. We saw cases when users took a new TouchPad into a use. They set up their corporate email account – typically an Exchange account – and a few additional private email accounts, all with contacts and calendars. Then, they set up their Skype account, Facebook account with thousands of friends, and potentially a Snapfish photo account. Then they log on to their Kindle account and started to synchronize their book library. Then, immediately, they transfer tens of gigabytes of music and pictures to the TouchPad. And then they go and install a few dozen of applications from the webOS application catalogue. At this point, webOS synchronizes all accounts, indexes all music and pictures, creates image thumbnails, downloads books, connects to Skype and other accounts and so forth.

While Touchpad is busy doing all the above, users watch a Flash movie and make a Skype video call while having email, Facebook, messaging, a couple web pages, and a few other applications running.

And I admit – we do not handle the situation as well as we should and webOS may get sluggish. We need to clearly improve the system performance especially when setting up new accounts and downloading a lot of data.

Apps

Another thing reviewers commented was the lack of applications. Well, I see a steady stream of good quality applications. We started later so we need to work really hard with developers. This is also a reason why we wanted to get the TouchPad out as soon as possible. TouchPad needs applications, and developers need TouchPads. We are getting very encouraging messages from developers. I firmly believe webOS is a very good platform to develop apps.

My bad

In addition, there is a few embarrassing things. As an example our dictionary included “dont” and “wont” instead of ”don’t” and “won’t”. What can I say? Stupid. But hey, English is not my first language. Yeah, I agree, not good enough - and you need to add the missing words yourself.

Go and judge yourself!

So, we've got a good start. We are working really hard for our first update release, and it will address several issues discussed in reviews and first end user comments. Later, we will crank out more good stuff. WebOS is uniquely different. Well suited for tablets. And we at HP are fully committed to further improve the already very pleasant the experience.

I strongly suggest you go to a BestBuy, Staples, WalMart, Office Depot, Costco, Fry's, or other places to check it out. Judge for yourself!

(Thanks for the "Judge for yourself", webosroundup. By the way, I spell my last name Jaaksi :-) )

Veer available May 15th

2011-05-04T14:21:00.010-07:00

AT&T announced today the availability of the HP Veer. Veer is world smallest 4G smartphone. It runs a full webOS -- and it is so cool.

We've been working really hard to make it happen. I want to publicly thank my team and everybody else who made this happen. A lot of planning, design, implementation, bug scraping, blood, sweat, and even some tears. Go to an AT&T store to see why!

I joined the HP / Palm team in November. So this is the first HP/Palm product for me! I was really impressed to see the dedication and passion within the team. It became very clear to me that even though this is not the easiest team to lead, this is most passionate and talented group of people. A lot of action going on.

As announced earlier, we will have more products coming out. We are thus engaging with developers every day. We run workshops and distribute SDKs and other tools. We are polishing webOS , and doing our best to make sure developers have the best possible tools and the latest know-how from our engineering on how to develop applications and services on webOS. In addition to the core webOS team, developers all over the world are a key source of innovation and drive. Add that team seems to be very passionate about webOS, too.

So, a lot of hard work, emotions, drive -- and a very nice webOS phone -- the HP Veer!

Developing with webOS 3.0

2011-03-31T16:18:00.012-07:00

We've been busy working on webOS 3.0 and the devices we announced in February. I'm really excited -- especially about Veer; the smallest and cutes smartphone I've ever seen.

If you are a developer, now it is a time to get started. We made the HP webOS 3.0 SDK developer beta available for download through the webOS Developer Early Access Program. This is the first webOS release specifically targeted at the HP TouchPad, and we want to make sure you have time to make great apps ready for this exciting platform.

Your old apps will also run OK, but you may wanna take a look at the new platform and see if you could benefit from it. The new Enyo framework is also more developer friendly, and provides many enhancements for the TouchPad form factor. Of course, it is an early access program so things will still change. But changes should be very manageable.

Some people commented to my last post and suggested that we'd take qt as a part of our tool set. I don't see that happening. WebOS is much easier. It offers web based tools, such as Ares, and a rich framework (Enyo). Developers use familiar tools (HTML, Java Script). Those developers who want to go deeper and develop e.g. real time games can use our PDK. Providing these two powerful tools, we keep the platform simple and accessible. Other tools would just make things more confusing and provide no real added value. I claim that for developers, webOS is the best platform available.

I also want to remind you that we have a lot of open positions. But that you already knew, eh?

You CAN make a difference!

2011-02-11T11:08:00.018-08:00

Wednesday was great! Just take a look at

We have ambitious goals. We will make webOS a winning mobile operating system. We will create an exciting ecosystem with developers and other partners. We are very committed, we have products in the pipeline, and we do not hesitate. We control our own destiny, and that is what matters in life. Right?

We’ll have a cool tablet, world’s smallest smartphone, a big screen workhorse smartphone, plans for printers and PCs. Did you see how they work together? We have a clear developer focus with Enyo, Ares, and PDK. Have you tried them already? I’d say this is a pretty good demonstration about how serious we are. WebOS will go to places, and HP is very dedicated to make this happen. For partners, developers, and new employees; this is the time to join the ride.

On another note, I worry about my old friends a lot. I’m sad to see they no longer trust they can make a difference. They’ve given up and given away their passion. Sorry, that ain’t gonna work. You must believe in yourself and what you are up to, and you must believe you can change the world. That’s the only way I know. All the best, though.

So we’ve got many openings at HP in the webOS team. We need good C / C++ developers. We need good javascript guys. We need good HI people, testers, and architects. Now it’s the time to join. Where else are you going to have fun?

webOS launch in San Francisco!

2011-02-09T08:54:00.006-08:00

We announced today 3 new webOS devices that work beautifully together and make webOS shine. We also demonstrated many new innovations that show how great software webOS is for end users and for developers. I want to publicly thank my team and others who have done a tremendous job during the last months and weeks and days and nights. I’m very proud to be a member of this team!

We showed a true webOS smart phone, the Veer, no larger than your credit card yet a fully capable smart phone running the latest webOS. We demonstrated a true workhorse, Pre 3, with a beautiful big screen and a qwerty keyboard. At the same time, we launched the HP TouchPad, a large beautiful tablet running the same webOS.

Let’s then think about the products together. Touch and share. Download and study information about the Sharks today’s game on your Touch Pad. Then, touch the pad with your Veer before leaving home – and take the information with you to go. This is pretty close to my old vision – now just much better implemented!

And, with webOS, you can use the small phone to so much more than just talking. Veer is a true full featured smart phone. And for a tablet, I claim the webOS is better than any other OS for that form factor.

There are three aspects that, in my mind, make webOS so great:

It is designed for cloud. Synergy is a part of the webOS running in the cloud.
It is standard. Developers can use standard HTML and javascript and unleash the full power of webOS, internet, and their favorite services.
It is task oriented. The highly scalable UI promotes tasks and activities you want to perform. You can do you task on a small screen or on a big screen – but instead of concentrating on launching apps it concentrates on getting your things done.

But I wanna talk more about these later. Now, let’s party!

Getting ready ...

2011-02-03T22:20:00.008-08:00

2+ months @ HP. I’m enjoying the ride tremendously. And in my personal life, I'm loving the weather and living on Craigslist.

We are working hard to develop webOS and services further. We will show some new stuff next week, so stay tuned.

As a teaser, take a look at this.

And this, we are in the finals ;-)

And this, we are hiring!

Continue posting ...

2010-11-24T11:39:00.002-08:00

I originally started this blog for one reason: I felt that I needed to communicate the strategies we were executing especially in the area of open source. I was responsible for the most part of it at Nokia, and I thought you wanna hear it from me. Thank you for all the feed back. All of it!

From the early days of Nokia 770 everything has changed. We did turn the company around and put both open source and MeeGo into the center of Nokia. We released Nokia's first Linux and open source based smartphone, the Nokia N900, and participated the creation of the Maemo community. We then joined forces with Intel and others and created MeeGo operations to continue that work we started. And my dear colleagues and community members continue doing that. It will be a great success!

But I moved on. I started at HP / Palm 3 days ago. I'm exited and thrilled about this opportunity. I've always been a great fan of webOS and I'm now proud to be a part of this great team. One of the first things I did even before joining was to install and try out the SDK. I was impressed to see how easily I got started with it!

I do not know yet what are my future needs for communicating through this channel. Palm seems to have good publicity actions going on, such as developer days and sites. But we will see .... talk to you soon!

1.2 out tomorrow

2010-05-25T00:48:00.006-07:00

1.2. You should have it tomorrow the latest.

In a nutshell,

- The world's first phone with Skype video calls
- Google and SIP video calls, too
- Other stuff like browser, exchange, browser etc improvements
- Qt 4.6 for developers ... this is very important. This now bridges us to the forthcoming MeeGo apps that will then run also on you N900.

So with all the above, with full Flash, Mozilla browser, and a lot of cool apps at Nokia OVI store and Maemo repositories, a very compelling little computer. And a phone, too.

More info here.

Competition is good .. it makes things happen!

2010-05-01T00:57:00.042-07:00

I've been working with software, computers, user interfaces and all that since late 80s. I've seen interesting development and several paradigm shifts happening. But I feel that we are in the middle of the most significant one!

It is happening now!
We are right in the middle of a very interesting era. Mobile phones are in the center of high tech innovation. The most of new interesting user interface paradigms originate from mobile space. Laptops and other are borrowing connectivity and other features from mobile phones. And, Moore's law has made it possible for mobile phones to run full operating systems without any limitations thus killing limited "mobile operating systems". If I ever had a doubt now I'm sure! Now we have full computers in our pockets. No wonder mobile phones and their software are in the center of innovation.

Competition
And competition is fierce. Competition is good because only through competition can we ensure continuous development and added value to consumers. PC operating systems have lost this competitiveness after somebody won. Now innovation has moved elsewhere -- increasingly to mobile space.

This is why I follow up and value highly our tough competitors. This is why I think about the industry as a whole. I want to learn from our competitors, copy them, collaborate with them, and try to be better than them. We can commonly do so much more than a single dominant player could do. Competition boosts innovation and makes things possible.

So what is happening right now. A lot!

Apple will come up with their new iPhone OS 4. It will be great, I believe. And even if it wasn't the will make it sound great!

I've been using Google Nexus One a lot lately. It is such a great device. The way they've integrated Google services sets the bar for all of us.

I used to use a Palm Pre a lot. What a great device. What an astounding software. I was so disappointed to see it not getting the traction it deserves. I really hope that now that it has found a new home @ HP it will rise again! And by the way, I have an extra sweet spot for Pre. It shares a lot of stuff with Maemo and N900.

Nokia just announced N8, the first device running Symbian^3. It is a great device with a very nice user interface. And together with the new Qt SDK, the application development environment for Nokia devices is one of the best in the industry!

And of course MeeGo and Maemo. A true computer software running in a mobile phone. Developed as an open source project with Intel, Nokia, and others.

My biased N900 view
As you know, we are selling the first Maemo phone, the N900. I'm biased, but I claim we have the best Flash implementation anybody has. We optimized full Flash to run with an open Mozilla browser. And it works very well!. (These are merely excuses, I think.)

We have the best browser based on the open Mozilla engine. We have the best multitasking implementation.

And --just try it -- we have a brilliant audio quality. Go ahead, plug the best possible studio headphones into you N900, and listen. To my ears, the best in the industry!

So competition is good. It is so exciting to see all this development.

P.S.

I'm running a 1.2 release candidate on this phone now. And this is the best phone ever to write blog posts!

Getting there -- and back! (A volcano post)

2010-04-23T04:18:00.030-07:00

I finally got back home from the Linux Foundation summit where I gave a keynote. We are now building both the platform and devices, and we need to keep the following things clear on our mind:

Other parties are joining, too. This all is happening fast and I noticed a lot of support for MeeGo during the summit.

Thank you Linux Foundation for hosting both the summit and the MeeGo project!

-----------------

And then, everything started to go bad. Islanders broke their volcano and seriously complicated things. Those guys seem to screw up banks and mountains on a regular basis.

I had originally a flight back home from SFO, leaving Thursday evening a week ago. It was canceled, as we all know, and there was no idea when would British Airways start to operate again. Actually, BA never ever contacted me on anything during the trip.

I'm one of those guys who cannot relax if everything is not under my control. So no way could I have done what --looking back now ---would have been the right choice: stay put and wait for BA to take me home. No no. Instead, I started my own journey step by step getting closer to home.

So I booked a flight to New York City. It is closer to Finland than SFO, I figured. Then, in NYC I started to look for flights to Europe.
I managed to get myself on a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt. But while the plane was already starting to board, I saw the pilots walking out of the tube. I thought: They either gonna ask me to drive or then they'll cancel the flight. Was not my day, so back to the hotel and a night in NYC.

Next day I desperately tried to book a flight to Europe. No airlines or travel agencies were of any help. My dear admin, Merja, did all she could back in Finland, but no flights whatsoever! The longest time I waited on a phone on a single call was 2 hours 20 minutes. A long distance call from NYC to Helsinki on my N900. I had the waiting tone playing in my ear plugs while doing shopping in NYC. I hate the music loop they've created.

But then, Sunday evening, an Alitalia / Delta flight from JFK to Milan. And I managed to get a ticket. So here we go.

In the latter part of the flight, I heard an announcement in Italian. I could not understand anything but I saw Italians making weight lifting moves (without weights) and saw the map on the screen drawing a dotted line to Rome. OK I thought. Rome is not Milan, but Rome is Europe. Getting closer now.

In Rome I saw all the flights north canceled. Nobody knew when they would start again. It is now Monday and I was already supposed to be home by Friday. I went to different car rental offices and tried to rent a car. No cars available anywhere. None. I tried to buy a car. Yes I did -- I've always thought I'd like to buy a 70's Alfa. It would have taken me 5 days to get an export license, they say. So no good.

Then I went downtown and checked into a hotel. I took a subway to the central railway station to get a train. No availability in any trains leaving North until Saturday. Buying a complete trip to, say, Stockholm --- no idea. There was a 500 m line queuing to the ticket office -- while there was a sign saying "No tickets available". Go and figure ... And it was raining!

I was also trying to call different places and become sort of an expert on waiting tones. If you ever make one don't you loop your waiting tone music so that when the loop stars again there is a click and noticeable loop break. It gets reaaaaalllly annoying after an hour listening.

Very tired now, I go to the hotel bar to get a beer before going to bed. It was around 11 pm and the previous night in Alitalia coach wasn't really cozy. Then I heard two persons talking Finnish and I ask if they were stranded, too. They said, yes, but we are leaving for Helsinki tomorrow, they continued. They were leaving the Rome Central railway station Tuesday morning 6 am. Holy shit, how?

They have found a group of people on Facebook going for a bus ride Rome - Tallinn organized by a local travel agency. And then a ferry to Helsinki. They gave me a phone number to call, but the bus was already full. Sorry.

I went back to my room and brushed my teeth. Then I -- packed up my things and set an alarm to wake me up 4.30. I thought eventually you also get lucky if you just keep on trying.

So, in the morning I checked out from the hotel (a sign of commitment ... no plans for the next night other than it won't be Rome) and went to the railway station with my new Finnish friends so see what's going on. All 49 showed up and they loaded the bus . I was silently hoping a now-show but I was not lucky. Or actually I was ... the bus company had told the travel agency that there are 49 seats available, but the bus had 50!! So I got in! Here we go from Rome to Tallinn.

I save you from the details of the bus trip. But I will never ever use a bus again. Some of the highlights were:

-We had three drivers who would take turns in driving and resting. They would change a driver without stopping the bus.
-We drove non-stop Rome - Tallinn. Only 20 min stops here and there every 4 hours or so.

-The bus had one broken TomTom navigator that didn't boot up, my N900 run out of battery already in Italy, and the drivers considered buying a map in Austria but decided not to. So the navigation was all f'd up. We got it wrong during the trip pretty often.
-The drivers were driving to Belarus before we as passengers realized that this is not the way to go! Its not on the way to Estonia and you need a visa to get in and .... really ... nobody is interested in going there at this point.
-There was no WC or fridge or anything in the bus. Just 50 hard seats.
-It took us 46 hours with a few 20 minutes breaks to drive from Rome to Tallinn.
-The roads in Poland and Lithuania are not for motor vehicles -- or for human beings.
-If you give a Finn too much alcohol he may get aggressive. In a bus that is not good. (I'm not talking about myself ....)
-Women pee more often than men.

So the, 5.30 am Thursday we got to Tallinn. I check into a hotel just to get a shower. The I take a ferry to Helsinki and a train to Tampere.

I get to bed early. It is now Thursday evening -- last time I was in bed more than 4 hours was Saturday in NYC.

This is all Jim's fault! But now hard feelings -- I'm home. And the Summit was superb.

MeeGo is now opened

2010-04-01T02:42:00.004-07:00

MeeGo project is making progress. We opened the MeeGo distribution infrastructure and the operating system base. It is not on official or tested release, but the opening of the public development of the MeeGo OS layer. So, it is an invitation for hackers who want to participate in MeeGo development, not for end users ;-)

If you consider yourself a developer, go and check it out. You can run it on an Nokia N900, and on an Intel Atom based laptop or handset.

If you study the code closer you can also see how we are merging Moblin and Maemo projects. Moblin contributed things such as the entire OpenSuse based build infrastructure, geoCLue location framework, PcakageKit, Connman etc. Maemo contributed things such as Telepathy for Internet communication, Tracker for user and metadata management, Maemo multimedia application framework, Qt toolkit etc. And, as we know, a big part of Moblin and Maemo were already the same.

