Some details for the next Nokia device was announced. It looks like it will have a 3x faster processor, be opengl es enabled (and will use clutter for it’s interface), will include tracker and have 3G. So it looks like Nokia wants to compete more directly with the Iphone.
In the talks it was also revealed that 2/3 of the tablet owners are developers. That is a higher number than I had expected, so either the tablets are not selling as well as one could have hoped or there is just a large number of developers owning them 🙂
Nokia was nice enough to provide all non-nokia people attending the desktop search hackfest with a n810. So I had some time to test it out in Berlin. Like going from n770 to n800, the upgrade is mostly only improvements and not very many “regressions”. Integration of GPS and keyboard combined with a smaller form factor are all very nice improvements. The keyboard makes the device much more functional as a IM device and is generally nice for inputting stuff instead of the virtual keyboard. Sadly I just bought a 8gb + 4gb memory stick for my n800 which won’t go into the n810, so I will have to hold onto the n800 for a while.
The hackfest went nice. A lot of decisions was made, it will be interesting how everything will pan out once everyone gets home and starts coming up with corner cases where the agreed upon solutions falls short 🙂 But overall it should be a good step in the right direction for xesam 1.0. It seems there was some tension between people which just want a functional xesam 1.0 (more or less just a cleaned up version of all the current api’s) and the semantic desktop people, but I think we came up with a nice compromise that made everyone happy. So that was pretty nice especially since it seems that the tracker guys have been punting the implementation of xesam support until the spec for 1.0 was finalized.