Amazon Kindle Fire from an European perspective

I've been interested in tablet devices for years (Maemo devices, anyone?), even before the iPad created the current tablet market. However as smartphones became increasingly more powerful and meanwhile I got myself a really light laptop (MacBook Air), even though devices like the iPad and some of the more serious competing offerings are undeniably very well implemented, amazing devices, I simply didn't see the need for those. On the other hand, I'm almost always carrying the ultralight Amazon Kindle WiFi e-book reader with me on travels, and often it also lives inside my coat pocket.

When the Amazon Kindle Fire was announced along with a cheap price tag and a size mostly comparable with the Kindle WiFi, I wanted to find out how useful it is and how well does it really work. I also knew that content services (books, magazines, videos, music, apps) are the main selling point for the device, and being an European - Finnish, currently living in Germany - I would probably be missing out on a lot, at least initially.

In this article I've collected my initial experiences, and I will continue to update this as I discover more, or as the Amazon offering gets updated. 

Last Updated: 28th December 2011

Hi all, I wrote a short piece on Qt Developer Days 2011 (Munich), you can read it on my company's blog: 

http://whatsyourideaoftomorrow.blogspot.com/2011/11/qt-developer-days-in-munich-nov15.html

I took some pics there as well, with my new-old Olympus E-p1 digital camera. Too bad the LCD screen broke during the flight, so framing the shots was "challenging". I managed quite well anyway, but I wasn't able to use my über oldie manual focus Canon 50/1.2 lens for Leica Screw Mount that I was planning to use, alas. The pics are on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32856926@N06/sets/72157628014737024/

A few days ago Nokia released the long-awaited first firmware update for the N950 at: 

http://www.developer.nokia.com/info/sw.nokia.com/id/db230178-aa63-4c73-ba7f-20930da13cad/Nokia_N950_OneClickFlashers.html

As Tuesday and Wednesday were such busy days for me, I didn't want to risk bricking my phone. But today I bit the bullet and installed the upgrade, making sure to take backups first of course. Some random experiences, I will update this as I encounter more:

• Generally the device responsiveness is lots better - scrolling is smoother, there are less delays etc. Feels very good now.
• I restored backups. Upon completion it said something about not being able to restore everything, but then rebooted faster than I could read the notification.
• To restore backups, I had to copy my backup file from my PC via USB, then manually move it from /home/user/MyDocs/Backup0 to /home/user/MyDocs/.backups so that the Backup application was able to see it.
• After reboot, all Contacts were missing in Contacts app. However executing "tracker-search -c" on the command line revealed I do have some contacts. After waiting for a while, a part of my contacts started appearing in Contacts app. A few minutes later, they were all there - so if you're worried you lost your contacts, just wait.
• There is now an official Twitter app and Twitter feeds show up in the feeds page
• The famous swipe downwards to close an app gesture can now be enabled from Display settings.
• There's a SIM menu (or what you call it) thats shows my operator's services that are on my SIM
• Feeds view can show weather as well. Default is Helsinki, Finland for some reason
• There is Angry Birds, and it works very fast and smoothly, much better than on WinPhones for example!
• Developer mode now has to be separately enabled in settings, but after you do it, Terminal and the usual goodness reappears
• Markings on "Developer Edition" are gone
• Ovi Store app no longer crashes all the time, and there is Ovi Music.
• Upon starting Maps, it asks me for an username and password. It doesn't say what service they are for, but I assumed it's the Nokia ID, which was correct.
• There is a WiFi Hotspot app, which is very welcome! 
• Terminal app has gained new features, an ability to switch between an Shell and Arrows toolbar with the swipe gesture among them

Dealing with duplicated contacts on the N950/N9

The N950 "dev kit" device arrived!

I'm super-busy during the whole week, but I did manage to get some Nokia N950 unboxing photos taken, and I've made it my primary device right away, so I will find out all the good and the bad that there is to find soon enough. Maybe I'll write more during the weekend, but now, on to the unboxing pictures!