And, by the way, our team within Nokia was called Maemo Devices. We are now MeeGo Devices. Same guys. Bigger ambitions!

P.S.

As explained, N900 is used as one of the platforms for MeeGo development. I do not have any news about the actual Nokia products running MeeGo. We will tell about the products separately.

N900, MeeGo, and Barcelona

2010-02-18T03:17:00.018-08:00

In-flight entertainment with N900

Flying to Barcelona over the Alps.
N900 takes the pictures and monitors the speed of the plane … keeping the pilot honest.

Open source and Business

So how was Barcelona? I met with many device manufacturers, software houses, and chipset and technology providers. It became clear that many of them will be looking into MeeGo as a viable target platform. The feedback was very positive.

We managed to get a very good traction with open source community on Maemo. MeeGo now expands that to next level -- and this is one of the biggest contributions Maemo will provide to MeeGo. I've been discussing with community members, seen the discussion and work taking off at the MeeGo discussion forums, and so forth ... the ball is rolling! Now it is the time for you to get on-board. Now!

But that's not all. With MeeGo we now get business interest like never before from the key players in the industry. As a truly open alternative, strong community support, with full blown standard Linux, powerful application environment, and the two biggest investors in mobile Linux backing it up it has all the potential. There was a huge need for something like MeeGo. Openly developed operating system backed up by enough money and a strong community.

I’m very encouraged!

Buzz!

Suits!

So what’s with today ….?

N900 is one of the most interesting products you can own at the moment. It is on open Linux based smartphone / mobile computer that offers, among other things, a superior browser that runs full Flash and renders pages better than any other mobile browser, good multimedia cababilitis (DivX and stuff ... even to your TV), a very deep social networking integration, a conversation view that allows you to maintain short message and IM conversations in order, capability to run many applications at the same time, OVI store for more apps, community repositories for really advanced stuff and apps, a Carl Zeiss camera, etc etc. (I indeed sound like a sales guy … but then again I and my daughter are using N900 as our primary device, of course)

And now, going forward it will only get better. We just released a new software release for you this Tuesday. Third over-the-air update this year pushed to your N900 by us. And we have new software updates in the pipeline for you, more applications coming, and we open new markets for sales.

But there is better to come. The announcement of MeeGo takes N900 even further. Now listen to this:

MeeGo has already gotten many more people interested in N900 than Maemo platform alone would have done. I already know many people now gearing up their Qt based application development on N900. Why now? Because now they know it will not be just a Nokia-only thing but will be much wider and thus worth investing in. This means that there will be more applications for N900 owners in the future than there would have been without MeeGo. This is for sure. This is the most important thing for the majority of N900 customers. With MeeGo, Maemo and N900 will only go stronger!

This is the next step ... a step forward

2010-02-15T12:26:00.009-08:00

Greetings from the Nokia party here in Barcelona. I'm blogging on my N900 which really makes me the geek of the party!

MeeGo is the next step fro Maemo. Natural evolution. Gets us much wider adoption. So it is not at all about forgetting Maemo. It is about merging most significant open source mobile projects together.

Nokia roadmap will be accelerated. Maemo6 plans have not changed. We are workingd days and nights to get it out.It will be Qt based and MeeGo compatible.

We will absolutely not forget N900 users and developers. If you are a developer, develop on N900 with Qt and your apps will run on MeeGo devices. If you are an N900 owner (or an owner wannabee) this is all good for you. All the MeeGo and Qt momentum will give you many more interesting applications to run on N900. Now and in the future.

MeeGo time!

2010-02-15T02:42:00.001-08:00

We’ve been busy with our friends @ Intel.

We decided to expand the relationship we started already last spring. We merge Maemo and Moblin projects into one single project called MeeGo. MeeGo is an open software platform – an operating system – for a wide range of devices. It’ll run on X86 and on Arm based hardware. It will be developed as an open project hosted by the Linux Foundation.

So what does it mean? Many things.

Joint development

We will merge Maemo and Moblin projects. Their architecture is already very similar. They share many components but sometimes use different versions. But they build and integrate releases independently. And while Maemo is for ARM, Moblin is for X86. Now we merge them to get the best of both. A good Moblin build and integration, Maemo’s mobile optimizations and ARM support, Qt etc. We can also now make the bright engineers of Intel and Nokia to work close together.

And even more. I invite all active Moblin and Maemo community members to now join the MeeGo project. It’ll give you all a much bigger pond to swim in. And it’ll get your work into much wider use than either of these projects separately.

Freedom

MeeGo is free. Code will be available for everybody under proper open source licenses. No strings attached other than making your contributions also free. The development and integration will be open, too. Everybody can invest in MeeGo and participate. It is a genuine open source project. Free for everybody to participate, contribute, and enjoy. Free. No papers to sign. Just show up!

Compatibility

MeeGo offers the broadest possible compatibility for application developers. It uses Qt as the framework and toolset for application developers. It means very good tools and possibility to run your apps in a wide range of devices. Code once – deploy everywhere.

MeeGo also means compatibility and full compliance with leading open source projects. We will not fork projects if we can possibly avoid it. We will work with leading open source projects using the open source best practices.

A perfect target

MeeGo will aim high. Nokia and Intel are the biggest investors in mobile Linux based technologies and now – together—even more significant. We will put all our force behind making MeeGo THE operating system.

So, for chip-set companies, hardware vendors, software companies, application developers, device manufactures, operators … this is the place to go. Make you stuff work under, inside, or on top of MeeGo and you get your stuff deployed all over the place. Nokia will ship tons of MeeGo devices, Intel, too. And others will use MeeGo in their devices. It is open, free, powerful and compatible.

Devices

So what’s with Maemo6? Maemo6 will be MeeGo compatible.....consider Maemo6 already a MeeGo instance.

So aim at MeeGo. We will!

Applications on Maemo

2010-01-21T05:20:00.011-08:00

Some people are questioning Maemo as an application development platform. I claim that it is one of Maemo's strong points going forward.

We have always had a strong and productive maemo.org community that builds very interesting stuff. Their work has been available for more advanced Maemo users already for some time. I claim that the depth and coolness of those apps and compos beats almost any other mobile platform. Maemo is open and as a true computer OS it allows developers to create really nice applications, widgets, and extensions. If you want to experience them just open disabled repositories or go directly to maemo.org.

And now, Ovi Store for Maemo applications has been open for a week or two. It is the official Nokia supported application store where developers can distribute their work. You should defenately check it out.

Angry Birds is one of the many applications you can install to your N900 from the Ovi Store. This is what the developers of that entertaining game say: " In the first week that Angry Birds has been on the Ovi Store, it has been downloaded almost as many times as the iPhone version in six weeks. Given that most N900 users have not even used Ovi Store yet, we are confident that there will be many more downloads in the months to come, and are sure that the N900 version will be very profitable."

I suggest you read the whole interview and go to the Ovi Store with your N900. Get your apps there, too. And have fun!

Maemo is on the right tracks ... Friday afternoon!

2010-01-15T05:57:00.007-08:00

When we started Maemo 5 we said: let's make the world's best pocketable computer, that is also a good phone! That is exactly what we've managed to do. And this is my vision of the future, too.

My impression is that if you read reviews and blogs, all of those that start with "Internet", "Computer", "Multimedia", "Networking" or any other such terms love N900. They think it's the best device out there. Those, who think it primarily just as a phone have more concerns.

Just as we planned! The best browser ever, the best conversation view, the best social network integration, very good camera & imaging capabilities, good multimedia support --- and a crips and well working mobile phone. And -- as a true computer- open and upgradeable by end users:

Two firmware updates within a week. Over the air. Some glitches, mostly going well!
Application store with good stuff in it
MMS implementation coming in as an open source project (Frals, cool!!!).
In addition to basic applications, a lot of other very integrated features, such as the Firefox browser, MSN and other IM plugins, codecs etc available as downloadables. Demonstrates the power of a true open Linux computer!
+ many so interesting apps ... hundreds already ....

Not bad, eh?

It's Friday afternoon and I'm still in a phone conference, as you can see in the picture below. I'm in a phone conf (on mute, of course) and on my Facebook at the same time -- and a card game going on ..... this late in Friday, I felt that I needed to post and brag a bit about it ;-)

A good start for 2010!

2010-01-12T05:54:00.007-08:00

Happy new year!

We opened Ovi Store beta today for Maemo 5, i.e. for N900. Go and check it out! More here.

I made a trip during the new year. And I used my N900 to take a lot of pictures. There are at least two advantages in N900 over a conventional camera:

1) The sharp high resolution screen makes it possible to really edit pictures with the device. I think somebody should build or port a good image editing software for Maemo 5. The screen would make it really useful. But even with the in-build editing capabilities you can do nice stuff.

2) I can upload the images directly to my Flickr, Facebook, Ovi and other accounts. And make my friends jealous ... By the way, there is a nice N900 group @ Flickr.

..and now, back to work!

Houston, we have a take-off!

2009-11-10T00:03:00.005-08:00

We gave a few hundred Nokia N900s out to the Maemo Summit participants. That happened about a month ago. You have now been using the devices and provided us with feedback. Thank you so much! That has been very helpful. You've helped us to focus our effort and work on the remaining issues. That's why I want YOU to be the first to know.

We have also been testing the software extensivly in our own labs. We will continue working on the software and will provide important software upgrades as we go forward. But we also wanted to have very good software release to start with.

Based on our testing and your feedback we decided to postpone the delivery start. We had oroiginally said October, but now we said November. Now I'm happy to tell that we ment only days, not weeks or months.

The shipments of the Nokia N900 have now started. The factories are now working full speed and the devices are on their way to distribution.

Houston, we have a take-off!

My vision of Maemo ... at least a part of it

2009-11-08T03:45:00.037-08:00

We say that the Nokia N900 running Maemo 5 is a computer. It is a computer in your pocket. What an earth do we mean? Let me try to explain what I think. This is my interpretation.

A computer of 2009 -- not 1999
When I talk about a computer, I talk about a computer people use today, especially young people. Think about the internet, messaging, sharing, openness, and think about browsers and players. Don't think about spreadsheets, word processors, file managers, or closed systems. That should put you in the right ballpark to start with.

Open and expandable
I want Maemo software to be expandable without limits. I want to encourage people to write apps that install themselves into the application grids and sit on top of the Maemo OS. But I also want to invite people to build services and apps that integrate within the Maemo software --- as an integral part of the end user experience. Not only apps but Maemo OS expansions. Maemo devices are open and true Linux computers so the sky is the limit.

Let me try to explain. An application that goes "on top of Maemo" is like the Nako game from Jakub. It sits on top of Maemo. The N900 will have many of these!

Figure: The Nako game -- an application

A MSN messaging I'm using is implemented with a piece of software called Butterfly developed as connection manager to the Telepathy communication framework. It is developed by the community (hackers, developers, 3rd party companies, ....) but it is tightly integrated into Maemo. Maemo allows such integration. For the end user MSN messaging becomes an integral part of Maemo as if it was originally developed by Nokia.

Figure: My accounts -- including MSN -- integrated within Maemo 5

Figure: Butterfly MSN discussion with my daughter

Figure: Similar discussion over SMS -- both look exactly the same. SMS is developed and integrated by Nokia and MSN/Butterfly by others

So Maemo is an open platform for all kinds of integration possibilities.

Addictive, active, and connected
My vision is to make Maemo really addictive. I want users to be constantly checking it out -- what's happening, who's online, who said what etc. Instead of a boring static menu grid, I want Maemo to open directly to the world around us. Maemo is active -- not passive. I want plug-ins, message bars, picture galleries, and status indicators constantly changing on the home screen. I want to see the latest from the world around me. I want to be connected all the time with a glance at the screen!

Figure: What's up RIGHT NOW?

Doing many things at the same time
We all multitask. I want Maemo to make multitasking simple and understandable. I want to be able to shift from one activity to another with one touch of a finger. I do not want to limit people to only one job at a time.

Figure: A whole lotta things goin' on ...

Cult
Maemo is rough on the edges. It is a bit dangerous. It is open to experiments. It is about community involvement. I want these to stay. I do not like boring cars, either.

Figure: Torrents ... like in any computer

Summary
These were some of my thoughts when I'm thinking about Maemo 5, pushing Maemo forward, and making computers. We are not making a new iPhone or Symbian here. They both exist already and are pretty good. So no need to replicate them.

With Maemo, I see computers that are always connected, fit into your pocket, are open, and addictive.

About boring cars

2009-10-23T09:40:00.019-07:00

Getting close now!!

It was cool to see the Maemo Summit participants playing with N900s. For those of you who still need to wait for a while (yes, my fault ...) check out the new videos from our UI team.

We are working like maniacs to get the N900 finalized. I'm so proud of the Nokia teams in India, US, and Finland working hard on Maemo 5 .... and already equally hard on Maemo 6. And I'm also very happy to see the Maemo community efforts getting cool stuff on and inside the Maemo platform.

People speculate now if N900 is a smartphone, or a computer, or a some kind of a killer of another phone --- you know. I understand that people want to compare N900 to other devices, but it's like comparing apples and oranges. Literally. N900 does many things better than any other device I know, some features could be improved, and some tricks it cannot do at all. So you better check it out and form your own opinion.

Those of you who know me know that I'm a bit of a petrol head. So for me my N900 is a bit like my Alfa Romeo. It can be almost anything -- but boring it ain't!

...and, life is simply too short to drive boring cars. But that's another story .....

Sttgrt

2009-09-04T04:52:00.004-07:00

We had a good few days @ Nokia world in Stuttgart. Nokians, journalist, analysts, partners, operators, Maemo.org dudes, etc. I received overwhelmingly positive feedback from people once they saw a N900 in action. But then again, I do not know what they talked behind my back.

Or actually I do. Very positive comments also in various blogs and articles. People understand what we are doing and they like the product.

It is all about
1) Internet (browsing, chatting, sharing, talking ....) first
2) Open source & collaborative development for consumers
3) True computer experience in a small package

Alan has a nice story @ maemo.org.

How do we build Maemo devices?

2009-08-29T03:17:00.013-07:00

Nice buzz ;-)

We have a tough last mile to finalize the N900 for the sales start. The Maemo team is working very hard and I'm so proud of it! Thus, I want to say a few words about how we build the Maemo devices. We do it as a part of the community in upstream projects, maemo.org projects, and internal hardware and software development, finalizing, and releasing.

Upstream projects
The most significant part of this joint development happens in upstream communities, such as kernel.org, Mozilla, and Gnome. Hundreds of individuals are participating the development and this is what creates the foundation of the Maemo platform.

Maemo is based on the world's most significant open source components. It is build with the community. I've said some time ago that our vision is to bring open source to consumers. That is what is happening right now.

Maemo.org
While working within these upstream projects, we have maemo.org as the Maemo community. It provides a means for developers to discuss, contribute, follow up, praise&complain, and be part of the Maemo evolution. The Maemo community has over 16.000 registered members that contribute to more than 700 development projects. Is it the largest community of mobile open source developers? We as Nokia sponsor it but it is governed by the community council.

Nokia Maemo team
The Nokia team runs device development programs, such as the N900 program, and software programs, such as the Fremantle software program as a part of the Maemo Devices. Software programs and the roadmap are communicated and discussed openly within the maemo.org. Device programs are Nokia secrets before days like this Thursday.

The Nokia programs utilize the work from upstream projects, maemo.org work and Nokia internal R&D. They finalize the software and hardware, and create an open source based user experience that -- I hope -- people will love the way I do.

Don't think that this is a simple engine to run! In addition of getting the most significant parts of the code from community projects, the Nokia Maemo team has a huge job to develop, finalize, optimize, fine tune, test, and integrae the devices into ready packages. The work varies from bootloaders to UI widgets, from power management to graphical elements.

In addition to the open source projects, the Maemo team works intimately with external companies providing components and technology to Maemo devices. Texas Instruments, Adobe, Ebay/Skype to name a few.

Summary

Great user experience through open source. Excitement in the air. The community development in the core.

This really made my day: A reason to get up in the morning by Philip.

N900 announced

2009-08-27T05:50:00.004-07:00

Ifeel good. It is now publicly announced. See www.maemo.nokia.com.
More to follow.

See you at Nokia World, Maemo Summit and OSIM.

Collaboration, upstream, Intel, and others

2009-06-23T06:14:00.013-07:00

We are living interesting times. The current economical situation has made things change faster. The whole mobile world is changing. New players are entering and old players are changing or disappearing.

There is now less time and energy for games, politics and religion in the tech world. For all of us who are in this for the long run -- we all need to get products and services out to consumers ASAP. For us, the key is collaboration.

As a part of our strategy in Maemo, we collaborate with many partners. We work closely with the Mozilla foundation and the Linux foundation. We work in several open source projects such as Gnome, Qt, X and so forth. In addition we work with several industry partners, such as Texas Instruments, who provide us with the underlying technology for the existing Maemo products.

And today we announced that we collaborate with Intel inside several new and established open source projects. This is the kind of upstream collaboration we've been talking about. We say: "Intel and Nokia are coordinating their Open Source technology selection and development investments for Maemo and Moblin. This means alignment behind a range of key Open Source technologies for Mobile Computing such as: oFono, ConnMan, Mozilla, X.Org, BlueZ, D-BUS, Tracker, GStreamer, PulseAudio. "

We both feel that it makes a lot of sense to collaborate and direct key investments to the same direction. It allows us both to contribute mature technology to same open source projects – and not fragment the industry.

