Maemo 5

The UI in Maemo 5 has changed with respect to its predecessors. It provides four fully customizable (add/remove widgets, move widgets around, change the background, shortcut to applications/contacts) "Home" screens, called Panorama Desktop. Switching from one desktop to the others is done by sliding one's finger horizontally on the background. The dashboard is accessed via the upper left icon and shows all the running applications, in a manner similar to the Exposé feature in Apple's MacOS X operating system.

From the dashboard, running applications can be brought back to fullscreen by tapping the preview window or applications can be closed by tapping an X-symbol located in the top right corner of the preview window, similar to the concept of closing applications in the Windows operating system series. The application launcher, where all the installed applications can be launched, can be accessed as well from the dashboard by tapping the same area again in the upper left corner of the screen which invokes the dashboard. If no task or application is running in the background, tapping the top left icon skips the dashboard and directly displays the application launcher.

Maemo provides the Mozilla-based MicroB web-browser with complete Adobe Flash support, which can operate over a wireless connection. It supports an 800x480 display resolution, so some web pages can be viewed without horizontal scrolling. It can automatically connect to known wireless networks and download RSS feeds and email and disconnect automatically without user intervention.

Software is all installed or uninstalled using the Application manager. Users can subscribe to different software repositories which can then be used to automatically keep software up to date. The Application manager also provides an overview of everything currently installed on the system. Data can be synchronized with a PC via a USB connection, and the users files can be accessed using the standard Removable Storage Device protocol.

About Maemo OS

Maemo is a software platform developed by Nokia for smartphones and Internet Tablets. It is based on the Debian Linux distribution.
The platform comprises the Maemo operating system and the Maemo SDK.

Maemo is mostly based on open source code, and has been developed by Maemo Devices within Nokia in collaboration with many open source projects such as the Linux kernel, Debian, and GNOME. Maemo is based on Debian GNU/Linux and draws much of its GUI, frameworks, and libraries from the GNOME project. It uses the Matchbox window manager, and the GTK-based Hildon as its GUI and application framework.

The UI in Maemo 4 is similar to many handheld interfaces, and features a "Home" screen, which acts as a central point from which all applications and settings are accessed. The Home Screen is divided into areas for launching applications, a menu bar, and a large customisable area that can display information such as an RSS reader, Internet radio player, and Google search box.

The Maemo 5 UI is slightly different: The menu bar and info area are consolidated to the top of the display, and the four desktops can be customized with shortcuts and widgets.

At the Mobile World Congress in February 2010, it was announced that the Maemo project would be merging with Moblin to create the MeeGo mobile software platform.

Nokia Phone as a Scanner

I apologise to old camera-phone hands who've been down this road before - this will seem a bit obvious, but, for the newcomers around here and to anyone who might not have thought this laterally before, consider that your auto-focus camera in your Symbian smartphone is good enough to replace a Scanner for occasional use.

I discovered this when my old Canon desktop scanner fell into disuse because it plugged in using the PC parallel port and I simply ran out of computers which had one of these. I'm not a big scanner user and didn't miss it much - and, being just an average home, we don't have our own photocopier. Then one day my wife popped into my office with two A4 classroom worksheets: "Can you scan these in, please, and print off a dozen copies?"

Tempting though it was to scarper off to the local library and pay the £2 or so needed for the copying, it suddenly occurred to me that, with a 3 megapixel camera in my Nokia N93, surely that was good enough to produce a good-enough representation of anything put before it? After all, I could focus exactly, even add in some fill-in LED flash if needed. It was time to experiment.

And, you know what? The end result of my improvised workflow was quite good enough for the classroom worksheets, as I'll show below with another example. Most importantly, for a geek like me, it meant yet another use for my smartphone, one more example of convergence that's useful in the real world. Bah, who needs a scanner or photocopier now?

Obviously, there are large numbers of office situations where you do in fact need dedicated bits of kit, but for occasional home use I've now managed without a scanner for almost four years, simply using whichever phone I happened to be using.

Here's what I do, should you also not have thought of this and want to try your hand at using your phone-scanner.

1. You'll need a phone with an auto-focus camera. So anything of the order of the Nokia N93, N95, N82, E90, E71, N85, 5800, Samsung INNOV8, etc. (from just the S60 range), or the Sony Ericsson P1i or P990i (from the old UIQ range). Think of 3 megapixels as a bare minimum here, you'll need this much resolution if you want to scan in text accurately enough to read back later.

To show that all this is possible using the aforementioned minimum, I'm using the small-apertured 3 megapixel, auto-focus camera on the Nokia 5800 for the example. If this phone can work as a scanner then it'll be a piece of cake with most of the rest of the list mentioned above.

2. Find a nice, light window ledge (but not in direct sunlight) - you want even, bright, white lighting. Don't assume that indoor lights will do, however bright they seem to the naked eye - the human eye is incredibly good at adapting and fooling your brain. Place your document/page flat and then position the phone to fit the page within the frame, as shown here.


Focus and take the shot, as usual, while trying desperately not to shake the camera as you squeeze the shutter. If the light levels are high enough then you won't have a problem here.

