Maemo 2.x Wishlist

June 5, 2006 on 2:02 pm | In maemo, nokia770 | 10 Comments

I know it is too late for a wishlist, but the 770 really needs the following (IMO):

  1. Lightweight browser – This is supposed to be an internet tablet. The heaviest builtin application is the browser and it is the only one that has given me ‘memory low’ complaints. Oh Mimimo, where art thou?
  2. Better PDF reader – The current one is paged based, and evince supports continuous scrolling (much better-but evince doesn’t handle large files well). Since a significant role the 770 serves for me is ebook reader, and all of my work related content is PDF, this is key.
  3. IM client – But we know that is coming already.
  4. Lightweight IMAP client – becoming less important as web email portals are getting better.
  5. A really performant video player – Take some hints from the guys that did TCPMP. They managed to turn a treo into a video playing device. It is just amazing. The 770 hardware should be capable of so much more.
  6. Better memory management in all applications
  7. Package manager that supports pre / post script execution. Really.

Anyway – Just my rant for the day. Please – no flamewars.
ubergEEk

10 Comments »

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  1. Regarding Minimo, considering that Nokia funded the original development into Minimo on Linux you better carry on waiting (or better yet work on it) if you want it to do the same work in less memory than Opera.

    Comment by Ross — June 5, 2006 #

  2. I think that the best lightweight browser would be a copy of the webcore based browser that Nokia has done for the S60 phones. As for better package manager… that’s happening, as is the improved mail client see Philip’s blog http://pvanhoof.be/blog/index.php for some details of the basis for the new mail client. And yes, bring on a better PDF reader, the current one drives me niuts!

    Comment by Peter — June 5, 2006 #

  3. You got to be kidding me. Minimo requires WAY MORE MEMORY than Opera does! I know, I run both on my PocketPC, and I know that Nokia did their research before commiting to Opera. Minimo 0.15 *is like a snail* on my 624 Mhz PPC and even worse on my 312 Mhz one, while Opera 8.60 flies on both. Minimo requires about 12 MBs of RAM to load on my PPC, and then it requires even more to start rendering complex pages (like cnn.com). Opera starts up at 4 MBs and then requires more for its own rendering of complex pages.

    Besides, there is a possibility that the Nokia S60 KHTML browser might get ported to Maemo. All Nokia needs is a good incentive to do so. I recently got the Nokia E61 and its new browser is flying compared to both the older browser and Opera.

    Comment by Eugenia — June 5, 2006 #

  4. ok. i am corrected. i was hoping that minimo would be more lightweight. Now i have even more reason to be depressed about the opera browser.

    ubergEEk

    Comment by admin — June 5, 2006 #

  5. I totally agree with you. My 770 is an expensive paperweight because the two things I wanted it for – web browsing and PDF reading – are both near useless. Evince would be great if it didn’t die after a few pages, and while I like Opera on most platforms it sucks on the 770. Unless 2.0 improves things radically I’ll be selling my 770 and buying a Hanlin v2 e-book reader once available (and stick to browsing on my smartphone).

    Comment by geek — June 6, 2006 #

  6. 1. I don’t think the browser is that bloated — the problem is the web… If all we wanted was a html+css browser that displayed valid markup correctly, we’d probably have a lean mean browsing machine. Unfortunately the web today requires several different technologies and all kinds of quirk modes for invalid content…

    2, 3 and 5. Agreed.

    4. I would really like a good email program — I think the ability to refer to old emails without connection is a must (an so is writing them off-line without hacks).

    7. That’s coming. The features look pretty good — se for yourself: packaging instructions

    Comment by Jussi Kukkonen — June 6, 2006 #

  7. 5. A really performant video player…

    I agree that it should be better, but looking at the benchmark page, TCPMP/Betaplayer is not far superior to the 770 video player.

    You can checkout the 770 clock frequency (cat /proc/cpuinfo), the LCD resolution (WVGA) and find simlar devices on the benchmark table for your comparison. For example, iBEE-sp402 seems to perform worse than 770.

    Anyway, my comment doesn’t change the fact that the video player should be improved. Thanks.

    Comment by domaemon — June 6, 2006 #

  8. Well my expectations / hopes for the video player are partially based on a potential bit of information on the 770 video controller. It seems that it may the Epson SD13472 (http://www.erd.epson.com/vdc/html/contents/S1D13742.htm)

    and it may possibly allow for setting the full screen mode to 400×240 for video, and double buffering the image. Since any video playback on the 770 is currently much less than 400×240, there is some potential there for significant improvement – IMO

    ubergEEk

    Comment by admin — June 6, 2006 #

  9. The 770′s video player utilizes the onboard dsp quite well, whereas TCPMP (IIRC) uses only the processor since it wants to be platform neutral.

    Comment by gultig — June 7, 2006 #

  10. well, what ever you said about minimo, I had spent some time porting it to maemo and it seems to work greatly ;)

    give it a try

    Comment by tonikitoo — August 25, 2006 #

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