Nokia’s N900 is already enticing developers, but right now there’s not the same compelling catalog of applications as you might find, say, in the iPhone’s App Store. Happily that just leaves room for Maemo coders to fill with their own apps, such as a homebrew open-source Spotify application.
Video demo after the cut
HTC have quietly answered many Android developer’s prayers, and pushed out the kernel source code for the Hero smartphone. Available to download now – though admittedly of little use to most of us – it opens up the potential for much more modification of the Hero with custom ROMs.
Android 1.6 is only just rolling out to users of specific smartphones, but already we’re getting particularly excited about what’s set to occur in OS 2.0. The Boy Genius Report are doing nothing to minimize that excitement, either, with a photoset and run-through of just what’s going on in the latest 2.0 builds. Android 2.0 brings with it not only native Exchange support and a fresh – dare we say it “grown up” – new UI, but native Facebook integration, a unified email inbox and new Maps app.
Google have also obviously been working on streamlining usability, too, with more functional desktop widgets that step beyond mere shortcuts. You’ll be able to trigger a YouTube upload in literally two taps, from recording through titling and describing footage then squirting it off to the video sharing site, direct from the homescreen. Meanwhile, while there’s no multitouch support in either the browser or the new, layer-toting Google Maps app, there is double-tap to zoom.
In an ideal world someone would read this and send me a monome of my own to play with, but the button-encrusted control surfaces are in short supply (and not too cheap). Since controlling music isn’t the sole use of a monome, but still the task most people connect them with, some owners are pushing forward their DIY projects showing that a monome can be pretty much anything you have the imagination for: here, Robert Böhnke repurposes his as a low-res Twitter display.
Video demo after the cut
Creative’s Zii EGG developer unit has been on sale for some time now, but it’s taken the company a little time to deliver the promised Android update. However, according to a Twitter message from the Zii team, ZiiLABS will be releasing the Android installer “next week”.
The Nokia N900 was the stand-out device from Nokia World back in September, and we’ve been tracking the Maemo 5 smartphone ever since. Imagine our surprise, then, when a pre-release N900 dropped onto the SlashGear test bench today; the hardware is final, so the 5-megapixel autofocus Carl Zeiss camera is onboard, together with HSPA, WiFi b/g, a 3.5-inch 800 x 480 touchscreen and slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and you can check out our video unboxing and gallery after the cut.
Nokia have already been pretty upfront about their intentions with the cross-platform Qt framework and Maemo, but the company has just pushed out an official Qt port to Maemo 5 in the form of a “technology preview” release. Contrary to earlier news that Qt wouldn’t play nicely with Maemo 5, the OS which the Nokia N900 will run, but only Maemo 6 (expected in late 2010), the Qt port “is designed specifically to work within the Maemo 5 environment”.
Video demo on the N900 after the cut
Microsoft may have hoped their Windows Marketplace for Mobile would dominate app store news today, but Palm are having none of it. The company has just launched paid software in the webOS App Catalog, together with adding a few more free titles, with a fresh injection of almost thirty new apps. Meanwhile, they’re also broadening their appeal to the open-source community.
In a developer event late yesterday, Palm revealed that it would be enabling developers to release their applications via the web, rather than solely through the App Catalog; Palm will provide a link for downloaders for each new title submitted in this way, but not run the apps through checks as it does for the existing download store. Meanwhile they’ve also confirmed that they’ll be waiving the regular $99 annual fee for webOS developers if the software they’re producing is open-source.
Dell have announced their first netbook running Intel’s Moblin platform, and it’s available for developers to buy now. The Dell Inspiron Mini 10v Ubuntu Moblin Remix Edition is priced at $299 and comes with the usual Mini 10v specification – Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM, 160GB hard-drive – but uses Canonical’s combination of the core Moblin Version 2.0 interface, libraries, and applications with the internals of Ubuntu Linux 9.04.
Video demo after the cut
Google have released Android 1.6, the latest version of their open-source mobile platform. Android 1.6’s stand-out features are support for alternative screen sizes, CDMA support and a new text-to-speech engine. The update means that we’ll likely see more range of Android handsets on a broader range of networks.
Video overview after the cut
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