3. Connect up your phone to your desktop (PC or Mac) and transfer the photo using whichever multimedia/image transfer system you prefer. OK, you've now 'scanned' your page, but the JPG file needs a little work on it before you're done. (Again, please remember that this is something of a beginner's tutorial, I'm not trying to patronise those who know all this already!)

You'll need a basic photo manipulation application, I use an old cover-disk version of Paintshop Pro on the PC and the freeware SeaShore on the Mac. If you can't find anything, you can always use Adobe's online app instead for free.

4. Open up the JPG file in your chosen photo app:


Not bad, a well-focussed, reasonably well lit 3 megapixel photo, if I do say so myself. Here's a cropped part of it, to show the sort of level of detail captured by a 3mp phone camera:


5. Again, pretty good, and certainly good enough for casual scanning/photocopying.

6. For printing out again, assuming that's what you need here, i.e. using the phone-desktop-printer combination as a photocopier, it's usually a good idea to perform a few basic operations on the JPG file. The exact details will vary, depending on your chosen software, but for this sort of use, I typically:

* Crop the edges to within the paper boundaries
* Bring the brightness up a bit and the contrast up a lot
* (if needed) Convert to greyscale or even, as here, to black and white (2 colours) or similar

Here's the sort of thing I end up with:


Again, all this is with the rather average camera (by Nseries standards) on the Nokia 5800 - you'll get much better quality still using the likes of the N95 or N82.

It's also worth thinking even more laterally about your phone as a document capture device. In a meeting and can't be bothered to write down everything someone's just scribbled all over a whiteboard? Just stand up and photograph the board and transcribe/refer to it later. At a restaurant and sent off to enquire about the specials of the day? No point in trying to remember them all or write them all down, just photograph the blackboard and read off at your leisure from Gallery later. And so on.

Mobile Phone Gaming Is Big Business At The Moment And Is Set To Get Even Bigger

Dr. Mark Ollila: Connecting People Through Mobile Gaming

A recent Screen Digest report has estimated that the mobile gaming market will be worth $4 billion by 2012, all this with only 5% of consumers having played games on their handsets.

In recent months, we’ve seen different companies enter into the mobile phone games industry with their new offerings. This is a strong indication that the untapped potential of the industry is vast and an opportunity to get more people playing games on phones.

Big publishers like EA are showing they’re serious about making games for mobile alongside their console and PC activities and giving a strong indication that the mobile games industry is worth taking notice of.

If the appeal of mobile gaming is so great that the global gaming giants are playing ball, Nokia and the other players out there must be doing something right.

Communities Create Their Own Content

As we’ve seen with the huge success of several MMOs on PC, the ability to interact with the people you’re playing against really intensifies the enjoyment of playing games. Cross platform titles like Reset Generation allow players to play from their N-Gage enabled device or from a Web widget, against each other. We have also made available the assets of Reset Generation to the community, so that they can create their own games, experiences or mash-ups with one another.

With players in over 130 countries connected by N-Gage, the coming together of communities has never been easier and this has allowed the sharing of ideas, content and experiences.

So, for me, this poses a really interesting question: “Will the next big innovations in mobile gaming come from the developers, or from the players themselves?” It is, after all, the players who are trying to get the most from the games and want to find new ways of making their experiences more personal. Developers can do this to a certain degree but in the end, with user generated content (UGC), it is the players who can decide what they want from a game.

Our research at Nokia has shown us that players want games where they can play, share content and experiences with their friends, not to be stuck in a one dimensional game that offers little or no interaction with other players. We are exploring this significantly through our upcoming title Yamake, where the focus of the title is making your own games and sharing them. The explosion of content, that is driven by the players themselves, is mindblowing. The future is going to be very interesting!

Entertainment and New Technologies

The traditional notion that mobile games are just time fillers is now being challenged as we introduce titles that explore new directions.

With the current mobile device hardware, phones are more powerful than ever before. The processing power of a Nokia N96 makes it able to handle graphics that are ground breaking and gameplay that is the best of its kind. This means that mobile games can offer imaginative new ways of playing with fun and lively story lines which can appeal to all players. We are seeing new forms of gameplay methods being introduced to provide different ways of challenging players but improving the experience. Cell Weaver is one that has been used in Star Wars. You fight against opponents by using different key combinations – if you’re an avid texter, you’ll be great!

New technologies in mobile devices are giving players the chance to play games anytime, anywhere. This means playing games on the move and developers creating games that are specifically made for mobile. This provides, for example, the opportunity to come up with intuitive ways for players to receive and send information in-game. The only limitation to what can be achieved in mobile gaming is now the imaginations of the developers. Technology has finally caught up with ideas and game conceptualization.

Something else we are seeing is that there are more and more sensors now being built into mobile phones. Accelerometers for example are becoming an increasingly common feature of games, and we’ve seen with applications on other devices that they can generate a new scope for different movements and interaction. The potential to now include a phone’s camera also means that augmented reality games can begin to break into the mainstream and offer a completely fresh approach to gaming and, along with location based titles, could create an entirely new gaming genre. At the same time, games have the potential to link across different services such as music and maps, and bring a compelling experience which is personal in nature and to the context (where and what) of the user.

