[Gllug] ADVERT Meego gathering in London July 5th

Wed Jul 6 00:20:41 UTC 2011

Having spent a few hours playing with the device, I'm still not 
convinced why anybody might want a tablet - my Google Nexus S phone is a 
bit smaller, much lighter and far more portable; my Acer AOA150 netbook 
is a similar size (but only 1024x600 resolution), has a usable keyboard 
(okay, not everybody wants a keyboard, but I do), and I don't really see 
what I'm supposed to do with a keyboardless screen other than simply 
consume content. I did get the impression that that is what Intel want 
devs to do for them - create content for non-technical users - but for 
me, I'm not sure what to do with it.

The App Store (www.appup.com) seems to be broken at the moment (404 
error!) but when I was looking earlier, it only had Windows apps - no 
Meego apps at all. The figures they gave were 1.1m users, 58k 
developers, 4k apps. As far as I can see, there are no apps for Meego. 
Search for "meego" and you get TweeMe, Facebook and UniversalSync. All 
three say that they only support Windows.

 From tonight's talk, that seems to be the background of this appup 
store - Windows, x86, and niche devices. To me, that's not an 
interesting platform. Linux on mobile devices is a fascinating thing for 
me - I wanted to buy a Nokia N900 but my in-store salesperson told me 
that the software was "crap", so they didn't sell it any more.

It seems that natively this device can only process Ogg video; I used 
ffmpeg to convert "Pirates of Silicon Valley" to ogg and it played back 
fine. Maybe that's another part of the strategy - get WinAmp, etc, to 
write apps for the "missing bits"? Or maybe it's just that it's still 
work in progress. It plays MP3 and M4A.

Oh, and it overheats when recharging, but part of the docs do say that 
temperature testing is not valid for this device. As far as I can tell, 
(and I am using my landlady's figure-8 power lead to drive it, since it 
came with a US power cable), it can't recharge to full battery life 
without the charger becoming dangerously hot.

So - it's cool to have a device which some people would pay hundreds of 
pounds for. Still, I fail to see what the market is. It's a massive 
thing to carry around, needs extra protective devices to stop it from 
being damaged, and because it's so expensive, you are inclined to 
protect it. But (and this is a big thing) it is "proper" Linux, unlike 
my Android phone. It's a (potentially) massive consumer device running 
"proper" Linux, glibc, GNU, etc. If that takes off, we've got a serious 
FLOSS platform in the mass market. Development for Android (say) is 
pretty easy; if the Meego platform (or at least apps for it) can be 
"proper" Free Software (as per the FSF definition) then there is hope 
for the future of humanity

Steve

On 05/07/11 22:40, Steve Parker wrote:
> Many thanks for the info, it was an interesting evening and at the end 
> they were handing out (well, loaning for 3 years...) tablets. The spec 
> is apparently: Atom N450 1.66GHz, 512Kb L2, single core, 2Gb DDR2 
> 667MHz RAM, 11.6" LED-backlit capacitive touch screen at 1366x768 
> (that's as good as my 17" laptop!), Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 
> 3150, 64Gb SATA SDD, Atheros Wifi. The docs suggest there's a 
> microphone and webcam too, but the battery life was about 5 minutes 
> and it comes with a US power adapter, which I don't have in my rented 
> flat, so more than that I cannot say.
>
> Having written one small Android app, I'm not terribly qualified to 
> talk about the SDK etc, but the whole setup does seem a lot less 
> polished than the Android stuff that Google have done. But I've only 
> got my experience with Android and tonight's talk to base that on, so 
> that opinion bears little weight.
>
> The market for these devices is obviously getting a lot of attention 
> at the moment, and for a hardware vendor like Intel it's important to 
> build up a good software infrastructure around it to sell lots of Atom 
> chips. They won't care who makes the machines, or who writes the 
> software, so long as they've got Atom CPUs, so it seems to put them in 
> a bit of a strange place; they've go t little/no control over Meego, 
> QT, etc, and are unlikely to get into building tablets (I guess), but 
> they do have a vested interest in the overall platform being a success.
>
> We live in Interesting Times...
>
> Steve
>
> On 24/06/11 13:22, Thibaut Rouffineau wrote:
>>  Hi
>>
>> More of a social note, we are putting together a Meego meetup on the 
>> 5th of July at Skills Matter offices in Clerkenwell in the evening.
>>
>> A few presentations from Intel who are generously sponsoring the 
>> event but mainly a big community gathering with a lot of Meego hardware.
>>
>> Registration is here: http://ce1.com/intel/2011/londonappuplab/
>>
>> Hope this is useful!
>>
>> T
>> -- 
>> Gllug mailing list  - Gllug at gllug.org.uk
>> http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug
> -
>
> -- 
> Steve Parker
> steve at steve-parker.org
> Author of the Shell Scripting Recipes <http://steve-parker.org/book/> 
> book, due out August 2011
> http://steve-parker.org/ / +44(0) 789 777 2100 / 
> steve at steve-parker.org <mailto:steve at steve-parker.org>
> http://steve-parker.org/book/

-- 
Steve Parker
steve at steve-parker.org
Author of the Shell Scripting Recipes <http://steve-parker.org/book/> 
book, due out August 2011
http://steve-parker.org/ / +44(0) 789 777 2100 / steve at steve-parker.org 
<mailto:steve at steve-parker.org>
http://steve-parker.org/book/
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