All this is needed to create new interesting products and services.

Spam on Qt, Maemo and Moblin

2009-05-13T07:16:00.003-07:00

It's been a while.

One guy just told me he's reading my blog. I guess I better start writing ...

Let me spam this time with two topics only:

Look at Qt opened up. Pretty cool. You can see the work in progress.

Look at Maemo and Moblin work. oFono.org is a place to design an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications.

Qt goes LGPL

2009-01-14T07:54:00.003-08:00

Qt will be available under LGPL and repositories will be publicly available. We invite contributions ... so the development process will open up too.

This will make Qt a very interesting platform. It is now truly open, cross platform, and technically very advanced.

Many people had already earlier an opinion that Qt is technically very advanced, flexible and powerful. It was only the licensing and the development model that was wrong. Now, that’s fixed.

Open and Agile -- the Transparent Twins

2008-11-30T04:08:00.006-08:00

Component level

Open source adds transparency. It provides a very practical means to access and share code, work together with others, and design and implement software in a collaborative manner. When code is licensed under a copyleft license, there is also a guarantee that nobody can mess it up! Transparency and free access to source code provide very powerful tools for software development.

Commercial system level

However, building complex systems remains challenging. Developers who never worked in a large commercial project easily underestimate challenges outside the source code domain. Creating right user experience is hard. Collecting feedback from users during the development is not simple. Providing accurate project estimations for various stakeholders remains tough. Integrating complex systems from components that originate from different sources is much more difficult than writing the actual components. Testing and stabilizing large systems gets harder and harder as systems grow. Replanning after late and big changes in project conditions is laborious. And, running several software projects concurrently multiplies all the above challenges.

Open and Agile

Open source adds transparency to software development. The code, developers, and design decisions are all visible to everybody. I believe transparency can also be used in other areas of software projects. Agile methods, such as Scrum, can provide such transparency on the system project level.

Our context is challenging, though. Teams cannot be co-located. Non-agile hardware development happens simultaneously with software development. There are tens -- and even hundreads -- of Scrum teams working for a same project. Projects deal with issues ranging from hardware design, driver and OS base port, middleware and application adaptation -- all the way to end user experience and over 40 language variants ... and so forth. In these circumstances a basic idea of a a few agile software teams is hardly a complete solution.

I believe

It is a bit early for me to make any final conclusions of agile methods in practice. But I'm a believer, and we are using Scrum now more and more at Nokia. I believe that what open source has done for software development, agile methonds can do for commercial system and product development. Add visibility, access, and intellectual honesty. Transparency. You cannot hide shit no more.

A few thoughs based on your feedback

2008-10-26T03:20:00.018-07:00

Some time ago I asked you comments about openness. You sent me some interesting links. Thanks! I try to summarize your comments a bit.

Rights vs. executing the rights

Joel explained the idea of community openness by using three different characteristics:
1) the IP (right to use),
2) the development (right to influence the direction of the code) and
3) the governance (right to make decisions like who's in charge).

Then, Andreas talks about comparing and constracting community models by two axes:
- governance model
- license type used.

Both Andreas and Joel seem to have similar ideas, and I think they both have very good characterizations. But, in addition to these, I'd like to add an other dimension. The three elements above talk about the rights. In addition to the rights I'd like to think about the reality; i.e. is anybody really using these rights. And if not, why not.

Let me give you an example. Suppose I start on open source project and put my stuff into the sourceforge under GPL. I then invite others to discuss and influence the direction of the code I'm developing. And invite them to contribute. I also say that any time somebody suggest to change the leader, I'm ready to step down if somebody else gets a majority vote. So now, in Joel's three dimension model presented above, this would be very open, eh?

But what if nobody shows up? What if nobody is interested in my project and I'm left alone to develop it. Or if somebody just takes bits of my code and uses them elsewere inside another project. Is my project then open? I theory it is, but really? I'd claim that the project is open only if people use their rights, show up and contribute, and thus make it open. To me open source is more about "doing it" -- less about theory or human rights. So, to make the project open I also need to get others involved.

Another interesting aspect by Joel was his study on corporate sponsored open source projects. Check this one out!

Other comments

A good summary of different projects was provided by Smancke. He compares different projects in terms of their openness.

Jaffa gives us some ideas and opinions on how to continue with maemo. He talks about the community involvment, openness and control. He says "Nokia need to take action to really push community involvement. Nothing's got for free: if Nokia aren't seen to be committed to the community, why should the community be committed to Nokia?" Good points, Jaffa!

Usability

Then last but not least, David opened up a discussion on usability and open source. He refered at a good article by Matthew Paul Thomas. An interesting topic that needs attention. While talking to different people, I hear a lot of similar concerns and discussions.

Thanks!

c-base

2008-09-19T05:41:00.007-07:00

Greetings from the Maemo Summit here at c-base. Quim found us a cool place to have the Summit. You who didn't come -- you missed a lot! We are all here. Over 200!

A few new announcements about the current plans with Fremantle:

-WLAN / power management to open source

-Fremantle to support OpenGL

-Clutter -- altough there is a roadblock now ... but we're hopeful

We just had a nice lighting sessions. Alan ran OpenOffice in a Debian bubble within Maemo. Sebastian showed how Maemo devices can be used in police cars. Eduardo showed new Canola stuff on Qt. And so forth. Cool stuff. More here.

OSiM News -- What's up with Maemo?

2008-09-16T09:54:00.008-07:00

I had a presentation at the OSiM conference in Berlin today. I discussed about the future of the Maemo software.

Bringing open source to consumer mainstream

Nokia operates in two worlds:
a) in a product and business world manufacturing and selling devices and services
b) in an open source –even in a free software world—participating in many projects and peer development groups

The open source and the corporate world used to be very different. But now they overlap more and more each day. This closeness provides very interesting opportunities, but also challenges. Our vision is to bring the innovation, quality and end user participation into consumer mainstream. Our vision is a fruitful and beneficial collaboration.

Photo: Ian McKellar

A suit -- a t-shirt

So the suits and the hackers! For the suits I have one warning. We have no product announcements today. And for the hackers, we are not educating anybody here, not even the Linux community. But I’ve got a good story to tell.

Maemo

Maemo.org is an open source project, sponsored and contributed by Nokia. It is both for the application developers and for the platform developers providing a means to work together.

Nokia uses Maemo.org as the foundation of its own Maemo software that currently fuels Nokia’s Internet Tablets, such as N800 and N810. Maemo is the first mobile project that takes the Linux desktop paradigm to mobile devices. I’d claim that Nokia essentially created the Mobile Internet Devices (MID) category with the Nokia 770. It included several internet centric applications, such as the desktop browser and VoIP and IM services, as opposite of PDA or Phone centric applications, such as PIM or telephony apps. And it was based on GNOME and Linux. And it was all about the touch screen from the very beginning.

A preview of the 5th Release

Maemo software evolution has progressed through 4 releases. It has powered several multimedia computers, such as the Nokia N810. It is now a time to introduce some of the future directions for the Maemo software.

The 5th release will include cellular connectivity for the High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) data. Maemo already supports WLAN, Bluetooth and WIMAX. With HSPA we can now build use cases for wireless broadband anywhere.

Maemo will enable more computing power by running on OMAP3 processors . OMAP3 enables laptop-like performance and advanced entertainment capabilities. It is based on the ARM® Cortex™-A8 superscalar microprocessor core.

Maemo platform will include support for high definition camera sensors. This enables new multimedia use cases such as instant photo tagging and sharing.

And like before, Maemo remains to be one of Nokia’s software options for Internet optimized multimedia computers.

The Linux Foundation

Nokia becomes Gold Sponsor of the Linux Foundation . Linux and open source is becoming more and more important to Nokia. Thus, increasing our contribution to the Linux Foundation and to the Linux kernel is a self-evident step for Nokia.

It is good to notice how well our goals are aligned already. Nokia’s vision is to bring open source and Linux to consumer mainstream. The Linux Foundation expresses its goals by saying:

...For Linux to remain open and attain the greatest ubiquity possible, important services must be provided, including legal protection, standardization, promotion and collaboration. The Linux Foundation has been founded to help close the gap between open source and proprietary platforms, while sustaining the openness, freedom of choice and technical superiority inherent in open source software.

As many of you know, we have been active in several open source projects, including the Linux kernel. Nokia has become today the first to contribute code on HSPA cellular connectivity for OMAP3 processor to Linux kernel.

Work in upstream is the way to contribute to community also in cellular connectivity area. It is our core way of working! As in most work with upstream projects, we start bottom up with our contribution. The first code on HSPA cellular connectivity was made public in the last 24 hours.

Later on, we intend to contribute to the Linux kernel the SSI (Synchronous Serial Interface) hardware driver for OMAP3, and the power management, link layer protocol, and the network layer protocol for the modem according to Nokia specs. Let’s work together!

Software Developed with the Community

Maemo.org community is the open source community that innovates on top and within the Maemo platform. We invite innovation not only on top of the platform but also into the platform as an experimental lab for innovations.

Maemo community has over 13.000 members today and works on over 600 projects. It is probably the biggest open source community for mobile Linux. As a part of the Maemo work, Nokia contributes to many other upstream open source projects such as GNOME/GTK+, Linux kernel, Debian, Gstreamer, Telepathy, etc. Nokia will shift more and more of its R&D work into open source mode to avoid forking.

Maemo Summit

Meet you soon there! Almost 200 participants and growing – just around the corner here in Berlin.

Different ways and paradigms - a theoretical post

2008-08-30T08:52:00.028-07:00

And now, something a bit more theoretical -- or is it?

I know many bright people in software and high tech, both in business and in academia. I feel very privileged. My network gives me new ideas, helps me testing some of mine, and gives me valuable feedback. I try to learn and understand why people and companies do the things the way they do. I then try to utilize this learning in my own work.

In addition to talking to people, I find it good to have some models in my mind when trying to understand how people and companies operate. A good model helps to put things into perspective and answer many "why" questions.

I've found the model shown below usefull in many occasions. It models the way companies utilize open source. As an example, the model can help companies to set goals for their open source operations. They do not necessary need to get very deep if they are on the left hand corner. But, if they plan to laund a new project around what is important to them, they better prepare to invest in it!

OSSI project; http://www.coss.fi/web/coss/research/ossi

Another important consideration is the approach towards software openness in general. Does openness have a value as such? Why? What value? Consequences?

We can think about two extremes and then many shades of gray in between. In one extreme we can find true free software advocates. Those who follow the thoughts of Richard Stallman and such. In the other extreme are people and companies who keep everything closed. They never reveal their source code and only give a limited license for the end users to use the binary package they provided. I bet you have you favorite company or individual to think of.

Then, somewhere in between are various ways of sharing code, opening APIs, and giving more rights to the user. Foundations, such as the LIMO foundation and the Symbian Foundation are examples of these. Also, products, such as our internet tablets that have some portions of the code free and some parts closed --- for various reasons -- fall into between these extreams.

Closed ---> Free

I wonder if anybody has tried to develop something similar to the one shown above. Academia? Anybody.? How would you label the extremes? How would you label colored boxes form A to E? Why? More or less boxes? Why would somebody choose a specific box for their products? What are the consequences? Is this even relevant? (I think it is!)

I have something like above often in my mind when thinking about products, individuals, and companies. But has anybody really tried to develop it further? I'd like to the map reality against the models. A good model can help us to explain and understand why things are the way they are. Also, as an example, reading Free As In Freedom helps you to understand the far right corner. It is a good book for those interested in understanding why people feel so strongly about free software -- why it is so fundamental, un-compromized, and clear in many people's minds. There are also good books explaining the far left corner; e.g. from the man himself!

Anyway, please, let me know if you have something more tangible -- papers, publications or thoughts. I'd like to know.

P.S.

See you at the OSiM. Also, do not forget the Maemo Summit.

Summer Greetings!

2008-07-21T09:24:00.008-07:00

I'm taking several weeks off. Up here in the north, summer time is so valuable that I want to dedicate as much time as possible to my family and to myself.

So I've been sailing with my family and doing other relaxing stuff. (Lasse, thanks!)

You may know that up here in Scandinavia we have something we call "every man's rights". In essence, I can hike on any land, spend a night in any forest, or moor my boat to any island I please -- as long as I'm not in a close proximity of anybody's home or summer cottage. Open access to our beautiful country!

10 pm!

You need proper tools for docking in the wild!

So I'm getting ready for the fall. One important occasion will be the Maemo Summit right after the OSiM world in Berlin. I hope we can -- once again -- initiate some fruitful discussion around open source (I know we will ;-) ), do some real work, meet interesting people and have fun. See you there!

Foundations and principles

2008-06-24T10:32:00.007-07:00

Symbian Foundation

As you may have noticed, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS, S60, UIQ and MOAP to create a new open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone we plan to establish the Symbian Foundation as a means to support everybody who wants to use, and/or enhance this platform. Contributions from Foundation members will be integrated to further enhance the platform. Membership of this non-profit Foundation will be open to all organizations.

To enable the Foundation, Nokia today announced plans to acquire the remaining shares of Symbian Limited that Nokia does not already own and then contribute the Symbian and S60 software to the Foundation! Sony Ericsson and Motorola also announced their intention to contribute technology from UIQ, and DOCOMO has also indicated its willingness to contribute its MOAP(S) assets. The Foundation will make selected components available as open source at launch. It will then work to establish the most complete mobile software offering available in open source. This will be made available over the next two years and is intended to be released under Eclipse Public License (EPL) 1.0.

Now let’s think a bit what this means. The S60 on top of Symbian is by far the most widely used smartphone platform. If you then add technologies that Moto and SonyE run on top of the Symbian OS you get a pretty good market coverage. 200 million phones shipped already! This all will now be available with very favorable terms – mostly under EPL. And what is most important is that this particular software really works. It is not a specification exercise or a strategy statement. It is real. It runs already in 235 different phone models. And it will be available to all.

Linux @ Nokia will go strong

This is now Nokia’s next step in the smartphone front running Symbian. But this is by no means a sign of us abandoning the work with Linux, Qt, Gstreamer, Mozilla, WebKit, Debian, X org, and so fort. Now, more than ever, we will strengthen our efforts within the upstream projects we already participate in – as well as around the maemo.org. And we will keep on developing most interesting Linux based products also in the future.

Some further comments

Which leads me to comment some of the recent discussion that – let me say – went pretty much where I didn't expect. So as said, we are 100% committed to expand our work with several open source projects, contribute even more code, collaborate, and learn. By doing this we expect to be able to create better Linux and open source base products.

We are by no means in a position to “educate the Linux community” or any other project for that matter. I never used those words, of course. Also, I do not like DRMs, Simlocks or any of that stuff any more than you do. I always want my music DRM free if humanly possible. I buy a laptop and remove Windows to put in Ubuntu and so forth. I also claim that we have been pretty careful in maintaining a proper division between open and close on our software to make it possible for open source portion to grow and get more significant. We have replaced many significant closed components with open ones over the years.

To illustrate my point, let me try to list some of the key principles I hold dear when developing Linux based products around the maemo.org.

-Play by the rules. Respect the projects you participate in. Respect the license fully.
-Be open. Communicate even the difficult topics. Release your roadmap us much as you can and you know. (ours @ maemo.org)
-Contribute code. If not, shut up.
-When closed code is used, make the borderline clear. Respect the licenses used.
-Maximize the use of open source; select a copyleft license if you can.
-Respect the different motivations and agendas. Tell yours and be open about it. (We build products to make money)
-Don’t get intimidated if somebody disagrees with you. Just do what you see right. ( ;-) )
-Ship good products. (sure trying hard!)

These are some of the things we try to do the best we can around Maemo and even more importantly … in the various upstream projects we participate in.

Good comments from Bruce

2008-06-14T01:53:00.002-07:00

Bruce had a good comment to this discussion. He call it a bright line system. He says: " The key is knowing how to draw bright lines between different parts of the system. That's a legal term, and in this case it means a line between the Free Software and the rest of the system, that is "bright" in that the two pieces are very well separated, and there is no dispute that one could be a derivative work of the other, or infringes on the other in any way. All of the Free Software goes on one side of that line, and all of the lock-down stuff on the other side."

This exactly the same thing I discussed in my article on our experiences and learning on building consumer products with open source. Section 5.2: "As some components are available only as closed source components, we need to mix open source and proprietary code. This mixing calls for proper architecture management to manage different licensing rules within the product code."

We understood this, of course, from the day one. And it is still the way to do it. Others, like Ubuntu, follows the same rule very well indeed.

Some learning to do?

2008-06-13T08:27:00.010-07:00

...related to the article found here.

The journalist emphasized things his way -- things that he saw important. Fair enough. My points are:

Companies like Nokia need to learn the open source way of working. This means not only fulfilling the letter of GPL, LGPL etc. but also the spirit. In my mind this means integrating the corporate work with the open source community, participating, contributing back the code, building the code in open projects and not only releasing it when mandatory, not forking, etc. Open source is a very effective way to create software together with others; together with other individuals and other companies. This is something that the corporate must learn to really benefit from open source.

The open source community should also be willing to learn. I think it would benefit everybody if people developing open source code would understand WHY certain things are made the way they are. Maybe there are other reasons than stupidity and an evil mind? Trying to understand and learn would benefit both open source projects and corporate to come up with better solutions. As an example, a subsidized business model has it challenges in the context of truly open devices. Understanding why, what to do about it, etc, would benefit us all.

