We’ve been given the honor of interviewing each team from the Nokia N900 PUSH competition one on one. However, rather than be selfish, we thought it would be fun and informative if the readers got to ask the teams some questions too.
Just post your question in a comment and we will be sure to ask.
Avoid the basics, like “what was your inspiration” – don’t worry, we’ve got those covered. But maybe you have that dieing question of “Haptic Guide: What kind of battery life do you expect with 9 or more motors constantly spinning, surly we wont be wearing Lead Acid around will we?”
how often do you change underwear?
Does it have Android? Oh wait, I forgot, mobile phone manufactures insist on not using open source software.
@Chris: From Nokia’s Push page:
http://blogs.nokia.com/pushn900/what-is-push/
“The N900 is the most powerful device Nokia has ever created, and it’s built with Maemo software – which is completely open source.”
Are they lying to us?
Most important question:
Where did you hide the Arduinos?
What hack would you make for a N900, without using the arduino?
“But maybe you have that dieing question ”
It’s dying.
@id – maemo is completely opensource, but many vital parts required to make it function are NOT. Things like the media player, or even the “file manager”.
Also some drivers, daemons or system libraries. (e.g. GPS).
Basically you cannot have a useful and maybe not even functional N900 (or any of the earlier tablets) if you only use opensourced components.
@id Why reinvent the wheel? Android is perfectly fine and supported on a lot of hardware. Nokia/other manufactures need to learn that Android is the future. Instead of releasing their own open source OS that’s probably not as supported as Android, they could work on Android releasing back into the Open Source community too.
@tz
How is GPS proprietary?
@tz: I have been doing a bitof development in python and C for the N900. So far, everything I have tried to utilize (GPS, bluetooth, file access, network access, etc) is 100% accessible on the device and works great.
The application development for Maemo is completely open from what I’ve seen. Choose your language and go, so long as a compiler/interpreter exists (gcc, g++, python, etc). No restrictive frameworks that you are forced to shoe horn your idea into.
@chris Maemo exists at least since 2006. Android reinvented the wheel, and made it square! (i.e., full of closed source stuff.)
@nlw Ooops, never heard of it. Next time I’ll Google better.
@nlw and @chris: Maemo exists since 2005.
OK, tell me how to turn the GPS chip itself on and off, or upload AGPS data to it. (I won’t go into where to get AGPS data, but assume I can grab it). If you call some library or use an interface, point to the source code for that (recursively until something talks to hardware).
“Android” is not all open either. It is mixed. Try going below what they allow you to have at the java application layer. For example almost all have bluetooth hardware. If there is not even an SDP connection in Java, you can’t access the hardware for this contest. Can you root your Android? I can’t do so on the Cliq (yet).
Short answer:
If there is something that the hardware which I could do something with except that it requires some bit of software I cannot access or change, it is NOT open in Stallman’s definition.
I think it’s fair to say the n900 is the MOST open tablet/phone out there, if only because you can upload your code to it directly without needing any ‘approval’ or even the chance that it can be pulled off remotely.
I’m personally pretty impressed with the blog posts, and it’s pretty clear that a lot of them are really working though their first major projects. Not bad at all for rookie hackers, let’s see if they manage to finish.
I’d like to know the answer to the battery question, from the blurry photos it’s hard to tell what kind of motors Haptic Guide is using.