Nokia 770
26/05/2005 07:54 | Categories: LifeType | 1 Comments
The new Nokia 770 was introduced to the public today. The Nokia 770 is some sort of an "Internet tablet" that allows to browse the web, read emails, etc, from virtually anywhere as long as there is a WiFi connection or a Bluetooth connection to a GPRS phone available.
This wouldn't be news (yet another internet-capable-tablet-pda-gadget) if it wasn't because this one runs Debian Linux, with a GNOME-based environment on top of X11. The environment is called Maemo and the project page is already available, where users and developers will be able to find resources and new software for the platform. The browser that the thing is using is a GTK port of KHTML (yes, it really is KHTML running on GTK!) in the same way that Apple ported KHTML to Cocoa and created WebCore. All the methods from the Qt libraries which are used in KHTML were re-implemented using calls to GTK (Cocoa in OS X) while keeping the same interfaces, providing the "glue" between KHTML and Cocoa or Maemo. If interested in how Apple did it, check out the KWQ library from the WebCore code.
I think that this is a great move for Nokia, despite their schizophrenic behaviour when it comes to patents and OSS (first they lobby for patents in the EU and then they support Linux with patents from their own portfolio), but from a geek point of view, this product has the potential to attract many developers specially if you think that it is very easy to port already existing GNOME applications to run within Maemo (check out the screenshots of a ported version of Gaim)
Now I only need to get my hands on one 
Comments
1 Comments
Are you doing some kind of corporative advertising? Did your company pay you with that? :P