Then, somebody told me that the open source community do not need to listen or learn from the corporate. They do not work for you, somebody said. But actually, many of them do. Let me explain:

The most relevant open source projects have an increasing number of corporate developers. Companies like Nokia, Red Hat, Novel, IBM, Opened Hand, Imendio, Trolltech, HP, and so forth develop code in projects such as Linux, GStreamer, Mozilla, KDE, GNOME etc .. For these companies, open source is not a hobby but serious business. It is a way to get software developed in an open collaborative manner -- to meet their business goals. So if a company pays (as a salary, as a contract to a hacker company or some other way) for the development, then I claim that the developer works for the company. Even if the development happens in an open source project.

We participate in open source projects with individuals, but also with companies like listed above. I think it benefits everybody to understand the constraints, motivations, and limitations each individual, corporate or project may have.

I'm not a teacher, I'm a learner.

Berlin -- Handsets World

2008-06-09T12:09:00.006-07:00

I just arrived in Berlin to participate the Handsets World conference. (The Netherlands just scored a goal, by the way!)

I'll have a keynote talk tomorrow, and a panel session. My talk is going to be about our vision -- and how open source can help.

And now it is 2-0!

Open source – yes!

2008-05-29T07:07:00.007-07:00

Thanks for the feedback to my previous post!! I merely described the current situation.

But things are changing. We see many new kinds of devices appearing: Internet Tablets, small PCs, multimedia computers, and so forth. For all these new interesting devices, open source is the way to go. Seriously, what else? A closed sw stack? I do not see any other way to develop these new interesting devices –bundled with interesting services – but to use open source more and more. That is simply the way to build these devices. It is the only approach flexible and powerful enough.

In the traditional phone business, things may be a bit more difficult. Traditional phones have already good operating systems and software optimized for their reasonably narrow set of use cases and for fixed business ecosystems. So, it’ll be more difficult to change that landscape to more open direction. I thought the same was the case with the PC – but Ubuntu may be proving me wrong. So you never know about the traditional phones either. The sure thing, though, is that for all new interesting highly connected devices, Linux and open source is the way to go. This is my opinion.

Then, what can we do to speed this all up? We work very hard on the next highly connected products – to bring new stuff to maemo and develop it further. And I also want to invite you all to do it with us.

So, please, take a look at this. For the next 10 days, we are opening a brainstorm period for the future of maemo.org. The goal is to consolidate feedback from the developers and users in the community, and integrate that feedback into the mid-term agenda of the project.

The work we do with maemo is our practical implementation towards more open environments for mobile devices. In our case, the Tablets provide a challenging new device category that will evolve over time. And open source and community participation are the only means for us to succeed.

We hire people and open new initiatives to get there.

P.S.
Linux phone shipments declining. Why
1) one reason descibed above
2) another reason
3) a third reason

Phones no, Ubuntu yes?

2008-05-28T08:28:00.003-07:00

We’ve been busy lately! Next software releases and products, architecture works with the Trolls, browser work with Mozilla, and so forth. It’s already almost June and I’m thinking we just got over Xmas. It’s good to realize that in about 4 weeks, nights start to get longer and days shorter here in the Northern hemisphere. The Earth rotates towards the next winter! Get ready!

Linux phone shipments declining – cool user experience from closed camps

We all like open source. Free speech, good beer, bugs are shallow, community will fix everything (if you let ‘em), no patents to slow us down, decisions based on technical merits, etc. If you hear all this positive talk you may wonder why won’t this good software just crawl into devices and turn them on. How come the shipment of Linux phones is declining globally? How come some of the bravest open source device and phone activities do not seem to get very far? And why do the most interesting user experiences and new user interfaces seem to come from proprietary camps? Apples, Microsofts, LGs, Samsungs, Nokias – they all introduce cool new devices, software and user interfaces based on closed software stacks. Why is this? The answer is NOT that because the companies are evil. There must be a better answer. Maybe I’ll explain them in my next post ;-)

Ubuntu rules

So what’s with computers then? Ubuntu is surprising me. I’ve been thinking that the traditional PC desktop environment is always going to be dominated by the closed players – where the one has 90% and the other has 10% and that's it. I also thought that the computer concept needs to radically change before anybody can seriously challenge the status quo. Network PC, mobile devices, something else. But now then, what’s with Ubuntu?

I do not know about their exact market share or Mark’s goals with Ubuntu. But the team is making a great progress. I’ve always liked Ubuntu but was kinda ashamed of using it. It’s brown, it doesn’t have an apple on it, and it doesn’t come with Internet Messenger. But this week two little things happened.

First, I bought a new smart card reader. I connected it with the laptop (!) running Ubuntu, pushed in an SD card – and it just worked! Ubuntu – laptop – smart card reader. Plug-n-play. This is seriously important to my father! He’s 78.

Then, our Windows XP laptop lost its network settings. I said to my daughter, I’ll fix it. Meanwhile, why don’t you use my laptop. I got the Windows laptop fixed the next day and gave it back to my daughter. She had used my Ubuntu laptop for a day for all she does. I did not get any comments nor any complaints or “how can I do this and that” questions. She was just happy using it. She is eleven now.

I find this pretty amazing!

CTIA and Qt

2008-04-14T12:01:00.004-07:00

This is a bit old news. We announced the WIMAX version on the N810 in CTIA already 2 weeks ago. And we received a CTIA WIRELESS 2008® E-TECH AWARD for the best Fashion & Lifestyle Product.

Wow, I feel pretty fashionable now!

We are also making progress with some longer term plans and thoughts. We plan to make the maemo platform even more powerful and extend its capabilities further. In addition to GTK+, we intend to provide a Qt-based application development environment to the maemo platform. We will therefore hire people with knowledge of GTK+/C and/or Qt/C++.

I’ll keep you posted. Take a look at the Nokia jobs and the maemo.org, too.

Greetings from OSiM USA

2008-03-11T16:47:00.008-07:00

OSIM USA 2008

I arrived at San Francisco on Monday to attend the OSiM USA 2008. The first day was very interesting. I met partners and colleagues. I found many talks, such as the Access keynote by Kamada-san, and Bill Weinberg’s on communities very interesting.

I’ll give my keynote on Wednesday morning SFO time. Thanks Quim and Peter for helping me with it. Let me share the story with you right here.

What Mobile Users Need

and

How Open Source Can Help

Linux and open source CAN meet the needs of mass-market.

We create mass market devices and services. This means that we must provide enjoyable quality devices and services that provide rich experiences. In order to do so, we need to tap into innovation and creativity. We must also manage our operations and cost by utilizing reusable assets, agile methods, and shared development. In all of this, the right use of open source can be a huge asset.

We at Nokia have invested a lot to learn. We participate in many open source activities, such as Gnome, Debian, Linux, Mozilla and WebKit browsers and so forth. We plan to increase our involvement there. We believe open source is a key strategy to create exciting devices and services.

Our role: Bring open source to mainstream consumer electronics

Our role as Nokia is to create a bridge between open source projects and consumers. We can provide integration, final devices and services, and help with distribution. We can also take care of such difficult things as warranty, legal, IPR, DRM, regulations, customer support, and so forth.

In my mind, our role and possibilities are clear. We can help end users and open source innovation to meet. I think we have a great role in helping my 70 something parents to communicate with their grandchildren over a VOIP client developed by a clever 20 something hacker.

We need to learn from each other. Both.

The theory is simple: We work together; the open source community and Nokia. We provide excellent devices and services to end users in large volumes with attractive terms. In addition to software and product development, we need great marketing, smooth distribution, and good manufacturing. We also need to support various business models that can deliver the devices and services to our customers. Excellent devices, available everywhere, with the right price. Simple….

…. not. It is not trivial to combine open source and corporate to benefit end users. We all need to learn.

We at Nokia are working hard to get it. We have to. We need to get better in communicating our strategies and plans. We need to be more open and get even more involved in various projects and communities. We must be better at articulating our views, providing information and code back, and supporting the community. We must be sure we support freedom and openness and do not try to limit anybody’s work. But at the same time, we must be better at telling what is OK for us and what is not.

And the open source community also has to get it. The community needs to understand the business realities; possibilities and restrictions. It needs to learn the business models and rules in order to participate. If a project or a developer wants to ensure the success and max usage of her code, she must understand the functional and quality requirements, license the work under a proper license, and make sure her work doesn’t restrict business models needed.

It is actually brutal out there. Customers are very demanding and they do not accept anything but the best. Also, partners and other players want their share and support for their business model. It is not OK to steal music or crack and resell a subsidized phone. As an open source developer this makes me think: the majority of the most interesting and successful mobile devices and software –excluding Internet Tablets, of course— are clearly not based a large use of open source, or developed in open source manner. So we all have some learning to do here.

Building upstream. Community rules.

We see Open Source upstream projects as a base of our industry platform for Linux-based devices. Upstream is where the thing really happens. Alignment with upstream. Share plans. No forks. Contributions back. Ignore upstream and you loose!

We select the best software components that make sense in our architecture. If we select an open source component is because we think it's the best. This also means that the team that developed it is the best. Then we intend to align our work to their processes. This is not always easy because we have internal processes and requirements, but we are working on it. In fact any big organization has things to learn from open source development practices, even applied to internal and private processes: agile, decentralized, documented, peer reviewed... and the very human aspects of it.

As an example, I’m very thrilled about the discussion with Trolltech. Trolltech knows about upstream leadership and community rules. Working with this brilliant team together with Nokia is an opportunity no open source enthusiast should ignore.

Beyond code and licenses: developers and projects.

Source code and its licenses are critical in the use of open source for a company like Nokia. But code is just an output -- the top of an iceberg. It is the people, developers and contributors, the projects, the organizations, the users involved that truly matter. These are what really make open source unique, good today and even better tomorrow.

Nokia can do a lot more to get really involved in the community and make a good contribution as well. We keep working on this. In my dreams I see Maemo (open source innovation) playing a useful and exciting role bridging OSS upstream products and regular owners of Nokia devices.

Image: Alex Graveley presenting “Gimmie”, by Tuomas Kuosmanen. CC Attribution-NonCommercial License

Until now we have decently supported the projects directly related to the source code we use: Linux, Debian, GNOME, Mozilla and so on. We are moving to a wider support to those really smart upstream projects. Help them pushing their vision forward, shaping their ideas into alphas, betas and final products. Help them getting visibility in the mobile industry and the Nokia channels.

For instance: why not helping Qt and its software ecosystem fitting in the GTK+ based Internet Tablets.

Diving in: deeper involvement

A few years ago, Nokia started from zero. In summer 2005 we announced the Nokia 770 internet tablet and started the journey.

Now, I claim we are a good open source citizen – we’ve got our feet in the water. We are shipping Linux and open source based Internet Tablets, our S60 phones have many important open source components, and we use a lot of open source technologies in building our new services. We participate projects, contribute a lot of code, sponsor GUADECs, Debconfs, buy services from hacker companies and projects and play our part pretty OK.

And next, we’ll start swimming and dive into the community. We want to help and influence the open source community to succeed with Nokia. We provide channels to markets. We work as community participant playing Nokia’s own role. We’ll educate and help the best we can. And we try to constantly learn more.

This all is actually very selfish. By doing so, we can provide better devices, services, and experiences to consumers – and make a buck or two.

Meeting open source community ethics

Life –even a corporate life -- is more rich and human that just “profit”. As long as I remember, Nokia always had values; statements that we used to direct our work and operations. Because Nokia is made of people, we want values to guide our behavior. And we’ve always wanted to make the values explicit.

Last year we felt we wanted to revisit and renew our values. The process was most interesting. We organized several big workshops – Nokia Cafes – with hundreds of participants all over the globe. These workshops discussed what is important for Nokia and how we as employees want to see Nokia and its values. The workshops then continued in various on-line activities and projects. Eventually, we came up with four new Nokia values: engaging you – passion for innovation – achieving together – very human

If you are part of the OSS community these value will sound very familiar to you. Also, the process of developing these values must sound familiar.

We are not that different after all, are we?

Global warming ... in a candy store

2008-02-28T23:50:00.004-08:00

Global Warming

They say that this will be the warmest winter ever in Finland. The last record is –no it’s not from 2006 - but it is from 1924. Early days of global warming? But seriously, at the grass root level things are different now.

January ---------------- February

Back in the 70’s, I used be play ice hockey with my friends on an outside ice ring from early December to late March – even April. Now I’ve managed to take my 5 year old on the ring only once this winter. No ice. Well, today we have -5 degrees Celsius, it is kids’ winter break, and the sun is shining. I’ll post this now and then go out with my kids!

Candy Store

We’ve now dived deeper into the Trolltech stuff. Good stuff. I’m more and more understanding the great ecosystem and a partner network they have around their technology. I’m excited. Also, the guys are really nice – but then again, have you ever heard about an angry Norwegian? (yes, they are not all Norwegians but I was trying to be funny … sorry) People are extremely important -- people and relationships are far more important than lines of code. Really, even in business.

So now there are many things on my mind. We will use Trolltech technology in a range of Nokia products. That’s for sure. If the acquisition goes through, that is. I’m also very keen on finding the best balance and combination with G and Q technologies. I feel that we have a unique opportunity to act as a catalyst to even fill some chasms here? I'm like a kid in a candy store! So much candy – this is exciting!

Ads
Then something else. Two ads:

OSiM USA. I’ll be there. Come and say hi!

The Finnish Summer Code 2007 project employed five university students for the summer. Nokia’s maemo team was one of the sponsors of the students' projects. The Finnish Summer Code is organized by COSS (The Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions) and aims to help Finnish students participate in open source development.

Now it is time to apply for Summer Code 2008! We’ll sponsor it, too. So if you have nothing better to do next summer ….

Trolltech -- good!

2008-01-27T22:58:00.000-08:00

So we plan to buy Trolltech. I know those guys and I think they are true professionals! Good stuff. Good for Nokia and Trolltech.

Nokia's intention to acquire Trolltech is a good news to maemo, too. Nokia has now more technology alternatives to use and a wider outreach to open source communities.

Both GNOME and KDE are very interesting and active projects. Our strong participation in the Gnome community and the new access to KDE and Trolltech's technology puts us in an unique position to create even more interesting mobilde devices, together with the open source communities.

This is all about the products and how to make even better products to our customers. This will help!

Maemo overview

2008-01-19T11:09:00.000-08:00

If you ever wanted to have an overview of the maemo software, now there is an easy way. I'm proud to promote the new Maemo technology overview. (HTML version here). Even if you are not a developer, or you are too busy to scan through the entire maemo.org, or you are a strategist and want to understand if maemo could provide something for your company this is a place to go.

More detailed stuff can be found e.g. from here under application and platform development ... more for developers then ...

(this was a paid advertisement)

When open is too open

2008-01-17T11:49:00.000-08:00

Open is good, eh? Not necessarily. Let me give you an example.

A few days ago my wife woke up in the middle of the night. It was 2 am and she thought she heard something from the street. I couldn't care less and just wanted to sleep. I thought that maybe our neighbor had just came back from a night shift, or maybe some teenagers are having their Ford Sierra rally going on to impress girls (remember when you were 18?). It wouldn’t be the first time this happens.

But my wife insists that there is something strange going on. She says she hears just one voice – a man talking. Not shouting, not laughing, not yelling – just talking. You better go can check this out she says to me. So I get up.

Our bedrooms are upstairs. So I go downstairs and .... hear somebody talking loud and clear. Somebody is talking inside our house 2am in the morning! And all our phones are downstairs!

I go down the stairs and see a big guy sitting on our floor. A total stranger. He’s talking to himself saying ooh, ohh shit, ohh, I don’t feel that good, …ooh. I approach the guy and I ask him what an earth are you doing here? He doesn’t seem to recognize me. I can see he is drunk as a skunk. He’s reasonably clean, proper clothes and so forth but you can tell he drinks a lot. A lot.

I put my hand on his shoulder and keep on talking. Slowly he notices me and understands he’s not where he is supposed to be. He apologizes and says that he shouldn’t be here. Then he ask where is here?. When I explain he says ooh, I should be in the other end of the town; totally somewhere else. I say we better get you outta here and he agrees.

He keeps on apologizing. He notices my kids clothes on the floor (yeah, my kids leave them on the floor) and says he has 4 kids. I really do not want to talk about my kids with a drunken giant inside of our house, I’m thinking. Then he notices our kid’s pet and says that's a nice fellow you got there – is that a bunny?. I stay calm and say yes. I do not want to irritate this guy twice of my size. I’m a smooth talker now.

I asked him if there is anything I could do for him. He keeps on apologizing and asks if I can get a taxi for him. Sure can. The taxi arrives in 5 minutes. I help this guy to stand up and put on his shoes and jacket. Then I walk him to the taxi. He apologizes once more. I say not a big deal – take care of yourself! And he’s gone.

My kids never woke up and my wife didn’t freak out. I found the situation mostly odd and amusing. So it doesn’t feel like somebody intruded our privacy or wanted any harm for us. The situation was not threatening at all. It is only afterwards I started to think about how lucky we were. Suppose this guy had been on drugs or something.

I have this bad habit to leave doors open. I better start locking them up. For nights at least. Open is not always good.

P.S. My kids do not read my blog. Please do not tell them this story. They might start to worry for no reason!

2007 & 2008 and Happy Holidays!

2007-12-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

This was a good year!

A very good year, indeed.
Let me highlight a few goodies:

Nokia N800

A major sw upgrade to N800

Nokia N810 + the same sw to N800

Almost tenfold increase in maemo.org developers during 2007

Nokia N810 #2 in the Wired shopping list for Xmas ;-) ....

