Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

So Nokia released a new version of the Internet Table, the N810.

But they made some strange design decisions once again.
- Keyboard must be open to use keypad
- Compared to the N800 they removed a memory slot
- Memory type changed again (RS-MMC -> SD -> mini/microSD)
- And the best of all, API and ABI break *again*
- No protection cover for the screen, like on the 770
- microSB connector, one more bloody cable to carry around and forget

Don't get me wrong, I like it. It looks very nice, much nicer than the toyish N800, but still not as good as the original IT, the 770.

Positive features:
- Slide keyboard
- Integrated GPS
- A bit more Mhz
- 2 Gig of internal flash
- Updated Gtk (even if 2.10 is already old)

The integrated GPS and keyboard should make it a very nice platform for doing OpenStreetMap work.

The next thing is to get Mapper running on Chinook and add some OSM editing features.

Learning maemo/hildon

I started playing with the Nokia 770 development SDK last summer and ported an old gtk+ 1 based game (xhyperoid) to the device. First I had to fix it up to use gtk+ 2 and then hildonize it. Not too bad, the first packages had some silly key assignment bugs, but that is now fixed in the latest version, available on maemo garage.
The original xhyperoid has also sound effect support but it's using old OSS and maemo only supports gstreamer or esound, there is no Alsa or OSS emulation available. Anyway, I'm planning on getting sound support in the next version.

Learning gstreamer

gstreamer is quite nice... after some head scratching I was able to get a audio streamed from my desktop to my 770.

On the desktop:
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="KNULLA.MOD" ! modplug ! audioconvert ! lame ! queue ! tcpserversink host=nokia770

and on the 770:
gst-launch-0.10 tcpclientsrc host=angel.tal.org ! dspmp3sink

Fun stuff! :)

OpenStreetMapping Finland

I got myself a Nokia 770 last summer and been using the most excellent maemo-mapper to navigate around Finland. I'm mostly very happy with it but route planning and place search is something I would really like to have (and for free that is). The biggest problem is that there is no free map data available (for €€€ you can always get the digiroad data but that is not an option).

On my quest to find map data I found out about the OpenStreetMap project. And since couple of months been eagerly adding as much data as I can gather when I drive around. It's not loong ago when Turku was almost empty, but now it's starting to look like a map. I think I'm mostly alone in Turku, but someone is working around Tampere and Helsinki. But we would really need more people involved.
There is still a lot of work to do but