14 DAY TRIAL // Nokia N900, the high-end Maemo-based device Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia unveiled officially last year, has just got a little better, as the MeeGo platform was announced as being capable of running on it.
One of the most interesting aspects of the deal is that one would be able to have both MeeGo and Maemo installed on a Nokia N900, and to easily boot up in one OS or the other.
“On the Maemo side, there have been interesting, supporting developments going on, as well. The PR 1.3 update is quite close now, and with that you can easily dual boot between Maemo and Meego on your N900,” Harri Hakulinen, N900 Project Lead, states in a post on the MeeGo site.
For the time being, however, things are not final, and a lot of work still needs to be done before one can enjoy the full potential of MeeGo on a Nokia N900 device.
“At this point, I need to remind you about the basics: MeeGo is an open source project and if you choose to install the MeeGo image to your N900 device, you do it completely at your own risk,” Harri Hakulinen, said.
“If you are not confident that you know what you are doing with it and why, please don't use it at all. Especially now, if you start playing with call software under development, you need to watch after your phone bill, as well.”
“Also, please use the latest repositories only, or the next weekly image that is downloadable from the MeeGo repositories every Monday,” he continues.
The development team says that 3G audio call functionality was achieved on Nokia N900 running MeeGo, with ofono signaling and pulse audio stack working on the mobile phone.
As for how things are moving forth on the MeeGo development area, we should note that MeeGo 1.1 is nearing its final release, and the dev team is focused on ensuring that all things work according to plan at the moment.
On top of that, the work on the next MeeGo release, namely MeeGo 1.2, was already started, with great chances that the solution would be fully operational on Nokia N900 too.
“On N900 side, we will continue by integrating some interesting stuff from the latest Nokia and development repositories, including, SGX drivers, camera stack, and accelerated video decoders,” Hakulinen added.
Back in Spring, when the first news on MeeGo development started to emerge, news came that N900 might never taste the new operating system, but it seems that enthusiast have now a solid reason to rejoice.
However, it still remains to be seen how things would evolve, and whether an official MeeGo release would land on Nokia N900 or not. In the meantime, enthusiasts can take full advantage of the dual boot between Maemo and Meego now available for them.
“There is also a possibility of developing applications supporting both operating systems, based on Qt and Qt Mobility APIs on the Maemo side. It means that you can develop once in PC with Qt Creator, and test your applications on both Maemo and MeeGo, directly on your N900 device,” Hakulinen concluded.