A lot of new stuff @ maemo.org, like a better maintained bugzilla and many new documents, tutorials and guidelines. Many SDK releases. But even better: cool apps!!! Strong improvements there!

Forum Nokia supports maemo for business

770 hacker editions released

So for us this was a good year! I’m very proud of the team and the results. We managed to do a lot of good things and get a lot of job done.

Elsewhere

So what is happening elsewhere? I’ve got a bit mixed feelings.

Linux and open source is clearly in the mainstream of consumer devices. We no longer discuss about can or should you build devices based on open source. Instead, we discuss how to do it well. We also see a lot of technologies maturing fast to be more and more suitable for devices and consumer goods.

Also, some killer products, like the Nokia N95, N810 and iPhone, kept us awake. I like them all a lot!

And...

The market share of Linux phones did not grow. I know it is not because of Linux or open source but because of –well- not so good phones. Good products with the right price point sell well regardless of the technology used.

Linux consolidation activities are struggling and I personally do not see their impact. CELF, LiSP, Limo and even GMAE, to be honest. What is happening – anybody home?

So what’ll happen 2008 …

Let me prophesize:
Linux and open source will go to a declining hype cycle – steps 3 & 4 . It is no longer sexy to be open or create products with Linux and open source. That’ll scare honey bees and suits away and we'll see decline in publicity. But, because these technologies are now in the mainstream, open source will have bigger impact on technology and products than ever before. It’s not a Hollywood story any more, though.

Let me hope:
Peace (inside and outside), cool products, happy families, and a proper winter!

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Services -- straight and deep

2007-11-06T09:23:00.000-08:00

Applications are boring

Applications are not interesting. They are old-fashioned. But I still struggle and often think about applications. I think about applications such as emails, browsers, instant messaging applications, and so forth. How stupid is this. Especially in the mobile space.

It is funny that I never think about a “phone call” application, although from the software point of view it just an application; similar to an email and other applications. I bet my application thinking originates from the desktop world where I’m used to “install”, and ”purchase”, and “use” applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets. But such thinking feels increasingly stupid and I predict that such thinking will first disappear from the mobile world and eventually from the desktop, too.

Services should go straight and deep

So instead of applications that do things, let’s talk about services that serve users’ needs. So what are my experiences of mobile services so far?

A good service goes straight and goes deep. (Ari’s service rule, eh eh). An example of a straight & deep service is an old-fashioned phone call. It is straight: I just click your name on the phone book. And it is deep: It automatically makes all the necessary steps and gets you in the other end of the conversation. So an old-fashioned phone call is a service provided by my phone, my operator, and my friend in the other end of the conversation. It is straight: green button. It is deep: we’ll talk!

So let me introduce two services that are not straight or deep.

I subscribe to a portal service provided by my cell operator. I first open a phone browser and then select a bookmark provided by my operator. Then, I have a selection of things such as “Ringing tones”, “Pictures”, “Games”, and “Applications”. I select “Games” and the I select “Categories” and then I select “Fun” and then I get a screen that says “not supported by my phone”. After selecting different categories I finally find some games. And then, well, I need to figure out how to buy and download one! Not very straight forward.

I used a non-Nokia phone for a few months. It is good to use competitors’ devices ;-). The phone provided an interesting service that uses the technology created by Gracenote. This is how it works: I’m driving down the road an hear a nice song on the radio. I put the phone next to the car speaker and press a few buttons. In a few seconds I get a text message that tells me the artist, the song and the album. A marvelous piece of engineering --- but not very deep. I’d like to purchase the song, or listen it again, or something. But the service doesn’t go that deep. It just sends me a text message – almost like a teaser!

So, gimme straight and deep, please. The one that does, wins.

(Written with google docs on my N810)

Nokia N810 -- announced!

2007-10-17T09:17:00.000-07:00

So we fooled you! I bet you expected a new Internet Tablet in January but we worked overtime and will get it ready earlier! It has been fun to watch how things have leaked out and everybody knew about it already before the launch ;-) It's been fun to make it, too.

So what is Nokia N810? From the hardware point of view, the basic engine is the same as in N800. But we added GPS and a nice sliding keyboard. The on-screen kb works, too, of course. And it is a bit smaller than N800.

From the maemo based software point of view, a lot of new stuff. On the top of my list:

UI improvements. Looks and feels better. Eye candy, functional improvements
new browser
faster updated Flash 9
more multimedia formats supported
improved finger usage
nice set of 3rd party apps and services

So full multimedia on the move

the best browser on any portable device!
instant messaging
VoIP
music and videos
GPS with maps and downloadable voice guided navigation
WiFi + Cellular (through bt enabled phones)

And, you can update your N800 to run the new maemo based OS2008, too!

Some lessons learned --- I hope ....

2007-09-13T08:13:00.000-07:00

Developing maemo and Internet Tablets has always been a learning journey for us at Nokia. We have learned a lot about using mainstream open source technology in mobile devices, about integrating big company and open source culture together, about shipping open source based products, and about working with communities.

An important learning case happened during the last spring. We made some mistakes. No doubt about it! And on top of all, we underestimated the passion people had towards our work and products.

We launched the N800 in January. People loved the product. But some of you simply didn't accept that we didn't promise to provide new features and hacker support for the old 770s any more. Back in January -07, we got a lot of comments that eventually made us re-evaluate the 770 software situation. And now, as you know, a few days ago we released an Internet Tablet OS 2007 Hacker Edition for the Nokia 770. Not perfect, but we are learning.

So thank you. Your enthusiasm, positive comments, good reviews, criticism, sarcasm, and doom's day predictions prove that we are doing something right. Actually, I have not received any 770 software comments with f words for my posts recently ... so wake up, kids! Something's wrong?

Another thing we put out recently was the Hildon Input Method Framework.

And next week I gonna go out myself and fly to Madrid.

Summer teasers

2007-08-31T05:34:00.000-07:00

During this summer, I participated conferences such as GUADEC, OSS 2007, and Linux World SF, and met developers and teams in places like India, UK, and US. We also had our closing meetings and presentations for an interesting research project called “Managing OSS as an Integrated Part of Business”. A whole lotta open source going on!

So I’ve been making some observations, too.

First, open source is really becoming an integral part of any software business. It is very difficult to think of any new software product, service, or initiative that would not include significant open source elements. Somebody told me that VCs have included open source into their funding check list. If your new startup doesn’t base its software operations on open source – no money. I wonder if this is true. Anybody knows? Haven’t done fund searching lately.

Second, free software and open source are drifting further apart. There is a practical approach for getting good quality software available through simply sharing code. And then there is a deeper philosophy. ...but...., this topic is a taboo. Thou shalt not have wrong opinions on free software or .... Do you feel the heat?

Third, open source based UIs and end user experiences, build by communities and hackers, are not that good. It is not easy to find community built software that provides UI W-O-W and high level of usability. It seems that high quality integration and user experience requires a stong central mechanism, such as a company, to run the implementation. Now, please, prove me wrong!

GUADEC 2007

2007-07-17T09:24:00.000-07:00

I took a break from my summer vacation and flew to Birmingham, UK to attend GUADEC. It is the GNOME Users' And Developers' European Conference. Held annually in cities around Europe.

We base our work on GNOME and therefore this is the place to be.

I had a keynote today at 2 PM. Some of the main themes in my presentation were as follows.

We are taking open source to consumer mainstream. This all happens step by step by participating open source development, releasing new software, and building new products. Some of the recent steps are:

new software for N800 just 2 weeks ago

announcement of the development version of a new browser -- a Mozilla based browser engine that shares the key components and extension interfaces with Firefox. As small computers, internet tablets should have this option, too!

announcement of the development version of the new communications software. SIP connection manager, UI improvements, Google Talk relay support ...

The Hildon application framework contribution to GNOME and GMAE (...well, this is kinda old news but important ...)

---

This is a mostly a developer conference and I'm talking about development versions. We do not advertise these, other than the new N800 software, to general public at this point. We want to develop them openly and collect your feedback. See maemo for more details.

---

There are also many other interesting talks from my team and other GNOME developers related to maemo, GNOME etc. To pick a few:

*Maemo and gtk+: Past, present & future *A Modest E-Mail Client for Gnome and Maemo

*Embedded Browsing and Open Source

*Speeding Up Libglade/Gtk-builder in Embedded Devices Using Shared Objects

*5 tricks and 4 and 1/2 tips for porting GNOME applications to the Maemo Platform ...

I bet I forgot many!! And then, Lefty from Access and Open Moko should be interesting :-)

New software for N800

2007-07-06T00:37:00.000-07:00

It's out now. Flash 9, Skype etc. See the maemo pages for further details.

A middle management sandwich

2007-06-21T00:13:00.000-07:00

I want to share an observation with you. People ask me if new things get started from the top or from the bottom. Is it executives or developers who get things started? How was it with maemo and Nokia’s open source work? The answer is that is started from both ends.

There are basically three kinds of people in a big corporation: company executives, middle managers, and then workers – in our context developers. Nokia is very fortunate because we have some really bright and innovative executives as well as many world class developers. So, even with our average middle management, we’re ok!

So what’s with the middle management then? There is this sandwich where the middle management (=cheese) is squeezed between the executives (=bread) and the developers (=bread). Picture this:

A corporate executive has just red “The World is Flat” by Thomas L. Friedman. He is spiritually and emotionally engaged. He believes that all labor goes to India and that open source is the answer to the software crisis. He just learned that some guys in communities will do the work for free, and that we just need to use free software to get things done. Just do it! Party on!
A developer has just participated debconf. He has not taken a shower after the trip. He believes that if we just use free software everything will be great. If problems arise the community will fix them. He believes he can get his driver ready with product quality for tomorrow – and if not, somebody will fix it soon. Just get it out. No worries!
Now the corporate executive, the developer and a middle manager meet in a room. After two minutes it seems that the developer and the executive connect – they talk the same language and they agree at all levels. So it seems. The executive leaves the room saying to the middle manager: I totally agree with your developer. He is so bright. Now you just go and get things done his way. What’s stopping you?

In most cases the middle management does not have the luxury of being innovative or bright – they just need to get the products out. The middle management is under heavy workload, with unrealistic release schedules, managing primadonna engineers. These middle managers never initiate change or generate new ideas because they are too busy running arons. So the change never starts from the middle.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that you need crazy executives and religious developers to get things changed and new things started. And you need stubborn and boring middle managers to get things eventually done.

Ari, a middle manager

Mobile is dead!

2007-05-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

Years ago – I was responsible for Nokia’s WAP browser development. So I claim I’ve got some street credibility here, eh? So what do you think of this thread of thoughts?

Mobile Internet is dead
Back in the good old WAP-days we had a plan. We thought that we’ll ship millions of phones and put a WAP browser in them. Then, everybody will write WML content and that’ll create a new internet cloud called Mobile Internet ™ (TM looks good here!!).
That never happened. Internet grew richer and sexier and all we had was this tiny screen to WML decs and cards. And we thought that’ll change the internet and create the mobile internet. It didn’t.

It amazes me that I still see signs of this thinking. Web pages and services are tailored to small screens and people expect that to create the mobile internet. It won’t. There is only one internet, and if your device cannot access it, you’re out of luck. There is only one internet.

Mobile Software is (soon) dead
Back in the good old days we created mobile software from scratch. We created home grown operating systems for mobile phones, mobile stacks and UI frameworks, primitive light weight file systems, and so on. Back then, CPUs were lazy and flash was poor. Thus, we built dedicated software for mobile devices – and we called it Mobile Software ™.

Today, we run Linux, X, Gnome, Flash, and friends on Nokia N800. Our big idea form the start was to run --as closely as possible-- a desktop Linux stack. Others will start to do the same and I predict that mobile software will thus eventually die. All we need is software that runs everywhere.

Next
What’s next to die? Mobile phones? Now, this may be too much! We are making more mobile phones than anybody ever imagined! But, we are also making multimedia computers ... so you never know ;-)

770 feedback

2007-04-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

Howdy,

Just a short one this time.

We've been receiving a lot of valuable feedback on our 770 hardware from you. Based on it we decided to continue fixing bugs on 770 and release new software for it. This work will happen on our "hacker version" branch. We'll do our best to make it usable for you.

See Quim's post on the subject.

More later ....

GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative

2007-04-23T08:58:00.000-07:00

"The GNOME Mobile & Embedded Initiative will advance the use, development and commercialization of GNOME components as a mobile and embedded user experience platform. It brings together industry leaders, expert consultants, key developers and the community and industry organizations they represent."

I’m very pleased to see many other companies and initiatives moving towards using GNOME in consumer devices. We’ve been investing into GNOME for years and the open and even playfield that GNOME provides is serving us very well. We plan to continue strongly with GNOME and direct many of our activities through it. Our whole open source strategy relies primarily on strong upstream project participation – GNOME being a good example.

See the press release, too

The Linux Foundation

2007-04-10T06:06:00.000-07:00

This is an old news already but we are now working with the Linux foundation.

I've noticed that companies are seting up different forums and clubs to standardize/promote/develop Linux/open source based technologies for mobile/consumer/embedded devices. I have my doubts... I do not fully understand how they plan to work. I'd go directly to places like the kernel.org or to GNOME to get things agreed, aligned, and -the most of all- developed. These are the communities that do the actual work and I'm not sure how these additional forums add value.

It may be that big companies are so used to do high level standardization and high level business deals that the simple community work doesn't seem real to them. They do not know how to deal with open source development, so they try to change it into something they are more familiar with: NDAs, business deals, and standardization forums.

I believe the Linux Foundation is slightly different. It is a forum dedicated to a specific open source project, Linux. And it promotes the community aspect of the work at hand.

New sw for N800

2007-03-24T14:33:00.000-07:00

I suggest you now go and update your N800. This new software has several improvements & fixes. Just remember to make a backup of your data and settings first.

Nokia N800 Challence by Pop Sci

2007-02-14T05:39:00.000-08:00

We had a Pop Sci party yesterday at the Nokia Flagship store at Manhattan.

We launched the Nokia N800 challenge. The idea is this:

You come up with the most compelling application, service, script, hardware addition or anything that you will use on the Nokia N800. You send your idea to the challenge as explained here. Your entry must be creative, useful, appealing, fun, versatile, or extremely innovative — something that truly impacts people's lives.

The entries will be judged by members of Nokia staff and the editors of Popular Science. They will select two of the best Nokia N800 innovations. The first winner will be featured in the May issue of the magazine and the second winner will be featured in the June issue. Each winner will show off his or her winning idea in the Popular Science magazine.

Your idea must not be necessarily an application running within the N800. It can be server or network based, and idea of controlling or monitoring something using the inbuilt apps on N800 etc. To my mind, the most important aspect of a good idea is that it utilizes the unique features of the N800 -- portability, good screen, connectivity, openness, and so forth.

So let's be creative out there.

A high level roadmap

2007-02-12T15:18:00.000-08:00

People are asking for roadmaps for internet tablets and our software. Hey ... these are all trade secrets ;-) Seriously, I do not want to go and comment all "are you gonna have xyz and when?" -questions, for they are so many, and often even we do not know the answer yet. But let me try to paint a picture - illustrate some of our thinking. So here we go:

Short term

In a few weeks (I hope) we'll release a new version of the OS2007 with a
-better Flash performance
-better video performance and quality
-longer usage times i.e. better power management
-fixes here and there
These are still in the owen so wait and see.

Mid term

Then later this year we 'll have an
-updated browser with better WEB 2.0 support and other goodies
-improved multimedia support with more formats supported
-improved package management to better enable sw upgrading
-interesting 3rd party software such as Skype and Real Rhapsody
-more apps & stuff downloadable from http://tableteer.nokia.com/ (can be accessed with an internet tablet, only ....)

We want to also strenghten our open source community approach. We need to better articulate, how developers can participate in the development of these devices. Today it happens primarilly in upstream projects, and that will always be the most important way for collaboration. So see you @ GUAGEC, FOSDEM, DEBCONF etc and @ sourceforge etc. In addition, we will improve the usage of our external bugzilla, and study how to push Sardine forward. Also, www.maemo.org will be constantly improved with the help of the developer community.

Long term

Now this gets more difficult. But we'll work on new software to improve your internet experience. And we'll get WiMAX. And ...

And already now...

I wrote this whole post with the finger keyboard on my n800. I hardly use the stylus anymore but only with busy web pages. Also, I took this picture

from my hotel room a minute ago with my N91, and used my N800 to get in on this blog. Cool, eh..?

A status report #2

2007-01-27T03:19:00.000-08:00

Thank you again for you enthusiastic comments. It is good to see that you care about our products and have strong opinions. Otherwise you would not bother ;-) I read all the comments but I’m not gonna go and answer them all … sorry for that … I simply cannot.

Let me repeat again what we’ll do. It seems some of you have difficulties understanding what I try to say. My fault.

770 support
770 is a fully supported Nokia product. As an example, we released a new official OS2006 version for the Nokia 770 only yesterday. So it is also getting better. Also, a new OS2006 SDK was released yesterday. And as I said in my previous post, we follow the situation as we go on and keep on supporting the product.

A developer version of OS2007 for the Nokia 770
We will not make an official OS2007 version on 770 available. Instead, we are in the process of making a developer version, as promised, based on your feedback. For some of you, it seems to be not enough, though … well, I’m sorry for that. We’ll follow up how that developer version will go, and then decide how to move on. But no plans no make a full commercial OS2007 running on 770.

