Alphatek – Steven's Tech Blog

Until recently, I couldn’t care less about shiny new mobile phones. When mine broke or it was time to change to a new one due to my mobile operator contract ending, I simply went for the “free” phones that were somewhat compatible with Linux. My current phone, a Nokia 5310, can for example serve as a modem in Fedora vie USB connection or Bluetooth thanks to NetworkManager and it perfectly synchronizes with Banshee for my music and podcasts.  It’s just slow as hell, but that’s another story.

As I recently moved to another city and switched work, new requirements started to emerge in my life. These new requirements change my general multimedia usage patterns quite a lot, so I’m thinking of reorganizing my whole media distribution methods at home and at work. This may sound quite vague, but let me explain how this is related to mobile phones…My current “multimedia” needs are:

1. To be able to access the Internet via my mobile phone (work requirement).
2. To have a centralized way of downloading podcasts (personal requirement).
3. To have a centralized point to distribute music to my HiFi system (personal requirement).
4. The system has to be open for tweaking, using open standards (personal/work requirement).
5. The system has to be able to connect to my Fedora box to transfer files (personal requirement).

Now you probably see where I’m going…these tasks can be handled by modern smartphones. Let’s exclude the iPhone as it’s way too proprietary. This leaves me with two main options: a Goolge Android 2 based phone or a Nokia Maemo 5 based phone. Points 1, 2 and 3 are trivial for both phones, they can serve as modems on Fedora, they have applications to manage your music and download podcasts and they can stream music via Bluetooth (A2DP) or FM radio (for the Maemo device).

The Android story – HTC Hero

At work, almost all of my colleagues have HTC Magic or HTC Hero phones running Android 1.6 (soon to be updated to Android 2.0 for free) and they seem to be very happy about them. Another colleague and friend even develops an application for our company on Android and also seems happy about it. I’m pretty sure that in the long run Android will be the dominant OS on mobile phones other than the ones by Apple; let’s just give the Chinese manufacturers time to swarm the market with cheap smartphones.

What I’m concerned about with Android is Goolge, when I read things like this or this (I agree with the 3rd commentary)  it concerns me a little bit; be careful Google, don’t become evil. The “your are not allowed to share your Internet connection” clauses remind me of 1998, when ISPs didn’t like home routers; I pay for a service, let me use it as I want.

Apart from that, an Android 2.0 phone can fulfill all my requirements at a decent price, around 550 CHF (360€) for a HTC Hero. It has a decent marketplace for applications and will surely benefit from the fact that it’s used by multiple phone brands (mass effect).

The Maemo story – Nokia N900

As a Fedora contributor, Maemo touches me more than Android. It’s Nokia’s “new” OS for their high-end mobile devices. By 2012, it should replace Symbian on all their devices in this category.

Unlike Android, Maemo is a “true” Linux distribution as we know it; it’s a Debian-based distribution with Gnome on it and a custom UI. It has apt to handle software updates and installations, supports software repositories, supports GTK and QT, uses Gnome technologies (gstreamer, telepathy…),  PulseAudio, BlueZ a Mozilla browser etc etc…it also has a strong developer community and a planet, like Fedora.

On this device, you have a root access by default and you can find all your usual command-line applications. Their flagship mobile device running Meamo 5 is the new Nokia N900. Oh, and it has a real keyboard too.

The downside of this device is ironically that it’s new. The Nokia application store is not very well populated and the Maemo OS is only used by Nokia. As now, I see it much more like a hacker device than Android and I don’t expect it to have huge market share. An N900 can be bought for around 700 CHF (460€).

Conclusion

You may argue that these smartphones are expensive and I agree, but you rarely buy them without a contract from a mobile operator anyway. In my situation, my company pays for the phone bills so I can also invest some money in hardware now..priorities change.

If you look a the raw technical specifications, the Nokia N900 wins over the HTC Hero, it has more of just everything (Memory, CPU power, I/O capabilities).  Having seen a HTC Hero in action, it doesn’t lack any processing power though, so the real difference between the devices has to be made on the software side. Both devices can serve as modems and download + stream music from a centralized point to all the devices in my apartment.

• Android is solid, stable, has a big and growing marketplace and is supported by many companies. It just lacks that little bit of openness that would make it the perfect OS for my usage.
• Meamo is reported to be stable, very fast, very hackable but it lacks a real marketplace for applications right now. The fact that it’s a “pure” Linux system backed by Nokia, a big Open Source contributor, really appeals to me though.

At the end of the day, I’m probably going to give my preference to the N900, let me a couple of days to think about it and with a little chance, you’ll get a full review in a couple of weeks.

While writing this blog post, it also struck me how important the concept of caring about an operating system on your phone has become during the last years, we can at least thank the iPhone for that. Yes, I feel like a hipster now.

/me looks at the shiny marketing video

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 22nd, 2009 at 1:46 pm and is filed under /dev/null. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.