(Rest of the unboxing pics on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32856926@N06/sets/72157627056484127/

On 11th of February 2011, Nokia's new CEO Stephen Elop dropped the bombshell that Nokia is switching to Windows Phone 7 as their only smartphone software platform. There are thousands of blog posts already covering this, so I am not going to write at length. I only have one point to make, which is:

 Developers, developers, developers!

No, seriously. While I see the logic behind choosing WP7, and while I lament the minimized role of MeeGo in Nokia's future plans, I think that they missed one very important thing altogether. One they can still fix. I am talking about a migration plan for the current Symbian developers who have been told to use Qt/QML and have been doing so. When Nokia has completed the migration to WP7, the developers who have been writing apps using Qt/QML will have to throw all their code away and start from scratch, at which point many might choose a non-Nokia platform to target next, just as well.  This is because (according to http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/02/12/nokia-new-strategic-direction-what-is-the-future-for-qt) there won't be an officially supported Qt for WP7 port.

And for Nokia WP7 devices, there will be far fewer apps available from day 0 if the Qt apps can't be easily brought over to the new platform, thus hurting WP7 as well as Symbian device sales.

Possible solution? 

Now I am no expert on how the Microsoft .NET CLR exactly works, but with my limited understanding at least, I don't see why a Qt/C++ application couldn't be statically compiled into .NET code just like C# and all those other currently available languages are. A QML app would work with a 10-liner C++ loader that pulls in QtDeclarative to run the QML. So technically the idea of Qt Everywhere is just as sound as anywhere else, also this would bypass the perceived fragmentation problem as the target device wouldn't have to have any Qt stuff pre-installed for the app to work.

This is all I had to say for now. If someone convinces me I got it all wrong, I will update this post accordingly and be glad I was wrong (for once

Update1: Waiting to see what this comment from Elop's MWC 2011 talk will mean in practical terms:  "The question is, what do we introduce into the Symbian environment to ease the transition to Windows Phone. So that's part of the mission that we're taking on now."

Update2: Forum Nokia's Vice President, Purnima Kochikar, clarifies the Feb11 message in this open letter to the developer community: http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/2011/03/25/open-letter-to-developer-community

While I appreciate his way of re-iterating what was said on Feb 11 (some people still didn't get the basic points of that day, such as, no they didn't stop making Symbian devices cold-turkey) and adding some details, I still don't see anything concrete for developers transitioning from Qt/Symbian to WP7. Maybe the answer will be the reverse of what I was thinking at first: Silverlight for Symbian?

I couldn't resist putting Steve Ballmer here, sorry. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

I've been very quiet on the blogging from because since August I have been getting married, quit my job, gone on a honeymoon trip around Australia, and moved to Berlin to work in a new job. Now that yesterday I got my ADSL set up I feel like writing some blog stuff again. I will be putting some MeeGo Conference 2010 / Dublin photos here soon, but first, please go and check out what I wrote about the MeeGo Conference on the Teleca "What Is Your Idea of Tomorrow" blog, parts 1, 2 and 3:

http://whatsyourideaoftomorrow.blogspot.com/2010/11/meego-conference-2010-dublin-part-1-nov.html

http://whatsyourideaoftomorrow.blogspot.com/2010/12/meego-conference-2010-dublin-part-2.html

http://whatsyourideaoftomorrow.blogspot.com/2010/12/meego-conference-2010-dublin-part-3.html

More pictures available now at my flickr account!

I have not written anything new here for almost 4 months. I have been very busy with various things such as getting married, planning a honeymoon trip and lastly, I am going to start a new job in Berlin, Germany in October! This means I won't be able to concentrate on blog writing for at least two more months. Except maybe, given sufficient connectivity, I will be able to post brief greetings from our Australia-Singapore honeymoon trip.

I will arrive back in Finland with my lovely wife on 6th of October and my new job in Germany starts 18th of October, so it's going to be interesting until everything settles down....

