Nokia announces Open Source Phone Software

Big news from the land of the Finns. Nokia made two big announcements for the Open Source world today. The first is the newest release of their maemo (Internet Tablet) platform. Named Diablo, this is a big release because it is the first iteration with iterative updates. This means that you can update the tablet like you can your laptop running Debian Linux, by merely upgrading the components and without the need to re-flash the device. No more re-installing /everything/ when you flash your tablet.The second -and bigger- announcement is that Nokia will be purchasing Symbian and has plans to open source the Symbian platform. Symbian runs the majority of the world's mobile phones. This comes hot on the heels of Google's Android platform, which has been demonstrated but will not be available until 2009.

This really signifies a major shift in mobile phones. First, there was Openmoko, more of a proof-of-concept type phone, but it received quite a bit of press regarding its open platform. Then, Android and now Symbian, which will leave Windows mobile as the last really major closed source phone. (New Apple iPhone sales could make that phone a true player, but currently it is just a niche device which has made a big splash but very little impact on the actual market).To me, this shift toward open source can only mean great things for the mobile industry. We are just entering a phase where the mobile phone you carry does more than just make calls and check some e-mail here and there. The handsets are truly becoming mobile computers and this trend will continue and accelerate just as all technologies following Moore's Law. This is not to say they are a replacement for your laptop. Rather, this new mobile computing will allow you to do some (many?) of the things for which you use a traditional computer, but they will enable other technologies and uses. Think about how difficult it is to have an ad-hoc video call with your computer. If you want to use Skype or Gizmo to video talk to your family, you need to pre-arrange that. A mobile handset with video streaming capabilities will let you do that anytime. Sure, you can do this with a select few handsets, but they are limited by the software. The ones I know of require you to connect to an equally-capable device. Why? If my mom's phone can display but not send video, why can I not let her see me while I receive only sound? There is no good reason, other than that the software we currently have available does not allow this type of asynchronous video communication. That is just one example; by making the phone's software open source, Nokia (and Google) will expose thousands of new developers that will want to create exactly this type of use, and a hundred others you or I might not have thought about.

And I anticipate this will be even bigger than Linux on the desktop. It is difficult to move people from Windows or MacOS to Linux because they are very accustomed to what they have and perhaps have certain programs that simply will not run in Linux. So far, this has not happened in the world of phones. I suspect that most people that have owned multiple phones have had a different system and set of applications each time they get a new one. They are not tied to anything. I also predict that the "killer app" of this new mobile structure will be a good, easy-to-use, and seamless application delivery system. I bet that Nokia is learning its lessons from the problems us early tablet users have come across with the massive number of applications available for Maemo, with nearly as many options for installing them. This is confusing to the user, especially users not accustomed to installing new applications for their phones.

One plus Forty or so Emacs Tips

I got tired of a couple emacs annoyances this morning and decided to look up the answers. They proved easy and do not take very long to setup. The first problem was the copy and paste behavior under the Gnome window manager in Linux. The problem is that emacs uses its own clipboard system, rather than bowing down to the one used by the rest of the system. The problem is that sometimes emacs prefers to paste in some text you worked with an hour or two ago, rather than that text you just copied from the website you are currently viewing. I found a great article by Uche Oqbuji at O'ReillyNet that solves the problem.

In short, you can just add

(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)
(setq interprogram-paste-function 'x-cut-buffer-or-selection-value)

in your .emacs config file.

The second tidbit I have is a rather large group of useful emacs utilities called emacs-goodies-el.

Even the most powerful editor on the planet can use a few goodies to jazz up the experience. That is what the emacs-goodies-el package does. Install it from the command line via apt-get install emacs-goodies-el.

Emacs Goodies comes with 40+ different packages to spruce up the emacs interface. To learn about the packages, type info emacs-goodies-el at the command line to bring up the documentation. The front screen will provide a one-line description of each goodie. Press the enter key next to the one that you want to know more about and it will give you the full description of how to use it.

The main reason I install emacs-goodies is because of color-theme. This package will allow you to easily change the color scheme of emacs from the default white-on-black or black-on-white colors. To use color-theme, add the following to the end of your .emacs

(require 'color-theme)
(color-theme-gnome2)

Now, start emacs and type in M-x color-theme-select to bring up the color selection and have fun perusing the color themes.