[ubuntu-za] Nokia N900 or HTC Hero

[Andre Hugo]

The hacker-friendly part is what I like about the Nokia and is this not
why I linux? YES! Freedom. IT is not my day job but I do like to do a
bit of programming part-time.

I have in the past tried to download Android SDK but could not get it to
work on karmic. Last night I downloaded and installed Maemo 5 SDK. What
a easy task that was. One python installer file and the file takes care
of everything else.

Looks like there is a PyGTKEditor. 

Morgan thank for the detailed advice.

Andre



On Thu, 2010-01-14 at 07:24 +0200, Morgan Collett wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 17:17, Andre Hugo <cortexhugo at mac.com> wrote:
> > Hi List,
> >
> > Thinking of getting a new phone. I have narrow it down to Nokia N900 and
> > HTC Hero.
> >
> > As I am running Karmic at home and work. I would like to hear from the
> > community about their experience with these devices and ubuntu/Linux
> 
> I have a Nokia N810 tablet - basically everything except the GSM
> radio. The user interface on the N900 has been improved, but basically
> it's a small ARM Linux box running a full screen window manager and
> the software is based on Debian. There's a toolchain to build debs for
> the armel architecture on the normal debian/ubuntu distros.
> 
> I don't know anything about syncing the N900 - the N800/N810 did not
> include PIM functionality out of the box. There were some third party
> Contacts/Calendar apps but they must surely have extended the platform
> by now.
> 
> Nokia's open source division behind Maemo were very proud of their
> involvement in the community - Nokia were a big sponser of GUADEC when
> I went a couple of years ago. Many of the software development houses
> in the GNOME community have done substantial work contracting for
> Nokia, building bits of Maemo - like Collabora building Telepathy
> which later got more exposure through OLPC and Empathy but was
> originally developed for Nokia.
> 
> So... while I don't know much about the N900 specifically, it is
> likely to be a lot more hacker-friendly (in the good sense) than any
> other phone out there. When the iPhone came out, Nokia were
> positioning Maemo as the anti-iPhone, because their platform didn't
> need to be jailbroken - you could get root quite easily and build your
> own software on a Free Software platform. Browse around on maemo.org
> for more details on the Maemo platform.
> 
> A colleague with the HTC Hero says its software is less mature than
> the iPhone - but it can be upgraded at some point to a newer Android.
> He also says the Hero is a bit underpowered - the Nexus One obviously
> runs newer more powerful hardware. All of these devices are basically
> obsolete within 3 months...
> 
> HTH
> Morgan
>