The topic of this blog post is a hint towards what company is my new employer

Lastly, I did manage to release a fixed version of Luxus light meter application for the N900. It took a while since my development machine's motherboard and PSU were fried a while ago, and it took some time to get the replacement components - see here: http://maemo.org/packages/view/luxus/

 See you at the Meego Conference in Dublin, November 2010!

..or why/how to install and use CCache 3.0pre0 in Scratchbox

A few days ago, I was building and rebuilding a Debian package in Scratchbox to see if it builds, installs and works properly after my modifications. To make sure it works, I had to do a full dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot rebuild, which of course does a full clean every time. Each rebuild took 10 minutes, and I started wondering how to make it go faster.

Exec summary

Use ccache 3.0 and make sure your regular build does not use compiler options incompatible with ccache! Read on for details. 

A while ago I experimented running various operating systems on the Nokia N900. Now with the availability of N900 hardware emulation in QEMU (see http://wiki.meego.com/ARM/Meego_on_Qemu ) I decided to try this the other way around. The result: Regular N900 Maemo software straight out of the phone boots in QEMU, but no GUI since there is no SGX graphics emulation in the Maemo QEMU yet.

(in soviet Russia, the computer boots YOU)

I attended a presentation given by Bjarne Stroustrup in Otaniemi, Espoo, Finland 18.3.2010. Bjarne was very down to earth and seemed to understand both the needs of the average C++ developer, and to have a very good idea on what is C++'s place in the modern world of programming. I was very inspired by all the new features of the soon-to-be finalized c++0x standard and I'm going to write about my thoughts on some of them soonish, so check back on this article in a few days if interested!

I took some pics of Bjarne, you can see them following the link below:

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/32856926@N06/sets/72157623541450607/

People have asked me to package the Bochs IA-32 PC emulator that I used for running Windows NT 4.0, and today I've done it. It is available from the Fremantle extras-devel repository: http://maemo.org/packages/view/bochs/

I have configured the package in the way that I found works best on the N900 and included a sample config file that works for running NT 4.0, as a starting point for others. Also the version is 2.3.7 and not the latest, since in my experience 2.3.7 was the most stable on the N900 - this might of course change or have already changed.

A while ago, Qt Software released some helpful software and instructions on how to make real homescreen widgets on the N900 using Qt 4.6. As I had already previously implemented my Luxus light meter widget as a sort-of homescreen widget - as part of an experiment if it's possible to do a Qt app for N900 from scratch in one day and get it published too - I was of course intrigued in finding out how easy it would be to enable it as a full-blown homescreen widget. It turned out to be pretty easy!

From the "just for fun!" department: Full version of Mac OS X 10.3 running on the N900! I believe this makes the N900 the first smartphone EVER to run the full version of Mac OS X (at any speed, slow or otherwise). Youtube video below.

I thought to give it a try if one could make a Maemo 5/N900 app from scratch, and publish it on the Maemo.org extras-devel repository, all in just one day. Well, it was possible! The result is the Luxus 0.1 light meter desktop widget, and you can get it from extras-devel today.

People are asking me just exactly how does one install ScummVM? Well, the answer has changed. With my version, you pretty much had to know some basic Maemo hacking to get it installed. However, now as the official version of ScummVM is available from the Maemo Extras-devel repository, all you have to is:

• Enable the extras-devel repository. Short version: Go to applications manager, select software catalogues, add a new entry for extras-devel. More detailed: See for example this web page: http://maemocentral.com/2009/12/29/how-to-enable-extras-extras-testing-extras-devel-repositories-on-the-n900-with-one-click/  
• Install scummvm from Application Manager: Select Download, then Games, then scroll until you see ScummVM. Click, follow instructions, and that should do it! 

