A status report #2

Thank you again for you enthusiastic comments. It is good to see that you care about our products and have strong opinions. Otherwise you would not bother ;-) I read all the comments but I’m not gonna go and answer them all … sorry for that … I simply cannot.

Let me repeat again what we’ll do. It seems some of you have difficulties understanding what I try to say. My fault.

770 support
770 is a fully supported Nokia product. As an example, we released a new official OS2006 version for the Nokia 770 only yesterday. So it is also getting better. Also, a new OS2006 SDK was released yesterday. And as I said in my previous post, we follow the situation as we go on and keep on supporting the product.

A developer version of OS2007 for the Nokia 770
We will not make an official OS2007 version on 770 available. Instead, we are in the process of making a developer version, as promised, based on your feedback. For some of you, it seems to be not enough, though … well, I’m sorry for that. We’ll follow up how that developer version will go, and then decide how to move on. But no plans no make a full commercial OS2007 running on 770.

Future features and improvements -- focus on N800
Thank you for your suggestions on how to improve our products. Some of the suggestions are already being worked on. In this competitive environment of consumer products, working with partners and competitors, we cannot provide a total transparency to what we’ll do. Therefore, I cannot tell you all the details -- before I can.

The N800 will get better, more internet services will be supported, and I feel very excited about the future ahead of us. Competitors are emerging, and more and more people understand and support our original vision . Let’s make internet mobile and put it into our pocket.

When to release – early or late?
As I said in my previous post, expect to see the software on N800 getting better and better. I’ve already seen it in our internal releases. Based on our earlier experiences we decided to release it in CES, get feedback from users, and with the help of communities, improve the software. So we released the product now because N800 is already a very good and usable product, and it is getting better. There are always people who would like to do it the other way – and then others would say “just release and we’ll suggest what to fix and help you”. Once again – you cannot make everybody 100% happy. But that’s life!

A status report

Here is a little status report of what is happening.

N800 software
N800 is getting nice reviews. People seem to like what we’ve done. Of course, there is a lot of room for improvements, but it seems we are on the right tracks. The direction is right – the speed could always be better, eh ;-)

We are currently working on improving the N800 software for the forthcoming new software releases. I believe we can improve performance in many areas. Also, the overall stability and quality is on our agenda, of course. So expect to see N800 getting better and better. I feel kinda bad seeing magazines and bloggers reviewing N800 and complaining about something that is already fixed in our internal sw releases. I hope all reviewers understand that N800 is a device that is going to improve over time – just like the 770 has done!

Some people are also asking about new Flash versions, new browser versions and so forth. These components involve customer and business partnership relations, technical work, and other things that make it impossible to tell exactly what is gonna happen. However, our goal is to make Internet Tablets as interoperable with internet services as possible. This includes services such as Skype and Google talk, support for major internet formats, and a brilliant browser. As I said earlier, the direction is clear and right, and the speed --- well, we run as fast as we can!

maemo.org
Another thing we are working on is the application installer and application catalog at www.maemo.org. You can already see the test version here.

770 support
As agreed, we are working on getting N800 software running on 770 – not a final product image but an engineering release that’ll help developers to bridge the gap between N800 and 770. Carlos posted you an update.

We're getting some feedback .. and we've got a plan now

Thanks

Thank you all for your feedback. Also you, Mr anonymous, who gave so many comments on my previous post.

The Plan

But seriously, this is what is gonna happen:

-We will now investigate what it takes to run N800 software on 770 hardware. We will post the details and ask you to solve problems with us, if possible, as we go on. Expect to hear from us through maemo and other sources. I do not yet exactly how we gonna do this all. I'm at the Heathrow airport waiting form my flight back to Finland, and we have not had a chance to figure this out fully yet. However, the team is already working on this.
-The goal is to provide an engineering release of those parts of the software that can be made to work. I do not believe we will make an official "consumer version" of the software for 770. But having a release working on 770 would allow developers and hackers to continue working on 770 and bridge the gap between 770 and N800.
-Once we've done the release we want to get more feedback from you about where to go from there. Unfortunately I do not have an estimate of when such release would be ready. But we are working on it now.
-Should we find it impossible to have N800 software even partially run on 770, you will see the details of our attempt.

