OK Nokia, just take all my money.

NOTE: I probably shouldn't even be posting this. As I say later all images/specs of the N9 online are the result of unconfirmed rumors that are pretty widely contested for technical and logical reasons.



The current phone I would like to swaddle and carry around like a baby is the Nokia N9 (picture from SlashGear).

Nothing has been officially confirmed by Nokia yet. We're not even sure the device pictured above is what the phone will look like (there are some pictures online of a black phone claiming to be the N9). EDIT: It sounds like the phone will be available in silver and black (the keyboard will be black on both versions).

Rumored specs: (found here, originally obtained here I think)

FM transmitter (YES! The one on my N900 has come in handy far more than I ever expected)
8 or 12 MP camera, depending on where you hear it
720P video recording
HD out via HDMI
Qualcomm processor - (Doubtful, pretty sure Nokia has said they were going to use OMAP 3 processors)
64GB internal storage, expandable via a MicroSD slot
720p Super AMOLED screen. It won't have one of these. Seriously, it won't. Probably a 800x480 screen, possibly just AMOLED (not Super).

Finally, and most importantly, the N9 will have a anodized aluminum finish! YES! Ever since my Tapwave Zodiac, which never got a scratch, never, I've been so hopelessly in love with anodized aluminum finishes. Of course, I do also have a thing for soft-touch plastic...

The release date could be as early as December but will probably be Q1 2011.

Of course, the phone have MeeGo running on it. I haven't made up my mind on MeeGo yet. MeeGo Netbook seems like something I would be willing to put on my T91MT if and when I get some confirmation it works well. I haven't seen enough of MeeGo Handset to make a good judgment on it, but to be honest I haven't really been impressed with what I've seen so far. Also, Maemo 5 is THE BEST mobile OS I have ever used.

I mean, come on. They've been working on Maemo for years, making it better and better. It's finally amazing (to be fair it the N800's Maemo 4 is still light years ahead of anything Microsoft has done, and I still prefer it to the iPhone OS), so they release it on one device, don't properly support it (Ovi Suite anyone?), and scrap it in favor of a brand new OS. MeeGo is coming along nicely, and far more quickly than I had any reason to expect, but it's still a bit of a slap in the face.

I actually stopped in the middle of writing this post to check out MeeGo Handset videos on youtube, and it does in fact seem to have a lot of Maemo 5 qualities. In some places if almost feels like Maemo 5 with a different skin though that's obviously not the case. I just hope that a lot of the things I like in Maemo 5, such as the closing of pop-up menus by touching in the out-of-focus area "behind" the pop-up, make their way to MeeGo as well. Looks like the task switcher, one of my favorite Maemo 5 features, will remain intact, with a few more options.

Also on the Maemo/MeeGo note, the Maemo community is bad-assed and super-awesome. They also seem to love the platform and devices they're developing for. All that considered, I'm sure that if MeeGo's user interface is worse than Maemo 5, and Nokia doesn't work out some sort of a port, then the community definitely will. Because as I've already said, they're awesome.

Okay, okay, okay, this post sat in my browser over night, I did a little more research, and it looks like MeeGo is being built with the expectation that phone manufacturers would like to implement their own UI, and in fact it sounds like Nokia will be putting the UI Maemo 5 has on top of MeeGo. This is what it sounds like to me, and I really hope it's so.

So, all that conjecture and rumor considered, it seems ridiculous that the N9 would have a Qualcomm processor or a 720p screen, as some are claiming, which is fine by me. The one spec I really care about is the FM transmitter. If the N9 doesn't ship with one I might not buy it just out of spite and switch to an Android phone. Everything else looks good. The phone's style is a little hard to place--is it retro? Is it faux-futuristic? It's like something you would see in a sci-fi movie, but probably a rather good one, or at least one with a good design team.

Please Nokia, please make some sort of official announcement regarding this phone. Release the specs. Let me know if I need to start saving money for it. Oh hell, I'm saving up for one anyway.

Till then,

David

Random Personal Updates

Hey everyone! I'm working on some blog posts at the moment, but thought now would be a good time to throw out some random personal updates.

I removed Ubuntu from my laptop and replaced it with OpenSuse. I like it. The package manager takes some getting used to, but it's going well. My main reason for leaving Ubuntu is the snail-like pace at which Ubuntu updates their repositories. In fact, Ubuntu usually only updates software in their repositories every six months, when they release official updates to their distro. In the open source world six months is a long time, and way too long to go without bug fixes. There are ways around it, like finding pre-compiled packages, building packages for yourself, and using independent repositories but I wanted to test out some other distros anyways.

