In All About Symbian Insight 91 (AAS Podcast 153), Steve expands on his N97 camera and GPS experience from last weeks podcast. Rafe and Steve then discuss Nokia's Q3 2009 result in details, before Steve asks Rafe about his initial N900 versus N97 impressions. Our final topic is Steve's experience with Ovi Suite 2.0. You can listen to AAS Insight 91 here or, if you wish to subscribe, here's the RSS feed.
Read on in the full article.
Rafe, you mention that Symbian^4 and Maemo 6 will appear around the same time? When will that be?
I hesitate to ask exactly when, however I'm curious to know when a device 'just' running Symbian^2 will see the light of day?
S^4 most likely mid-2010, and end of 2010 (or 2011) for actual devices.
S^2 devices probably very late this year, or more likely during the 1st half of 2010.
Actually Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 is already now implemented with Qt:
http://betalabs.nokia.com/blog/2009/06/23/nokia-ovi-suite-20-the-one-and-only-nokia-desktop-application-in-the-future
Connectivity platform under Nokia Ovi Suite UI is implemented with something else, from Betalabs blog: "Then, couple of comments about Mac and Linux support. As you know, we've implemented Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 with Qt, but that's for the UI of of Nokia Ovi Suite 2.0 - most of our connectivity is based on technology from Nokia PC Suite and unfortunately, this connectivity technology doesn't yet have multiplatform support."
Yes we should have been clearer in the podcast - a lot of the underlying stuff is still .NET. The new UI is nice, but need a a new engine to go with it.
S^4 and Maemo 6 will appear at the end of 2010 (ish). You'll see technical preview before then. I would expect Maemo 6 to be slightly ahead (3 months?) of Symbian^4.
The N97 Mini and N97 with version 2.0 software are effectievly Symbian^2 though you wont see them referred to as such (in that they have almost all the Symbain^2 tech). I imagine the next batch of Nokia Symbian handsets announced may carry the ^3 label (assuming they are touch).
Hello Rafe, Steve, Ewan, I want to ask some stuff regarding the N97 and the N97 mini
First, any clues regarding when is the new firmware for the N97 comming out?
Second, my girlfriend is going to graduate from college in dicember, and she is a symbian girl (since the early days of the nokia 7610) my question is, do you think it would be a very neat gift for her professional life and stylish life?
I think it will, but I would love to get some advice from you guys!
Cheers from M�xico!
I have been a software architect on the .NET platform for several years and let me assure you that .NET is not the reason for bloated software.
The only thing that is quite large is the .NET framework itself. Usually you do not integrate the framework in the installer package but have it downloaded by the setup on demand (as most users have it already installed on their pc).
There are other new options to reduce the footprint of .NET software. Our client for a complex client/server software has a 21 MB setup including a full third party component suite used for enhanced GUI look & feel. And we did not even apply optimizations for a smaller file size.
I have not installed Ovi Suite 2.0 yet and have no clue what Nokia did to produce such a bad experience. At least I would never combine a .NET application with a QT user interface. :frown:
OK so maybe we find another reason that Ovi Suite is slow... it maybe that its not .NET (but probably is old legacy connectivity stuff) - will have to do some digging.
I just wish that Nokia would drop the whole Microsoft centric thing. I use Ubuntu, I totally abandoned Windows back in February and it wasn't a moment too soon. Having to install juggernauts like .NET is really bad. I'd like to see Nokia write their software in a cross platform language like Java. Unfortunately once software Engineers get accustomed to writing for a particular platform it is another learning curve to move from that, so there is some understandable resistance. When I was using Windows I found PC Suite very temperamental and sluggish. Now I have to use workarounds to service my Nokia N95 8GB as I can't use PC Suite - it shouldn't be like that Even though Spotify, having written their desktop, for the dreaded Windows, did take the trouble to make it function perfectly in WINE. Computers using Windows just seem to get slower and slower as time goes on. I know someone who regularly does a complete reinstall to get round this. Notwithstanding the crummy OS, having to run bloated spy, ad and virus protection software slows things down too. I guess that it might come to Linux eventually but meanwhile, like Mac users, we can bask in the sunshine.
Just one negative about the podcast content. How many people are really interested in detailed info. re Nokia's trading details? Unless you have shares in Nokia I can't see that such long and drawn out detail is necessary. It would be interesting to see what others think about this. Far better to cover things like apps that, I would guess, most people will find interesting.
Display 800x480 pixels
Play AVI, DivX, etc. files natively
Run proper 3D games and UI transitions (no graphics accelration, no OpenGL 2)
Support 4 user definable home screens
Multi-task 25+ apps (only 128MB RAM vs 256+750 for the N900)
Display full flash websites
etc.
As you say it depends what's important to you but I'll take these features over mms, better maps, portrait support and drm music any day! It is still very early for Maemo 5 and the N900 and the package still looks more convincing than the many times patched N97. Most "missing" features will be addressed in Maemo5 or added in Maemo 6.