Some of the challenges encountered so far
-WLAN configuration has changed quite a bit.
-DSP (770 is OMAP 1710 and N800 is OMAP 2420) is different. DSP code is developed by various parties and we do not have a full control over it. We need to figure out if we can support DSP (codecs and stuff ...)
-Browser is licensed separately for both platforms and we do not have a cross-platform version. We do not own the browser code.
-We have several commercial components that are licensed for N800 only. Should we make them available for 770, you or Nokia must pay. How do we arrange that is not clear at the moment.
-Some new components require more computing power than 770 offers, and they run slow even on N800. I fear making them work on 770 will be very challenging.

But as I said, let's try now. Thank you for your feedback!

Some reality bits

Somebody commented that it was easy to make a 770 application run on N800. Yes it is and that is very good, isn't it. But making the operating system and drivers and all the low level things running on a different hardware is significantly more complicated. It requires much much more than just recompiling. If that was the only thing needed we would have of course done that ;-)

Also, supporting and commercially launching a new software releases is a big task. If you have never done a product release you wouldn't know. This is why we're thinking about an engineering release that would work, would be supported for developers by developers, but not offered as an official release supported by Nokia's global support organisations etc..

770 didn't go away and is a good product

So we understand you comments. However, please remember that 770 is already an old product. It was announced 1.5 years ago and that is a long time! However, it is a good product and Nokia supports it fully and keeps on selling it, too. It is just that technology keeps on developing and we want to offer better hardware to our customers.

More from Vegas

Our CEO just officially announced the N800. And the Skype, Rhapsody, and other plans we have. For my Nokia team: well done -- good stuff! People are really excited and unlike when launching 770, nobody is asking what the heck are you trying to accomplish! People now understand the strategy with internet tablets and our open source approach.

Then as a response to the comments on my previous post:

People ask about can they run N800 software on 770. The answer is unfortunately no. N800 has a different hardware (Omap 2420) and we just needed to optimize the software for N800. Our true intention is to separate hw and sw so that in the future we would have a better support over the different hardware releases. But this time we simply needed to prioitize our efforts and put all our energy into making the N800 happen on time.

We understand that this is not ideal but it was the best we could do this time.

So as of now
-we keep on selling and supporting 770s
-we expect many Maemo applications to be made available for both products
-hacking and development will be supported on both platforms
-Nokia will not integrate and make OS2007 available for 770

The Nokia N800

I just landed at Las Vegas 30 minutes ago.

It's out now. And this time we did the launch a bit differently -- you can go and buy one immediately; tomorrow at the latest. As you already know ;-)

There will be a lot of material and news available covering N800 -- so I will not repeat that all here. Some personal thoughts, though:

This is a natural next step in the evolution of Internet Tablets. I like the way it looks and feels, and software is improved. It's now more appealing for a larger audience. Some of the new goodies include video calls, enhanced connectivity that always finds an optimal way to get connected, combined media player for video and audio, improved web behaviour with e.g. updated Flash player, and improved general performance.

At the maemo application catalog, some of the old 770 applications will work -- and some of them won't. We'll get you the information at http://www.maemo.org/ .. some issues there still but we'll work them out. For example the new application catalogue is still here: http://test.maemo.org/applications and it is not functional. But soon!

You have all the tools & documents to make your own applications and components N800 compatible .... and yes, we do not like the break either, but it was necessary. The software is still so young and evolving that we needed to make changes that cause developers some extra work. So we try to do our best to help you with:

-launching a new Maemo 3.0 SDK for you and updating the whole maemo.org web site

-providing detailed documentation & tools for you to make you software N800 compaible

-running a developer program: we will sell 500 pieces N800s to key maemo developers at a discounted price of 99€. The most active maemo.org hackers should expect an email very soon!

We are making some progress here!