A lot of could-be-good games are set to come out next year. Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2 (still haven't played the first), Dark Void, Just Cause 2, I know I'm forgetting some but rest assured, 2010 should be a good year for games. I can hardly wait. Of course, I still have yet to play Arkham Asylum, Dead Space, Modern Warfare 2, Assassin's Creed 2, and a handful of 2009's other great games. I like having all these presumably great games just waiting for me to play them.

Speaking of gaming, I started watching G4's X-Play last week. I've watched 'Attack of the Show' regularly for close to a year now (since I've had G4) and I don't know why I haven't watched X-Play. Truth is, after Attack of the Show is over, my DVR usually shows the beginning of X-Play after it. My interest is piqued, and then the show is cut off. My interest in games comes and goes--and I don't mind waiting out most games until there's a large price drop (I'm just now playing Mass Effect 1), but we seem to be entering into a golden age of gaming. I mean, superhero games are actually getting fun, who could have predicted that? That said, I enjoy X-Play, especially Adam Sessler's insight (I held off on buying a PS3 because Sessler said at E3 he suspected a price drop was on it's way, though Sony wasn't talking. A few months later, the PS3 dropped to $300). Also, there's a lot of games out there I didn't even know existed, which X-Play has educated me on.

Well, there you have it, a short, scatter-brained post.

You're welcome,

David

Just finished switching outliners...

So I'm switching outliners, from the more recent and regularly updated The Guide to the ancient yet still very functional KeyNote.

What is an outliner? Look at a file browser, like Windows Explorer. The left pane usually shows a tree view, where each folder can be expanded or minimized to show or hide all the subdirectories it contains. The right pane shows all the files in the directory selected in the tree view. An outliner uses this interface design with a text editor. In the left pane, instead of folders, traditionally has nodes. Each node has it's own body of text that shows up in the right pane when selected. Click here for a picture of "The Guide" that might help you understand it better. The nodes are hierarchical, you have parent and child nodes, and they can be maximized and minimized just like folders in a file browser.

It might help to think of the left pane as collapsible a 'Table of Contents', and the right pane is the actual text the table points to. Outliners are very important, I think, because they're so adaptable. You can use them for addresses, recipes, brainstorming, note-taking, shopping and to do lists, anything really. Outliners are built to organize a lot of information and that makes them very useful.

The Guide is the first Outliner I've ever used, and I've since tried many more while searching for a cross-platform replacement. The Guide is the best out of all I've tried (only free and open source, I didn't try any commercial ones). The only reason I'm switching programs is because I needed an outliner that would work in Windows and Linux. KeyNote is Windows only, as is The Guide, but The Guide doesn't work under Wine (Windows environment for Linux) and KeyNote does.

KeyNote is very similar to The Guide, in fact I think The Guide is loosely based on it. The transition won't be hard, but the copying sure was. I just finished manually copying each node of my main file from The Guide to KeyNote. Probably 300 nodes. It wasn't fun.

I'm doing a lot more graphic design and video work lately, and Inkscape and The Gimp seem to run faster on Linux. Not to mention Blender loves crashing when I try to use sound in the sequencer on Windows 7. So I'm using Linux for this work, and my outline has all my notes for it, so my outliner should run in Linux.

Oddly enough, I only have 3 windows-only apps I regularly use: Exact Audio Copy (doesn't work in Wine), KeyNote, and a post-it notes app. I switch back and forth from Windows to Linux so much that it's something I pay attention to when looking for new programs. In Linux I tend to use abcde for ripping. I just started using this notes app and the concept has proven invaluable so I suppose I'll have to start looking for a cross-platform alternative for that, too.

Other cross-platform outliners I looked at: JreePad--couldn't get it to run on one Windows 7 PC, although it would run on another. KeepNote would be my next choice after KeyNote, if it didn't hang every now and then, and...well, it's just not what I'm used to. If you could hide the trash can, that would reduce a lot of the clutter and I think I'd like it a lot more. Both decent programs though and I'll keep an eye on them in the future.

But the cream of the crop really is The Guide. If you run Windows only, you should check it out.

David

PS I was about to pass out sleeping while writing this, apologies for any and all spelling, grammar, and logistical errors.