Future features and improvements -- focus on N800
Thank you for your suggestions on how to improve our products. Some of the suggestions are already being worked on. In this competitive environment of consumer products, working with partners and competitors, we cannot provide a total transparency to what we’ll do. Therefore, I cannot tell you all the details -- before I can.

The N800 will get better, more internet services will be supported, and I feel very excited about the future ahead of us. Competitors are emerging, and more and more people understand and support our original vision . Let’s make internet mobile and put it into our pocket.

When to release – early or late?
As I said in my previous post, expect to see the software on N800 getting better and better. I’ve already seen it in our internal releases. Based on our earlier experiences we decided to release it in CES, get feedback from users, and with the help of communities, improve the software. So we released the product now because N800 is already a very good and usable product, and it is getting better. There are always people who would like to do it the other way – and then others would say “just release and we’ll suggest what to fix and help you”. Once again – you cannot make everybody 100% happy. But that’s life!

A status report

2007-01-24T23:07:00.000-08:00

Here is a little status report of what is happening.

N800 software
N800 is getting nice reviews. People seem to like what we’ve done. Of course, there is a lot of room for improvements, but it seems we are on the right tracks. The direction is right – the speed could always be better, eh ;-)

We are currently working on improving the N800 software for the forthcoming new software releases. I believe we can improve performance in many areas. Also, the overall stability and quality is on our agenda, of course. So expect to see N800 getting better and better. I feel kinda bad seeing magazines and bloggers reviewing N800 and complaining about something that is already fixed in our internal sw releases. I hope all reviewers understand that N800 is a device that is going to improve over time – just like the 770 has done!

Some people are also asking about new Flash versions, new browser versions and so forth. These components involve customer and business partnership relations, technical work, and other things that make it impossible to tell exactly what is gonna happen. However, our goal is to make Internet Tablets as interoperable with internet services as possible. This includes services such as Skype and Google talk, support for major internet formats, and a brilliant browser. As I said earlier, the direction is clear and right, and the speed --- well, we run as fast as we can!

maemo.org
Another thing we are working on is the application installer and application catalog at www.maemo.org. You can already see the test version here.

770 support
As agreed, we are working on getting N800 software running on 770 – not a final product image but an engineering release that’ll help developers to bridge the gap between N800 and 770. Carlos posted you an update.

We're getting some feedback .. and we've got a plan now

2007-01-11T04:38:00.000-08:00

Thanks

Thank you all for your feedback. Also you, Mr anonymous, who gave so many comments on my previous post.

The Plan

But seriously, this is what is gonna happen:

-We will now investigate what it takes to run N800 software on 770 hardware. We will post the details and ask you to solve problems with us, if possible, as we go on. Expect to hear from us through maemo and other sources. I do not yet exactly how we gonna do this all. I'm at the Heathrow airport waiting form my flight back to Finland, and we have not had a chance to figure this out fully yet. However, the team is already working on this.
-The goal is to provide an engineering release of those parts of the software that can be made to work. I do not believe we will make an official "consumer version" of the software for 770. But having a release working on 770 would allow developers and hackers to continue working on 770 and bridge the gap between 770 and N800.
-Once we've done the release we want to get more feedback from you about where to go from there. Unfortunately I do not have an estimate of when such release would be ready. But we are working on it now.
-Should we find it impossible to have N800 software even partially run on 770, you will see the details of our attempt.

Some of the challenges encountered so far
-WLAN configuration has changed quite a bit.
-DSP (770 is OMAP 1710 and N800 is OMAP 2420) is different. DSP code is developed by various parties and we do not have a full control over it. We need to figure out if we can support DSP (codecs and stuff ...)
-Browser is licensed separately for both platforms and we do not have a cross-platform version. We do not own the browser code.
-We have several commercial components that are licensed for N800 only. Should we make them available for 770, you or Nokia must pay. How do we arrange that is not clear at the moment.
-Some new components require more computing power than 770 offers, and they run slow even on N800. I fear making them work on 770 will be very challenging.

But as I said, let's try now. Thank you for your feedback!

Some reality bits

Somebody commented that it was easy to make a 770 application run on N800. Yes it is and that is very good, isn't it. But making the operating system and drivers and all the low level things running on a different hardware is significantly more complicated. It requires much much more than just recompiling. If that was the only thing needed we would have of course done that ;-)

Also, supporting and commercially launching a new software releases is a big task. If you have never done a product release you wouldn't know. This is why we're thinking about an engineering release that would work, would be supported for developers by developers, but not offered as an official release supported by Nokia's global support organisations etc..

770 didn't go away and is a good product

So we understand you comments. However, please remember that 770 is already an old product. It was announced 1.5 years ago and that is a long time! However, it is a good product and Nokia supports it fully and keeps on selling it, too. It is just that technology keeps on developing and we want to offer better hardware to our customers.

More from Vegas

2007-01-08T12:34:00.000-08:00

Our CEO just officially announced the N800. And the Skype, Rhapsody, and other plans we have. For my Nokia team: well done -- good stuff! People are really excited and unlike when launching 770, nobody is asking what the heck are you trying to accomplish! People now understand the strategy with internet tablets and our open source approach.

Then as a response to the comments on my previous post:

People ask about can they run N800 software on 770. The answer is unfortunately no. N800 has a different hardware (Omap 2420) and we just needed to optimize the software for N800. Our true intention is to separate hw and sw so that in the future we would have a better support over the different hardware releases. But this time we simply needed to prioitize our efforts and put all our energy into making the N800 happen on time.

We understand that this is not ideal but it was the best we could do this time.

So as of now
-we keep on selling and supporting 770s
-we expect many Maemo applications to be made available for both products
-hacking and development will be supported on both platforms
-Nokia will not integrate and make OS2007 available for 770

The Nokia N800

2007-01-08T00:59:00.000-08:00

I just landed at Las Vegas 30 minutes ago.

It's out now. And this time we did the launch a bit differently -- you can go and buy one immediately; tomorrow at the latest. As you already know ;-)

There will be a lot of material and news available covering N800 -- so I will not repeat that all here. Some personal thoughts, though:

This is a natural next step in the evolution of Internet Tablets. I like the way it looks and feels, and software is improved. It's now more appealing for a larger audience. Some of the new goodies include video calls, enhanced connectivity that always finds an optimal way to get connected, combined media player for video and audio, improved web behaviour with e.g. updated Flash player, and improved general performance.

At the maemo application catalog, some of the old 770 applications will work -- and some of them won't. We'll get you the information at http://www.maemo.org/ .. some issues there still but we'll work them out. For example the new application catalogue is still here: http://test.maemo.org/applications and it is not functional. But soon!

You have all the tools & documents to make your own applications and components N800 compatible .... and yes, we do not like the break either, but it was necessary. The software is still so young and evolving that we needed to make changes that cause developers some extra work. So we try to do our best to help you with:

-launching a new Maemo 3.0 SDK for you and updating the whole maemo.org web site

-providing detailed documentation & tools for you to make you software N800 compaible

-running a developer program: we will sell 500 pieces N800s to key maemo developers at a discounted price of 99€. The most active maemo.org hackers should expect an email very soon!

We are making some progress here!

The story of the 770 -- what have we done & learned so far

2006-12-17T12:51:00.000-08:00

I wrote a white paper to document some of our experiences and learnings when building consumer products with open source. Some people may find it interesting ... You can also find it here.

Open source works well for new stuff

2006-12-13T14:04:00.000-08:00

Disruption
Let me continue about the disruption topic I discussed in my previous post. Let me first say that in my mind, open source development model is primarily not “an evolution” but “a disruption”. As a long time industry insider, I claim that one cannot easily change any existing closed software or business model and move it to the open world. The open source model is very difficult to fit into any established industry without changing some very fundamental rules. Let me take two examples:

Open source and cell phones
There is a dominant design and a ready ecosystem for mobile phones. Phones, weather they are running Symbian, MS, Linux or any other operating system are closed because that’s what works well for everybody in the ecosystem. With closed phones, operators can (feel they can) control their business, device manufacturers can (pretend they can) differentiate, and end users can (close their eyes and) feel secure and safe with their subsidized devices and guaranteed services. You need closed phones to achieve these elements of the existing ecosystem. So phones are not built using open source development model, although they may use some open sourced components here and there.

Open source and PCs
There is also a dominant design in desktop / laptop PC:s. The design includes Microsoft Windows, Intel based PC:s, and people who purchase them with a virus software plans and other such nice services. It is a very good design and fits perfectly into the ecosystem around it.

My prediction
These two things, i.e. mobile phones and desktop/ laptop PCs are developed using a rigid dominant design and marketed within a well functioning established business model. Something needs to radically change before any new model can replace the existing ways of things. Putting Linux into a closed phone and keeping the ecosystem and the development model unchanged is not changing anything. Fell free to disagree with me.

Focus on new things
I believe in open source as the development model for new things. Openness utilizes people, brainpower, and technology better than other models. I thus believe that it’ll be the dominant design for the majority of new interesting things to come. So what are these new interesting things?
Various companies are coming up with such new things. One of our new things at Nokia is Internet Tablets. Internet Tablets were designed from ground up to be internet devices. They are not PCs, players, or cell phones, where internet was added almost as an afterthought. Tablets are built solely for internet usage, giving the highest priority to internet use cases, such as browsing and communication.

The plan
We launched the 770 about a year ago. I then needed to explain over and over again why it is not a phone. And there are reasons. I told people that we will not make a yet another cell phone, but we’ll do the same to the internet that cell phones did for phone calls: Make them mobile. We are not going to replace PCs or cell phones, but we are going to enhancing the current ways of accessing internet; doing your surfing, email, chatting, voice calls, multimedia and so forth. And that is happening with open source software and development model together with some new cool devices, such as Nokia’s Internet Tablets.

I’m simplifying some things here – yes. But my point is: let’s move forward, and not look back!

Phones are boring

2006-11-23T11:49:00.000-08:00

I participated the Open Source in Mobile conference the other week in Amsterdam. A good conference. There was a lot of talk about putting Linux into mobile phones, but I found it a very limited view to mobility and open source. Concentrating on today’s cell phones and how to put Linux kernel into them is actually pretty boring. Where is innovation?

Cell phones seem like a big market opportunity for many. It is therefore understandable that companies that utilize Linux consider them as potential business opportunities. But what they may forget is that while software technology progresses so do these devices. I claim that it would be wiser to think how to utilize open source in tomorrow’s mobile devices than trying to squeeze Linux into today’s cell phones. That’s like putting a modern turbo engine into a T Ford.

Me, too!
Why would we do the same with Linux and open source that is already done with other software stacks? Just because we can? Some companies that do not want to use Symbian, Microsoft, or other ready software platforms may be forced to use Linux and stuff on a phone, and I understand the business rational. But it is not interesting and it doesn't take you much further. From the technology and innovation point of view, it is simply re-inventing the wheel.

Phones are restricted
Cell phones exist in a very restricted ecosystem. Phones that you can buy today are closed; they include features, such as SIM locks, walled garden browsers, DRMs, MMS's, and other stuff desired by the ecosystem but ignored or hated by end users. All these features actually restrict innovation. Also, phones are good for talking but hardly for anything else. They need to be small so they don’t have proper keyboards or good screens. All your interesting applications are squeezed into this little screen and accessed by this clumsy keypad. Very restricted!

The Vision
I'd like a true operating system (Linux) and advanced middleware (GTK, Gnome, DBUS, ….) power new exciting connected mobile devices. I want to use the devices and their software as innovation platforms and want to create something new; not just re-implement something that has already been done. And yes, you are able to talk, see, hear and communicate through these devices but they are not your old cell phones. They are something else! To be continued …

------------------------------------
P.S. I truly apologize that we had some errors in our marketing campaign and that we gave credits to wrong people and so forth. It should be now fixed. The intention was honest and next time we’ll be more careful. Thank you for you understanding!

A hack ad

2006-11-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

Hackability is one of the most important elements of the internet tablets. But how do you communicate that aspect to the end users who do not hack or write software? Well, this is our first attempt: View the hacks and apps.

I like the work people do @ maemo. I realize that some of the work isn't necessarily fully finalized, and a critical end user may find them rough on the edges. On the other hand, these applications are an integral part of the internet tablet story, and they greatly expand the possibilities of these products.

So thank you for developing them and letting us to promote your work, too!

A day at the House of the Estates -- and driving there

2006-10-25T09:25:00.000-07:00

Suits

I enjoy hands-on work. But this week, I participated a few workshops. One of them was entitled "Networked Business and Governance -- Something Concrete for the Lisbon Strategy". It was an information society conference organized as a part of the official programme of Finland's EU Presidency. The seminar focused on finding concrete means to achieve the objectives set by the Lisbon Strategy. We were supposed to brainstorm about how to boost innovation and the utilization of innovation in Europe.

The seminar was opened by the prime minister of Finland -- I wore a dark suit. And the venue was pretty cool, too. Anywhoo ....

Opportunities and Challenges

I had a short slot to explain
-open source
-its opportunities and challenges
-and how to boost Europe' s competitivenes
for people who didn't necessarily know what "source code" means. It is always good to try to summarize your thoughts in a few bullets. And try keep them understandable for everybody. So these were my bullets about the opportunities and challenges of boosting innovation with open source:

Opportunities

Extend the work of others and concentrate on value add, differentiation, and innovation
Utilize global workforce and top talents through peer-to-peer collaboration
Common global language between industry and academia
A disruption in technology creation -- is changing the fundamentals of software creation
An even competitive landscape in software -- Europe well positioned in open source

Challenges

Open source is an innovation platform -- how can the innovator benefit from open source innovation?
IPR and legal situation not fully clear
Business models not yet fully developed
Open source development is distributed by nature -- how do big enough homogenious platforms emerge to enable large scale business?
Business players entering to open source -- impact unknown
How much there is hype around open source?

Such short bullets are flammable. Without explanations, they may be misunderstood. So go ahead and do so ;-) You can also read one of my earlier post to pour gas on fire.

Getting there

Talking about gas. I used some help navigating there. The vehicle that my 770 is attached to uses about 20 l / 100 km -- but don't worry. It will work in a Fiat, too.

An advice for software vendors

2006-10-19T06:06:00.000-07:00

It is pretty educating to develop the Linux and open source based software platform for Nokia. Based on our experiences I'd like to give a humble advise to software vendors -- those open or closed source software vendors who have a piece of software that you'd like to see running on Linux based mobile devices: Develop for Linux!

Interesting new things show up first on PCs -- and we want to set them free!

We want to liberate the internet experience from fixed locations to mobile devices. We want internet use cases, such as browsing, viewing, chatting, talking, sharing, and participating that you do today on your PC, be available anywhere anytime. For that you need a connected mobile device, such as an Internet Tablet, and software plugins, applications, and services to support your activities.

As of today, the majority of those plugins, apps, and services appear first on Windows PCs. I bet that your first browsing and internet phone call happened on a PC. The PCs still get things first.

A vision

I believe that Linux and open source based mobile devices will eventually conquer the world. We'll have different kinds of mobile devices, such as phones, internet tablets, media players, and game decks all running Linux in the future.

Current situation

Windows based PC:s are a commercial success. The vast majority of PCs and laptops run a version of Windows. They provide a more interesting platform for application, plugin, and service developers.

Too often, companies develop their players, streamers, plugins, and services optimized for Windows only. They treat Linux as a second class citizen, and do not optimize their software for it. They execute Windows and give lip service to Linux. In one of our recent tests we had a late version of a commercial software under evaluation for our Internet Tablet. The vendor had both a Windows and a Linux version available for PCs. The Windows version takes 5-10% of the CPU time and the Linux version on the same hardware takes 50%. And then they want to see it running on a mobile device ...!

My advice

Please, go and optimize your software for Linux, too -- even if it is not needed for your next quarter results. Make sure that your stuff works well on the mobile platform of the future, i.e. on Linux. Be a part of the positive evolution and get ready for the new species of mobile computers to flood the world. Stop thinking dinosaur!

So how? Develop on Linux. Create GNOME apps. Integrate you multimedia with GStreamer. DBUS you stuff together. Do the right thing. Even if your main target today was Windows.

Maemo.org is for application development and Sardine is ... a fish

2006-09-20T10:32:00.000-07:00

Maemo basics

Maemo.org is an open source development environment for Nokia Internet Tablets. Its primary goal is to enable application development for the Internet Tablets. The application catalogue demonstrates that it works.

The vast majority of our software components originate from existing open source projects. In many cases, we want to develop the components further for the Nokia 770. We want to enhance functionality, improve performance, make them fit into our resource limited environment and so forth. Such development doesn't happen under maemo.org. We do not want to fork the development and take it under maemo.org. Instead, we go and participate the projects, enhance the technology there, and then take and integrate the enhanced components into our platform.

So, we
1) participate various open source projects. We then
2) source software components from these joint development projects and
3) integrate them for Nokia 770. We then
4) publish the integrated Nokia 770 software and development tools at maemo.org and
5) offer them as a platform for application developers

Got it? Good.

Sardine extreme

So what's with the maemo Sardine then? Now that is something else -- it is a new interesting experiment!

The maemo Sardine is our attempt to let others to participate the development and integration of our application framework. It is an unstable version of of the Hildon application framework. It contains the latest version of the application framework and several other components. The purpose of the Sardine is to:

Enable Maemo application developers to follow the latest changes to our application framework, so they can test their applications against the latest changes, update them as a result of any API changes and pilot the latest additions to the APIs. All within a comfortable timeframe before a stable release of the software for the end-users.
Enable anybody to participate in the development of our firmware and see where it’s heading at

We will launch new software releases and new products in the future -- but we won't launch them quite yet. However, the source code is there for you to see. So you can start to prepare your applications for our future products -- or you can participate the actual development of those products. If you are a maemo developer, I suggest you go and check it out!

