Maemo Devices

Maemo SDK Appliance 0.4 for VMWare was released a few hours ago. This is the quickest way to get started with developing applications for the Maemo platform[Nokia N770/N800/N810 Internet tablets]. It is easy to setup(just boot-up the image in VMWare player] and all the necessary tools (and documentation!) are integrated nicely into a custom environment.

More details about the announcement can be found on Marcelo’s blog.

This release is loaded with a lot of goodies: Maemo 4.0 (Chinook) final and Maemo 3.2 (Bora) with Nokia Binaries Installer, PyMaemo packages, Vala compiler and its Hildon bindings for Chinook, Maemomm libraries, EVAS (Bora and Chinook, but i386 only), qemu-arm-eabi used as default cpu transparency method, Eclipse with ESbox plugin, and Firefox has now a lot of bookmarks for reference material. There are code samples for all the libraries and development packages cited above.

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It’s easy to control the desktop of your computer from a Nokia N800 Internet tablet. If the computer is running a GNU/Linux distribution, you can run a VNC server on that computer and then connect to it from N800 through an application like VNC Viewer. You can do the same if the computer is running either Windows or Mac OS operating system too, but they also support their own native remoting protocols - Windows supports RDP protocol and Mac supports ADP protocol - which are generally, though not in all cases, considered to be better options over VNC.

Here is the summary of what we have to do in order to get VNC working: 1) install a VNC Server on the computer running Windows or GNU/Linux OS; 2) install VNC Viewer application on Nokia N800 Internet tablet; and 3) configure/run VNC Server and VNC Viewer to connect them together. So let’s get started.

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If you are looking for information on how to convert DVD format to AVI(DivX/XviD) format, refer to my earlier posts on video conversion.

The technical specification page of Nokia N800 claims that the device can play a variety of video formats but in real experience it plays only a very limited number of formats. I strongly recommend installing MPlayer on your N770/N800 as it makes it possible to play many popular media formats(e.g. DivX/XviD) which the N800 won’t play in its default state. (Open the file mplayer.install from your N800 to install it.) You still won’t be able to play most of the videos that you have stored on your hard drive (or elsewhere) by directly copying them to N770/N800 - you need to convert them to a proper resolution that N800 supports, and occasionally, take care of the frame rate and data rate too. There are many tools available that can convert a given video to a format than can be played on N700 or N800 and one such easy to use tool is Media Converter(also called Nokia N770 Video Converter) created by Urho Konttori.

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There are different ways in which your computer can be accessed from Nokia N800 tablet such as ssh, VNC, Remote Desktop Protocol(RDP). If you want to access the desktop of your Windows machine(XP or Vista) from N800, the best option would be to use RDP and rDesktop for N800 is an application that lets you do exactly that.

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As the news of the announcement of Nokia’s N810 Internet tablet is spreading like wildfire(search Technorati for example) across the Internet, more and more people seem to get confused as to what exactly is the difference between N800 and N810 devices. There are a few posts talking about the differences but I thought I will summarize them here specifically to help make a buying decision.

I could have made a long table noting the differences between the two devices but I thought it will be more useful if major and minor differences are listed separately. If you are making a decision whether to buy a new Nokia N800 or a Nokia N810(when it is released), I suggest you go through all the differences listed below. But if you already own an N800, then the minor differences can be easily ignored, especially because N800 too can be upgraded to the ITOS2008 version when it is released simultaneously with N810 and then most of the minor differences listed below will cease to exist(e.g. Mozilla browser); jump straight to the last section.

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Media Streamer is a useful little application available for Nokia N800 Internet tablet that automatically searches for the UPnP AV media servers available in the range, connects to them and plays the media made available by them. The default media player that comes pre-installed in Nokia N800 also allows discovery of UPnP devices and playing streamed media but it is slow and isn’t great looking, where as Media Streamer looks slick and beautiful and the user interface is amazingly responsive (and intuitive) for a media player. It has the best UI of all media players I have used on Nokia N800 so far(Canola, Kagu, UKMP, Kalikili). Perhaps its limited feature set gives its interface an edge over the others’ but I anyway like applications that do one thing and do it well.

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There is no arguing that as soon as you replace the headphones that come with Nokia N800 Internet Tablet with any other decent quality headphones, you have got yourself an excellent music player. The playback quality is good and the user interface of the default media player is far better than that of a typical MP3 player(large size, touch screen etc.). The only downside is that the N800 comes with a meagre storage memory of 256MB! OK, you can stop laughing now, it does come with two memory slots enabling you to expand the storage capacity to 8/16 GB. 2GB SD cards especially are very cheap on Amazon or eBay.

Not interested in spending more money? You have a way out: Nokia N800 is a UPnP AV device which means that all you need to stream your entire music collection from a computer to N800 tablet is a UPnP AV MediaServer which you can install on your PC or a laptop.

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1. MH Shot Tool
MH Shot tool is an easy to use screen capturing tool that does one job very well: when run, it captures the N800 screen in its current state and provides an option to upload it directly to a Flickr account. I find it to be the fastest way of transferring a picture of my N800 screen to my blog. [...]

2. Maemo Screengrabber
3. osso-screenshot-tool

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I. Setting Up Nokia N800 for VNC Access Using `x11vnc`

1. Install x11vnc application on the Nokia N800. Either download the x11vnc deb package on the PC, transfer it to N800 and install it; or download and install it directly from N800.
2. You need to run x11vnc server in your Nokia N800 now. From the applications menu, go to Extras and select the x11vnc application. You can also run it from the terminal if you want to see its output messages.

II. Accessing Nokia N800’s screen from Windows
III. Accessing Nokia N800’s screen from GNU/Linux

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Though N800 is an Internet Tablet, it can serve as a very good ebook reader too, for those casual/semi-serious readers who don’t want to invest in a stand-alone ebook reader. At its screen size and resolution, reading ebooks is extremely pleasing on the eye. It supports HTML, PDF, etc formats out of the box; but what truly makes it such a good candidate to be used as an ebook reader is the excellent(read Free) ebook reader software available for it called FBReader.

Install FBReader for N800 with a few simple clicks and you are ready to read ebooks in the following formats in N800: TXT, RTF, CHM, fb 2.1, palmdoc, zTxt, OEB, OpenReader, mobipocket(non-encrypted), etc.

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