It was only a matter of time, after I got the Bochs PC emulator working on N900, I just had to try how slow Windows NT 4.0 would be inside it I'll post further details of how exactly I did it later, but for now, here it is:

• Yes, the memory on the device is partitioned so that you have around 1.5GB or so for applications, and the rest for data (images, videos, music, maps, software you use with DOSBox, etc.)
• To install Dosbox you have to add one or all of the extras repositories in your device App manager: extras, extras-devel, extras-testing. More instructions about that are available at: https://wiki.maemo.org/Extras
  

I did some tweaking and uploaded a faster Windows 3.11 running on N900-video to Youtube. The most important changes were setting frameskip=6 in dosbox preferences and installing of S3 video drivers in Windows, which had a huge difference in speed. I would have liked to test how well it would have worked with a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard, but I still don't have any to try it with.

For laughs, I just had to try running Windows 3.11 using Dosbox on the N900.. worked ok except for the mouse cursor, which was simply all over the place, so I used X11VNC for controlling the mouse remotely..

Just a quick note, i have released ScummVM 1.0.0-rc1-fremantle3 containing the following enhancements:

• full-screen mode can be entered and left with ctrl-f.
  
• Global menu can be entered with ctrl-s
• SCI games have been enabled. A brief test with Larry 6 and Quest for Glory 2 seemed promising!

 Download it here: http://www.tuug.fi/~toni/blogitems/packages/scummvm_1.0.0~rc1-fremantle3_armel.deb

Screenshot with Quest for Glory 2:

Things TODO left:

• Come up with new keypresses for the essential features like saving and loading game
• Upload the binary package to maemo.org Downloads and fremantle repositories
  
• Submit things to the mainstream project in case I actually do any production-quality code changes, instead of random hacking around (though I'm not hiding anything, all my stuff is available upon request if someone really wants.)
• Try to get the screen centered (already happens in fullscreen)
  
• Display the mouse cursor (actually already seems to happen in AGI games like Larry 1)

I have posted my Maemo Summit 2009 photos on flickr. If someone remembers I'm that guy with the weird old-fashioned film camera.. (click picture to open set.)

Also on my personal homepage if you don't like flickr: http://www.delphine.org/~toni/photo//maemosummit2009/

I have made an initial unofficial build of ScummVM for the N900. It seems to work OK.

It requires some additional packages, all of which are available in the extras, extras-devel or extras-testing repositories, such as: libsdl, libmad, libvorbisidec, libflac, libasound. 

All I really did was:

• Apply the supplied patch for the N810 (Maemo 4) devices and added the -lX11 flag to linking, since otherwise it could not find the symbol XStoreName which comes from libX11.
• Add RX-51 (=N900) into the list of keyboard-equipped Maemo devices in the part where it figures whether or not it's running on a keyboard-equipped device or not
• Fix the window focus - due to a Fremantle SDL bug (https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5153) you couldn't use the keyboard at all since all keypresses went to wherever you launched Scummvm from (homescreen -> calls up the Contacts page, xterm -> keypresses appear on command line) otherwise.

I would like to stress out that this is completely based on the previous Maemo porting work and all I did was the abovementioned things on top of that.

• Figure out which parts of the Maemo 4 patch are still a) necessary b) working anymore. At least the part that adds the application into the launch menu is still working. The part about bypassing GCC 3.x bugs may not be.
• Come up with new keypresses for the essential features like saving and loading games
  
• change the default directory to /home/user/MyDocs (or something) when adding new games
• Upload the binary package to maemo.org Downloads and fremantle repositories
  
• Submit things to the mainstream project in case I actually do any production-quality code changes, instead of random hacking around (though I'm not hiding anything, all my stuff is available upon request if someone really wants.)
• Try to get the screen centered
• Display the mouse cursor (actually already seems to happen in AGI games like Larry 1)
• Enable fullscreen mode with some key combo

Things I don't think I'll be able to solve:

• Music playback is sometimes choppy
• The file selector dialog is not very usable on a touchscreen device

Screenshots and video!

Youtube video:

Screenshots on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/32856926@N06/sets/72157622620009580/

Oh and btw, first post on my all-new personal blog! Forgive me the boring default look and feel as I continue to tune it to my tastes..