I claim that the maemo Sardine is pretty unique. How many other companies share the source code of their yet to be announced products?

@ Linux World

2006-08-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

I'll give a presentation tomorrow. Any suggestions how to improve it? It's basically the same old story with some new development added.

Then...

A few random observations at the Linux World, San Francisco, so far:
-Where's Red Hat and where is MontaVista?
-You can really see the difference between .com and .org. DotCom has all the space, glory, and electricity while DotOrg is pushed into the far corner of the showroom. Look at the pictures below: Can y tell which one is .com, which one is .org?

OS 2006 is out!

2006-07-02T23:15:00.000-07:00

It's out now -- the OS 2006 for your Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. No longer a beta. You can now upgrade your very own Nokia device with a new firmware, with new functionality.

I still like it blue ...

A phone call

Chatting

Finger keyboard

You can download it now at maemo.org download site and pretty soon also at www.nokia.com. (For a Windows PC, you also need to download a new update wizard. And, when upgrading your device, please, remember to press down the home key while booting up the 770 for a firmware update.)

Tools for software developers have been out for some time at maemo.org as a beta. And for consumers, we have now opened an interesting site @ tableteer.nokia.com where you can go with your 770 and get all kinds of bits and pieces.

The Tableteer site on your 770 screen

I'm pretty proud of what we've done so far! What we've got is an upgredable, open source based consumer product.

Upgreadable -- the product gets better even after you purchased it! You do not need to by a new device to get new functionality. And with this new software we've proven that now. So it is not like you conventional mobile phones, for example.

Open source based -- Using Linux, GNOME and other open source technologies allows us to introduce new interesting features. They provide us with a good quality platform. The open source based development model provides a means for collaborative development with open source communities. I predict that this is how products will be developed in the future, and we do so already now.

Consumer product -- the 770 is simple, durable, and highly usable. We want to keep the basic product accessable for all (while the Linux and open source based software allows developers to develop complex and sophisticated additional applications and features). With these devices and software, we are making internet mobile.

Hey, I'm bragging about it ;-) Please, let me. The OS 2006 is now available.

Academic talk

2006-06-21T05:41:00.000-07:00

I talk to a lot of companies and individuals, geeks and business suits, doers and dreamers, and other interesting people in the industry. It is pretty clear to me that consumer products will be built using open source in the future. Everybody's got plans for that! Everybody!

Utilizing open source are changing the rules of the game. It's sometimes better to share than to control, better to participate than to lead, better to code than to standardize, better to open than to close, and so forth. It is now important that different aspects of this change are studied and understood.

I think we should not consider open source (and free software for that matter!) only as a software development paradigm. I believe it will have a huge impact on business and sociological aspects of work, too. To understand this better, we started a research project with several industry and academia partners last fall. We've got us from Nokia, IBM, Novell, PWC, and others with Helsinki School of Economics , Helsinki University of Technology, Tampere University of Technology and University of Tampere. The aim of the project is to study open source from three different perspectives:

-business
-sociology
-technology

The research project is called Managing Open Source Software as an Integrated Part of Business. First publications are already available. Go and check out the first two OSSI reports:

Helander, N. & Mantymaki, M. (eds.) Empirical Insights on Open Source Software Business. e-Business Research Center Research Reports 34. Tampere University of Technology & University of Technology
Helander, N. & Martin-Vahvanen, H. (eds.) Multidisciplinary Views to Open Source Software Business. e-Business Research Center Research Reports 33. Tampere University of Technology & University of Technology.

P.S.

Thanks for all the feedback regarding our beta release! Unfortunately, I cannot answer your support questions here. Go to maemo.org for more info.

Maemo 2.0 & OS2006 beta for developers is out !

2006-06-09T01:33:00.000-07:00

When we released the first version of our software some 7 months ago, we knew that we need to fix things and add new features. We've done that and we are now ironing out nasty bugs and stabilizing the software. As you know, our new software introduces Google talk and other goodies. Just a bit of polishing and .... you can go and update your own 770 with this new 2006 software edition.

When we started to design the OS2006, we worried about backwards compatibility. We knew that we'll have challenges:

1) After the first version of any major system, you need to introduce upgrades and fixes. You need to change things, and you cannot ensure compatibility between your software releases (When can we? It is still a question!)
2) We have a very tight development schedule. I knew that we'd struggle in providing a beta early enough for developers for them to port their work on the new software version.

But here we go! We just released a beta version (the OS2006) of the new Internet Tablet software, and maemo 2.0 -- tools needed for application development at maemo. The purpose of this beta is to give tools for the developers to get their apps & stuff ported on the new software.

The beta is beta! It has its problems but I believe it is very usable for this purpose. It is not intended for regular consumers but for developers. So be careful out there. It may bite!

Yet another commercial break ...

2006-05-30T01:09:00.000-07:00

It is really low to use a blog for advertising -- two times in a row!

So here we go. We are hiring in Helsinki, Finland. If you are interested in developing open source based software platform and consumer products, such as the Internet Tablets, this may be your opportunity. We've got a really international team in Helsinki -- more than 20 different nationalities -- working with Linux, Gnome, debian, and other open source projects, our own internal projects, with partners, with maemo developer platform and so on.

Go and check out Nokia's web site for interesting new positions. Go to Nokia's job site, and fill in R&D Software as a Position Area, and use a keyword Linux.

As of today, the results look like this:

There is one specific position I want to highlight: Manager, Internet Applications Team. Check it out!

We will post positions in the future, too. So stay tuned.

A commercial break!

2006-05-24T06:20:00.000-07:00

Let's continue the open vs. free discussion later. Thank you all for your comments. Now, please, believe me that I DO understand the difference between open and free. And yet I wrote what I wrote ;-). I'm definitely for free software but I claim that open source alone is a great phenomena producing outstanding results.

But hey, I promised a commercial break:

Check out the new section @ maemo for presentations! (a bit selfish at the moment, eh?. More to come, though)
Check out a nice competition at the Open Tuesday web site!
Please, go and check out the 770 and maemo presentations @ Guadec in June.

Meanwhile, we're working really hard to get this out!

What´s with God and open source ?

2006-05-04T03:28:00.000-07:00

Nokia sponsored the Open Tuesday event in Helsinki this week. I gave a short talk and then we had a lot of discussion about open source, Nokia, 770, and maemo. People were really active and they had a lot of questions. Free beer. That was nice!

On Wednesday I gave another talk at a Nokia internal seminar for senior management about open source, Nokia, 770, and maemo. And again, an active dialogue happened. Free coffee. That was nice.

At the Open Tuesday, people wanted to talk about ogg, drm, software patents, and The evil company. At the Nokia event people wanted to talk about communities, how to enhance Nokia´s r&d to better work with open source, and how to share code. I enjoyed both events, but I must admit that the Nokia internal was more in the core of what is important. Let me explain.

To me, open source is about the SOURCE. It is about sharing your source code with others under fair terms. You give and take. You benefit from the work of others and they benefit from the work of yours. And the rules are the same for individuals, corporate, and academia. And that´s all.

So you share source code. You do not need to share your values, political opinions, opinions about drm, or your operating system preference. You do not need to agree on George W, EU patent legislation, or your preferred music file format. And yes, some patent issues may have an impact on open source projects, and The evil company makes so good PC software that the most of the people want to stick to it. So what?! Do what you see right but, please, do not say that sharing code requires sharing the same opinion about the above.

I´m a firm believer of open source. It is currently changing the way we make software intensive systems. Up here where I live, the Nokia 770 and maemo.org are true evidence of this. But please, let´s not attach foreign goals and ambitions to it. Such attachments could actually jeopardise the whole movement.

I´m very dedicated to do my share of making Nokia a true member of the open source movement, get code, give code, and lobby for free software. But, at the same time I´m buying music from iTunes (drm is ok), I use XP in my home studio (XP is ok), and I go to church every now and then (God is ok)! These things have nothing to do with open source.

So, let´s share code, no politics! Peace!

My Linux World presentation

2006-04-17T11:56:00.000-07:00

Some people have requested my presentation at the Linux World, Boston. Enjoy!

The Big Dig

2006-04-05T02:44:00.000-07:00

Boston

I arrived at Boston on Monday. This used to be my hometown for many years -- so it feels like coming home.

During the hectic days of the Big Dig, driving downtown was a nightmare. You’d come to the city in the morning, and they’ve changed all the roads during the night. So yesterday there was this exit from 93 – and today it’s no longer there. Instead, there is a new bridge!

The same thing is happening with our software. We are still building it the big time and changes are happening. There is no way we can have everything right at the outset, but we need to add roads, fix intersections, and add bridges. That’s what’s happening with maemo v2.0. There is one difference to the Big Dig, though. I do not expect us to go so much over the budget!

So bear ith us! I hope these changes, such as a proper package management will make everybody’s life easier. Also, a lot of other good things, such as a new toolchain is expected. Unfortunately, at least a recompilation is needed then. This is not the last change, but we’ll do our best to keep you all informed. Please, let us know what you think about the directions we are taking and the new additions at maemo. (But let's not do the discussion here but @ maemo, ok? Keep on commenting my blog, though ;-))

Linux World

I’m participating the Linux World here.

The first keynote by Nicholas Negroponte was about the $100 Dollar Laptop. It’s a beautiful project. It is more about getting a laptop for every child than about technology as such. I was impressed by the practical plans. It’s good to have ambitious and bold visions and practical plans combined. Good luck for the project!

Another interesting presentation was given by Mark VandenBrink. He spoke about Motorola’s Linux phone programs. He said that the vast majority of their Linux phones have a touch screen. He said that more consumer devices run Linux than Microsoft – and that the gap is getting bigger. He said he likes maemo. He said that if you'd ask they’d send you their kernel version obligated by GPL. …and many other interesting things. It is good to have a separate Linux for Mobile –track at the Linux world, isn’t it!

At the Access/Palmsource booth, people were carrying 770’s – they showed them to me but not for the general audience. That's OK. My daughter wanted a Siemens phone -- and got one ;-)

Luis Villa went to Harward Law School. I didn't know that! ... but I still met him at the GNOME booth.

Friends

Last evening – I spent it with my friends down in Canton, MA.

Let's be skeptical!

2006-03-07T00:57:00.000-08:00

When we announced the 770 last May, many people were skeptical. I bet many people still are ;-) However, many others --not just us -- have been thinking about something similar: How to utilize rich internet from a device simpler, lighter, and cheaper than a PC. Let's take a few examples:

Origami is an interesting new development. Local papers in Seattle compare it with 770.
PSP is a gaming device. That's what I understood. However, I do not see people playing games with it. Instead, they watch movies, and after the software upgrade they can now surf the web. Yes, they play games, too, but I bet they use it for other purposes more than originally expected...
We studied Samsung Nexio while designing 770. I wonder what happened to the Nexio.
Old and new development can bee seen, e.g. at linuxdevices. Many of those never came true, though.

So some are skeptical while others keep on trying. And somebody will eventually got it right for sure. We place our bets on open source, emphasizing internet use cases instead of all possible use cases, and the right (=small) size --open source for flexibility, selected use cases for simplicity & usability, and size for portability. And the right price is important, too!

By the way, I promised to Roger that I'll look into eBooks. I installed the readers from maemo and downloaded books. I was skeptical. But I'm starting to see the light. It is actually more convenient than I thought. I'm using FBReader (Misha, good work!).

I'm currently reading "Lives of Girls Who Became Famous" by Sarah Knowles Bolton. Why -- I've got two girls and they are already famous in my books!

Engadget Game

2006-02-07T14:46:00.000-08:00

Now this was nice:
Handheld of the Year Readers’ Choice: Nokia 770
Engadget Pick: Nokia 770

An then, who gets the credits? Some names seen at the Internet Tablet Talk. But, really, the credits should not go to Aris or Jannes. Yes, we sure look good, but that is not enough here.

The creation of 770 and maemo.org has truly been a bottom-up effort. Done by the team. We are lucky to have guys that believed in the product, worked through holidays and weekends, had the skills and courage to make right decisions, and finally the patience to work on bugs and problems.

This is not lip service. This has really been different from a regular Nokia project. I claim that people were enpowered to do right decisions -- and no executive should take any credit on anything else but this enpowerment! All the work has been done by the engineers, designers, testers, project managers, partners, friends in various communities, etc.

I wish I could list the names -- but they are too many. But go and meet the real dudes at fosdems, debconfs, guadecs and other such places. And, maybe .... you can call them Henry!

Where is Henry now?

2006-02-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

Free -- as free beer

I participated the first Open Tuesday event here at Helsinki just a few hours ago. So, there actually are occasions where open source means free beer!

Helsinki is a small town and I though I know quite a few people that work with open source. I was surprised to see so many new faces -- people I've never seen before. Many of the people that showed up were not particularly into Linux or open source. They were just curious about open source in general.

A lot of talk

So, everybody knows about Linux. TV and magazines talk about it. All my friends ask me about Nokia and Linux. My next door neighbor told me the other day that he's got an old PC with no use and that he'd like to try Linux on it.

But nobody that I know uses Linux, Gnome, or any of that -- with the exception of those that I work with, of course. My neighbor downloaded Ubuntu but to my knowledge never installed it. We've got the buzz but no actual users.

But why is that? There are many reasons. It is not possible to go and buy a PC with pre-installed Linux in it -- not from a regular consumer electronics shop anyway. Getting a Linux distro and installing it is far too complicated for a regular user, when the alternative is just to use the pre-installed XP. If you want to do music, play games, make home movies, presentations, documents -- or almost anything -- XP or Mac is far more user friendly and powerful. (If you wanna run your own web server, then maybe ....)

How about phones and stuff? Phones based on Symbian, Microsoft, or some home-grown operating systems are more usable and powerful than any Linux based phone I've played with.

Henry wanted!

So, we've got a long way to go. Open source is where horses vs. cars were early last century. Horses and wagons were more reliable, faster, easier to operate, and supported by the infrastructure. However, cars changed everything. The basic concept was superior and Henry Ford figured out how to get it to masses.

With open source, we've got the engines, brakes, chassis and all that figured out now. And, we've got the world class manufacturing process through peer-to-peer production. But where is Henry?

A strategy

2006-02-01T01:14:00.000-08:00

It’s been busy lately -- so something totally different now. Let me try to compare our open source approach with that of others developing Linux based consumer products.

Open source can support different strategies

So let’s suppose you’ve decided to create a consumer product –a device-- based on open source. Utilizing open source gives you certain boundaries to work in. It also gives you many new possibilities. For example, utilizing GPL mandates that you release your source code. In some cases this can be a restriction. However, GPL also means that you can use the code developed by others freely – just remember copyleft. Also, if somebody now wants to extend your GPL’d work, they can do it efficiently because you have released the source code they can work on.

How do you deal with open source and developer may vary a lot, though. Now, let’s take two different perspectives.

1) Own involvement –proxies vs. own involvement

a. Do you as a device manufacturer use commercial distros and integrators, or do you rather work directly with open source communities
b. Do you get your components from montavistas, redhats, trolltechs, and such, or do you grab them yourself from debian, kernel.org, GNOME etc
c. Do you rather make a business deal with a commercial company that should take care of the details of open source on your behalf, or do you rather participate open source work yourself to get what you want

2) Development environment –closed vs. open native development
a. Do you want to open your software for hacking and native application development, or do you want to keep it closed and support only application sandboxes, such as Java, on top of your software

Let me take a concrete example. Our friends at Motorola produce nice Linux phones. To my knowledge, they use MontaVista kernel and Trolltech’s Qt/embedded and Java as a developer platform. We on 770 went directly to GNOME and kernel.org and decided not to use commercial distros or middleware packages. We also allow native Linux application development. And we want to use the latest versions of components as soon as we can – a goal that a proxy would make more difficult to achieve. So the strategy is different. No better nor worse – just different.

Own Involvement -- I believe that big corporations often rather make a business deal with a “proxy company” than deal with small hacker companies or do to sourceforge themnselves. They are used to have NDAs, LOIs, frame agreements, partnerships, purchase orders, and invoices from other big companies. They may not want to worry too much about this open source stuff. The proxy companies hide the open source aspect of the work and you are dealing with simple old software component vendors.

Development environment – depending on your goals and needs, supporting a sandbox as an application development environment may be a good idea in cases where you need more control, portability, and other such things.

So, I’m not saying it is good or bad to be in any particular place on the map. But I think it is important you know where you are.

A rumor

I Finnish technology newspaper Tietoviikko said yesterday that Nokia doesn’t want to develop own operating systems, and that maybe the successor of 770 would run MontaVista’s Linux. They quoted a Monta Vista marketing person there. Well, I bet MontaVista is doing a good job and they seem to have many customers in the consumer electronics space. However, our software for 770 is sourced directly from kernel.org and the middleware from Gnome, GTK, Gstreamer, etc. So we are not developing an “own operating system” for 770. And really, our strategy to not use proxies is serving us very well, thank you ;-)

Feedback -- 2 ways

2006-01-09T13:26:00.000-08:00

Feedback for internet tablets and maemo

So we are getting feedback. It’s coming through maemo.org, through our 770 feedback channel, through blogs etc. Thank you! Sorry, I cannot comment them all.