Finally with the N-Gage SDK, we’re making the creation of great gameplay easy to achieve. Our stringent testing and quality control of N-Gage titles means that all games must be of the highest quality, something that’s always been essential for us at Nokia. We believe it’s also important to encourage developers to think innovatively. Since February we’ve been running the Mobile Games Innovation Challenge (www.gamingchallenge.org) where we had over 140 entries from developers across the world. This is a wonderful opportunity for upcoming developers to show the industry what they can do and for existing developers to push the boundaries of what they’ve achieved before and come up with something truly inspiring. The three winners have been selected by an independent jury and the winners will be presented at the Nokia Game Summit in Rome later this month.

A Bright Future

With new developments and innovations coming from the developers. mobile manufacturers and now the players too, we now have a strong and solid platform to build on moving forwards. To truly be top of the pile each new game must really strive to be more entertaining than the last.

Having the backing of the big game publishers and great developers really underlines the high regard in which mobile gaming is held and their input is vital.

With recent Juniper research revealing that in North America alone, the mobile gaming industry is set to grow by 275% by 2012, it’s now up to us as an industry to stand up, take notice, build on our past performance and evolve.

At Nokia we’ve had some exciting times already but it’s the future challenges that we are really looking forward to.

Officesuite Now Available For S60 5th Edition Phones

The First And Only Officesuite
Available For S60 5th Edition Phone Models

OfficeSuiteMobile Systems, the leading mobile productivity and reference solutions developer, today announced the availability of version 5.00 of the MobiSystems OfficeSuite for the S60 5th Edition platform. The S60 5th Edition has the most advanced set of features that enable new experiences for consumers that want to fully embrace the use of smartphone products.

"We, at Mobile Systems, have always strived to improve our customers’ experience with our products. That is why we have worked hard to release the FIRST office solution on the S60 5th Edition market.

This new release is a direct response to requests we've received from current and prospective customers."' - said Nikolay Kussovski, Mobile Systems CTO.

"We offer the highest level of commitment, backed by world class customer support, to assist Mobile Systenms in delivering this cutting edge solution"

The software offers a wide-range of powerful features, which include True Type fonts and Unicode support and superior document support capabilities to preserve file formatting and maintain data integrity. The OfficeSuite supports password protected files, charting, pictures, spell checking for word processing files and includes an integrated file explorer that let's you browse to your files on your device or memory card.

OfficeSuiteMobiSystems OfficeSuite is a complete mobile office solution, allowing you to create, view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files away from your office.

The new version 5 of the MobiSystems OfficeSuite has been especially enhanced with Microsoft ® Office 2007 file support. You can enjoy all of the great features of MobiSystems OfficeSuite 4 + the ability to open new Microsoft ® Office 2007 DOCX and XLSX files on your S60 5th Edition phone.

The program utilizes the most commonly used desktop document formats and allows you to easily acquire your sensitive documents on your handset.

With the advanced editing features you can modify documents on the fly and save them in their original format, just ready to be used back on your desktop PC.

The Word Editor of MobiSystems OfficeSuite

A powerful tool for creating professional documents, reports, and brochures. You can easily create everything from business letters to complete books with professional layouts, and email them from your phone.

Features & Benefits:

* Opening and viewing native DOCX files
* Editing of Microsoft native DOC files and the commonly used RTF and TXT formats
* True Type fonts and Unicode support
* Advanced spelling capabilities in 6 languages - English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Dutch- word auto-complete and underlining of misspelled words
* Advanced document formatting with embedded tables, images and hyperlinks
* Custom zoom to get best visualization of your documents
* Full preservation of the original document formatting
* Supports password protected Word files

The Excel Manager in MobiSystems OfficeSuite

This application allows you to work with native Microsoft Excel XLS and XML files or the commonly used CSV format right on your mobile phone. A feature-packed spreadsheet manager with which you can calculate, analyze, and visually communicate your data quickly, easily and on the go.

Features & Benefits:

* Opening and viewing native XLSX files
* "Easy sum function" availble in SpreadSheets
* Editing of Excel XLS and XML files, and CSV files
* Save in the original Excel XLS and XML and CSV file format with 100% preservation of the of the document formatting
* Support of True Type fonts and ability to work with multiple fonts, font colors and font styles
* Over 100 common and scientific functions to make your calculations easy and accurate
* Custom zoom for best document visualization
* Charts
* Support of password protected Excel files
* Undo and redo
* Hiding and freezing of columns and rows

PowerPoint® Presentations in MobiSystems OfficeSuite

Slides provides all the resources you need to deliver high-impact presentations from your mobile handset.

Features & Benefits:

* Support of PPT and PPS PowerPoint® native files
* Several different view modes - slide view, slide show and notes
* True Type fonts and Unicode supported
* Landscape and portrait view modes
* Fullscreen mode
* Embedded images and charts

Pricing & Availability

OfficeSuite version 5 for S60 5th Edition can be downloaded and purchased directly from Mobile Systems home website as well as many retail and online stores including Handango.com, Nokia Software Market, SmartSam.de, Mobihand.com and the network of Mobile Systems resellers worldwide.