The feedback seems to fall into three major categories
1) Hardware
2) Applications
3) System

Hardware
There are various hardware improvement ideas ranging from “expandability” through “connectors to the side” to the all famous “more memory & speed”. The ideas of expandability make a lot of sense but they’d easily contradict with a durable and affordable device. Screen protectors, charging cradles, separate in-box keyboards, etc would also increase the price, although they are good ideas, too. On the other hand, we already put a charger into the box, unlike some others who sell it separately, eh eh ;-).

But now, the hardware is what it is. We’ve got a gorgeous screen, a pretty good size (not too big – not too small), the device is tough and solid, and the price is right. Yes it is. You’ll see new hardware coming from Nokia in the future, but let’s now use the hardware we’ve got. We try hard to get enough units built, and get them to you.

Applications
At the application side, there is a very loud group of e-Book fans. I promised to Roger to try e-books and form my own opinion. E-Books have never been in my radar screen, so I’m trying now. Too early to say anything.

Then, what comes to internet calls and instant messaging – you’ll have them in the next major release later this year.

Other suggestions include PIM, more games, voice recorder, presentation editors, etc. A lot of people are working on those already, including open source based and commercial stuff. So let’s see what happens with them. But really, we are not really building your average PDA here.

System
I don’t think we’ll abandon X.

For more memory and speed, we’ll work with the software to try to improve the performance. We already had tested swap idea similar to those already presented, but there are still many issues there. We are not sure at all if that is the way to go. Also, let’s remember that a 770 is not your regular PC. So comparing a 770 to your latest laptop makes no sense what comes to memory and speed. But I agree that there is room for improvement there.

Our goal is to make internet tablets good internet citizens. All major internet use cases should be easily performed. Therefore, all kind of input related to this goal are carefully studied. We need to put things in priority order and keep on working.

For all kinds of ideas, there is a lot of discussion happening at maemo mailing lists, too.

Feedback from me
We all agree that we need to improve software – not only for Nokia’s internet tablets but for all Linux and open source based systems. In addition to us geeks, we need to attract a wider audience, and get our stuff to regular users. I claim that this one of the biggest challenges for the entire open source movement.

There is no doubt that open source can produce good quality software. Just think about Linux or Apache, for example. But simplicity, usability, and end user appeal – I don’t know. GNOME, Ubuntu and others are happening, but we've got a long road ahead of us. Therefore, I was really happy to get some 770 feedback from Alan Cox: “What is most impressive is that you've actually made a Linux system feel like a Nokia device -- not like a Linux device by Nokia”.

I encourage you all to work on your favorite applications. Share them as open source or distribute as commercial applications or services, like DejaDesktop, and please, publish you apps at maemo.org application catalog if you can.

But above all, have courage to publish a 1.0 version of your work– not just 0.1. Make it ready. Test it fully. Perform usability testing and fix usability bugs. Make your software works for your mom and dad. Seriously!

By the way
By the way, you can prevent pop-ups in the browser (tools-->settings-->plug-ins&scripts). Also, using the 4way button you can either scroll (keep the button down) or jump from link to link (press the button once). Also, we’ve do have dedicated hardware volume controls: while the video or audio player is on, the +/- button otherwise used as a zoom button works as a volume knob. …for those of you who didn’t know these.

A killer app -- I'm back home!

2005-12-17T01:42:00.000-08:00

A killer app? A good analysis from Russell although I don't like the whole concept. But I guess I need to live with it.

VOICE

My colleagues at Nokia often say the killer app for a mobile phone is "VOICE". OK then, I'd say the killer app for an internet tablet is "INTERNET". Let me explain.

So let's suppose the killer app for mobile phones is VOICE. It's a vague statement if we don't define what it means for an individual person.

For my daughter, VOICE means that she can gossip with her girlfriends, and that she can call her mom or me if any plans would change.
For me VOICE means work. For me VOICE is an enterprise application. I work with it. I do not spend time talking with my old friends on the phone -- so the phone for me is not a means for social interaction unlike for my daughter. I also use VOICE to call a taxi cab almost on a daily basis.
Then, I know people who use VOICE for so-called entertainment services.
..and so on

Well ... what is then the killer app? Is it VOICE or calling a taxi or entertainment services?

I don't know.

INTERNET

So if I really must use the concept -- then the killer app for the internet tablet is INTERNET. I especially like to

manage and publish my own music online (got tens of thousands downloads for my simple tunes and hundreds of written comments ... and a lot of online buddies there)

share my photos and stream my music from my home PC using 770 (I've got over 500 Gigs of hard drive and I can access that all from my 770 -- thus I've got a lot of music and pictures with me while on the go)

(contains partial nudity ...but for us Europeans it is OK)

listen to Internet radio -- never used it before, but on 770 on the daily basis
do email
search -- wikipedia -- anything I need to know I grab a 770 and search
read a local newspaper online

Feedback

VOICE is everywhere. Everybody uses VOICE and their favorite usage with it varies. So is INTERNET, too. All of us who have a life online uses INTERNET differently. It would be nice to hear your favorite killers online. And the lucky owners of a 770, do not forget to tell your opinions at the 770 feedback page.

The trip is over now -- I'm back home now

It's a helluva trip from SFO to Finland. I'm tired. But it was a good trip. I met a lot of interesting people and saw a 770 in Comp USA!

Here back home, we've got some new snow. It is certainly different than the view from my hotel room in San Francisco.

A view at the bay from my hotel room

A view from my window at home

P.S.S. And thank you all for the comments and improvement ideas so far. Roger, I really liked yours. But could you, please, make it a bit shorter -- like an executive summary. I don't read books online, you know.

Release early -- and party

2005-12-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

Party time

We organized two blogger events – one in NY in Tuesday, and another is due in a few hours in SFO. Drinks, snacks, a lot of discussions and 770s. We wanted to meet those people like Reggie and Michael, who have strong opinions about 770, maemo, and Nokia's open source approach.

When we announced the 770 and maemo back in May 2005 I said that we have just started something new; it is a good start and we’ve got many interesting things ahead of us; and now we want to learn. Meeting with these interesting people was/will be one good opportunity for us to learn.

Developing products

Now, how do you develop a product such a 770? How do you work in open source in general? You

1) release early,
2) get feedback – including code contributions,
3) improve your product – all very openly, and letting others to participate

So we have #1 already. Now we are doing #2., and with the maintenance and next major software upgrade releases we’ll do #3. This all sounds very familiar to us who are into creating software with open source. But it is also a pretty neat idea in a context of and entire product family, such as the internet tablets.

#1 is right – what’s next?

We know we’ve got the basics right. We’ve got the right operating system, right middleware components and the overall architecture. The main use cases, such as browsing, work better on 770 than in any other mobile pocketable device I’ve ever used. But the 770 is not perfect. We need to work on memory management, add better support for main stream internet formats and use cases, tune usability, etc. So the situation is extremely exciting and motivating.

The next software upgrade will not be perfect. Neither the one after that, and ….. We will need to work ridiculously hard and we never have enough resources.

We also need to keep the focus and concentrate only on things that matter for the mainstream users. We are building mass market devices; that is where we are going big time! But I believe we can keep the momentum and the focus. Through #1, #2, and #3.

You gotta believe in what you do, eh? ;-) I do.

It is not a cell phone -- and it is good

2005-11-19T10:16:00.000-08:00

There is the name Nokia on the 770 Internet Tablet. I bet that is why so many people ask me: "Are you gonna put a cell phone into your internet tablet?" And I answer: "No." Let me explain a few good reasons:

A Christensen reason

Nokia makes a lot of phones – more than anybody else. For us, it is mature business and we know it. We've got the skills, technology, sourcing, marketing, channels, and all to design, create, and deliver over 30% of all the phones globally. Our phones are good – go and get yourself one!

Cellular operators, who are the most important channel to markets, are demanding – they have tons of requirements for phones. Also, end users expect a very high level of maturity. Mandatory requirements for cell phones, such as type approvals, operator requirements, legislative requirements, operator subsidies, and other such elements make the business structure very complicated. You cannot sell a phone without SMS, WAP, MMS, SIM lock, sync, MIDP, 911 stuff, various approvals in different countries, and so on. Creating a device, even an internet tablet, with circuit-switched telephony –technically – is not that hard. Creating and selling a full cellular phone –taking all the requirements into account – is extremely complicated. It is!

Internet Tablets are different – they are new. Rules, markets, technology, customers, partners, and channels to customers are new and still evolving. This is good! It is an interesting opportunity for Nokia. And because all is new, we want to be flexible. We utilize open source, work with interesting new partners, and avoid all unnecessary baggage that would slow us down. Adding a cell phone into our internet tablet would put all the cell phone requirements on us and would make us slow. It would force us to play by the cell phone rules.

We don’t mix these things. We want to get the best possible mobile internet experience into the hands of our customers – though dedicated internet tablets!

A usability reason

This I explained already earlier. But to summarize:

An internet tablet is a pocketable device. The main use cases are browsing, email, multimedia and so on. They need a big and sharp screen. That makes the device about the size and shape of your hand – not and ideal design for a phone. An ideal phone is much smaller and optimized for talking.

A simplicity reason

This I also explained earlier.

The main use cases for internet tablets can certainly benefit from cellular connectivity. You sure want to browse, do your email, or watch the latest news over a cellular network even if you’re not in a WiFi bubble. And you can do these now with the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. But because there is no cell radio in the 770, there is no need to subscribe for another cell phone plan, another SIM card or anything. Simply use the phone that you already own as a modem and use the beautiful screen of 770 to do the rest. Or go and upgrade your phone to a new 3G phone and keep on using your 770 … it just got faster!

Telephone-->cell phone; PC -->770

2005-11-04T10:44:00.000-08:00

Back then, telephones were stationary gadgets. They were placed in certain locations, in certain rooms. When I wanted to place a phone call I needed to go into such a room and stay there until the talk was done. Residences and offices had phones, not people. One phone was shared with many people. Cordless phones gave some flexibility but even they were basically stationary.

Then came a cellular phone and changed it all. Today, I've got my own personal phone. I talk anytime anywhere. I talk in trains, in cafeterias, at airports, even while driving. I can make a phone call anytime and anywhere I want.

Today, PCs are stationary gadgets. They are placed in certain locations, in certain rooms. When I want to get online or send emails I need to go into such a room and stay there until the surfing is done. Offices and library rooms have PC's. One PC is shared with the entire family. Laptops give us some flexibility but even they were basically stationary.

Today we started the shipment of Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. .... I surf in trains, in cafeterias, at airports, even while driving. I can go online anytime and anywhere I want.

Now this was a bold story ;-) But hey, this is a good day -- it' s out now!!

Some random acts

2005-10-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

I'm not really into home movies. I'm not good at shooting them and I hate editing them. Just takes too much time. So this is un-edited. Let's see how long you can access this from my ISP.

Featuring 770 -- some random acts in AVI or MPEG (same acts -- different format)

And just like all my models; looks better in real life ;-)

Linux World London ...

2005-10-06T00:22:00.000-07:00

So me and Yannick flew to London for Wednesday to attend the Linux World Conference & Expo. Mark Shuttleworth had an interesting presentation on Ubuntu and its future. He says he can spend a few million a year to build Ubuntu. Why not then :-) good work -- I run Ubuntu at home.

Mathew Allum et al from Openedhand had a nice booth and a few gadgets, including Nokia's.

Wednesday evening, Nokia 770 got the best embedded Linux product award. Cool!

There was also an interesting panel entitled the Great Linux Debate. We had Nick McGarth of Microsoft among the panelists. I think that he did a good job explaining Microsoft`s strtegy and defending his case. Not an easy job. I don`t say I agree with what he said but I give him a credit for showing up!

... and I was actually irritated by a childish attitude against Microsoft. Let me give you an example: Somebody in the audience asked; "When are we gonna have a solution on Linux that I take an application, driver, or a component and it just runs. Like if I take this Windows application it just runs." Instead of answering the question, the panelists started to blackmail MS saying that their software doesn`t just run but that there are many problems etc. Now, even if this was true, nobody bothered to answer the question 'when on Linux'. Instead, they all talked about Microsoft and how bad their software is.

Give me a break! To me the open source movement is FOR SOMETHING (freedom, innovation, shared cost...) not AGAINST SOMETHING (MS). I find this anti-Microsoft religion a bit silly. I wanna move on and get things done. That`ll change things.

Reuters reported that 770 is delayed. Yes, it is a bit. But it's gonna be good. We`ve got some instability issues to iron out. And by the way, this all was written on my delayed 770 in London..

770 for surfing -- a small phone for talking

2005-09-24T11:34:00.000-07:00

Suppose you own a small phone and a 770.

1) When you go out running or partying you just take your small phone with you. Such a phone can be small because it won't need a big screen, heavy batteries or large keypads. Such a phone is designed for talking -- not for surfing or email. It slips easily into your pocket and you do not even realize you're carrying one.

2) Then you take a train to work. Now you take your 770 with you. And you can use the 770 in a cellular network, too. You use your 770 while your phone is somewhere in your bag or in your pocket; somewhere in the bluetooth range. Now you can use the big screen of the 770 to do other stuff like surfing and email. And only your phone needs a SIM card and a cellular plan -- not your 770.

We designed the 770 not only for WiFi but also for such combined use with a cell phone. That is one reason NOT to have a cell radio in the 770 -- because I bet you already own a phone. But yes, some people don't want to carry many devices. They may then need a Swiss army knife sometimes called a smartphone.

But me, I don't like big phones but I still want to be online. With a small phone and a 770 I can do both. Small phones for talking -- 770s for surfing!

On line on the road

2005-09-17T08:36:00.000-07:00

My 8-year-old has a virtual stable where other girls of her age (mostly, I hope!) visit. There are horses and ponies. There is a little shop full of virtual horse gear. And there is a discussion board. My daughter has given the other girls a horse for each to look after. The girls write stories about how they've taken care of their horses. Based on the stories, my daughter gives them points. A good long story and she gives 15p, a short one and she may give none! The points can then buy stuff at the virtual shop.

Pretty amazing, I think. Improves their writing skills -- and web admin skills; at the age of 8!

Yesterday we went to visit friends. They live in the woods so it took us almost an hour to get there. My daughter was on-line the whole trip. She used the 770 to maintain her virtual stable and give points and cretits to the users. A regular cell phone in my pocket provided the connectivity and and I didn't even realize that she was online until she asked me how to add a bookmark or someting. I said I'm driving, honey, cannot help you right now!

Using a cell phone while driving without handsfree is illegal in Finland. How about being online? Well, this time I didn't try but the back seat did!

Sounds good to me now!

2005-09-15T10:01:00.000-07:00

I've got a box full of headphones. Some came with players (mp3, minidisk, cd ...) and some when I tried to improve their sound. They are all bad. No bass, irritating highs, and a midrange that sounds like our bathroom. I though this is the way things are ...

... untill I got Koss PortaPros about a week ago. Yes, they are plain ugly but they feel and sound GOOD. I was told that they've manufactured these for over 20 years. It seems I really am into old stuff.

An icon …also with a keyboard

2005-09-11T05:53:00.000-07:00

I’m a happy owner of an icon. I’ve owned my Wurlitzer 200A for years already. Let me explain:

For many it seems that I’m having a piece of junk in my home. An old plastic looking instrument with 2 knops and a small keyboard. Inside, it is filled with primitive wiring and junkyard mechanics. For those who are into music workstations, software synths, or other such stuff it seems totally outdated. Nord Electro imitates it electronically very well, and software syths are much more flexible.

But unlike these modern shiny objects my Wurli has a soul. It is an honest old e-piano that won’t confuse a user. A one-trick pony but what a trick! It won’t give you a band-in-a-box but forces you to do the work. It doesn’t matter if you are into Steely Dan, Elton John, Hill Street Blues, or elevator music – it simply feeeeeels gooooood.

The world is full of these iconic things. Just think about a VW Beetle, a Vespa, a Fender Telecaster, … and a Wurlitzer piano. They all are simple, elegant and 100% fit for their purpose. They also have certain roughness in them that seems to make them unique. Do they still come up with these things … or is it just me getting old?

(All sound clips recorded directly from the headphone output of a W200A. No additional effects used.)

A key board

2005-09-09T05:24:00.000-07:00

David got my keyboard working on 770. Not perfect but a nice hack.

After using it for a while .... I'm not sure. I want to use my 770 on-the-go. How to use a separate keyboard while using a free wifi spot in a street corner...?

Internet radio ...

2005-09-08T03:44:00.000-07:00

Developers, friends, and even my mother keep on asking when can I get my 770. I honestly feel bad that I didn't have one with me last weekend when I met Keith Packard, Greg Kroah-Hartman and others. I tend to travel light and ...

You may think that an Internet Radio application doesn't make any sense. I disagree. You sure can access radio stations though a web page but having a separate small app that has all my favourite stations listed and behind one PLAY button makes a difference. Its convinient.

McLaren should be open!

2005-09-04T09:02:00.000-07:00

Well it looks like it is now over for Raikkonen. It's a pity since he is the fastest guy by far. But there'll be next year. And Monza was nice.

I tried to get my 770 on wifi at the Monza track. All the networks were closed. I think McLaren should let 770 users in! A friend of mine Mikko Valimaki suggested last week in Helsingin Sanomat (a Finnish newspaper) that everybody should leave their wifi networks open. If we dare to drive a car, we should dare to let others use our access points for free. Risks are much smaller and it costs much less than driving a car. Well, I've always kept my wifi open for anybody who happens to need it.

McLaren didn't.