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Nokia has released a press release about the new upcoming software update for Nokia 770.

It does not mention the release date for the software yet, but says that it will be released during the second quarter of this year. This would mean that it would be released within one month. Lets hope this schedule holds.

Interesting thing about the press release was that it mentions the Gizmo Project. So it will have SIP also. Nice…

Edit:

There seems to be also a webcast of the press conference. I just missed the live feed but the site claims that it would be soon viewable on-demand.

Edit 2:

And this is what it looks like…

The biggest news for the last couple of days in terms of Nokia 770 has been the new VoIP software update that supports Google Talk. It has been announced as a some huge co-operation deal between Nokia and Google. Well, I understand that it is a great way to get lots of free press and I surely love to see more and more people get interested in this great device, but Google Talk has been open for quite some time already. Anyone can use their liblingle to implement a Google Talk client. So I think it is not a big surprise to see Nokia 770 support Google Talk.

For a long time now I’ve been very pro-SIP, probably due to my engineer background. At first, when I saw GTalk using Jabber I was thinking that what the hell is Google doing here. Currently, I believe that their approach was the right one. SIP is getting far too complex and SIP presence solution is lagging seriously behind. This is probably why Gizmo is using a double stack (SIP for voice and Jabber for presence) and Google’s solution was to implement voice features for Jabber.

Google Talk is probably the best way to go with the Nokia 770. Currently Google has the largest “open” community and a client implementation that works. However, I bet that the new software supports also SIP. If you take a look at the maemo roadmap you see that they are using Telepathy and Farsight to implement the VoIP. Both of them supports Nokia’s Sofia SIP stack.

From these news it is quite clear that we don’t have to wait the new software for too long anymore. And as you can see from the roadmap, the VoIP & IM are not the only new additions to the software. Probably even more than the VoIP, I’m waiting for the better support for Python.

gnuite on Itt forums wrote a post about a new GPS application he has been working on for Nokia 770. It’s called Maemo Mapper and I have to say it is a really nice application to have even though you don’t have a GPS receiver. It uses maps from Google and works nice and smooth unlike when you use Google maps via the browser. I cannot really comment anything about the GPS features since I don’t have one, but this application makes me seriously consider purchasing one.

It was announced on Maemo mailing list couple of minutes ago that a new Nokia 770 software version is available for download. Get it here.

Version number is 5.2006.13-7, but sadly there is no changelog available. It is still the 2005 edition, so don’t expect it to do VoIP quite yet.

For some time now I’ve been waiting for a proper release of Flite to show up on Nokia 770 and now it has happened. Flite is a free text-to-speech application that makes your tablet talk the talk. Check moimart’s blog to download a test application.

The Flite tablet edition includes also a D-BUS service so that it can be used from other applications. Just imagine what cool things you could do with this one. Wouldn’t it be nice to get your tablet wake you up in the morning and read the weather forecast or news headlines to you. Now I still need to wait for the D-BUS libraries to come out for Pymaemo and I will make that happen (if someone who knows C-programming has not done it before that).

PS. However I still prefer my girlfriend to wake me up in the morning, but she just won’t read the weather forecast or the news headlines for me no matter how nice i ask.

I noticed this morning that Google Calendar is available for public. I’ve been waiting it since I heard that it was coming, since I would have liked to use it on my Nokia 770. Unfortunately it does not work yet with Opera browser as you can see from the screenshot below. I need to wait still…

l just finished porting SER (SIP Express Router) for Maemo platform. Well, not much porting actually was needed. Just compile for ARM and create an application installer friendly .deb package.

You might be wondering that what is SER? A simple answer is that it is a very fast and configurable SlP proxy server. If you still do not know what I’m talking about, this application is probably not for you. It is also a valid question that what is the use of such application for a device like Nokia 770. Well, my intention was only to test if SER can be run on Nokia 770 and how well it works. Seems like it was easier task than what I thought. The .deb package can be downloaded from here.

The application can be used without root privileges. By default the users are not authenticated, since I’ve not yet had time to configure it with the dbtext module. That might come later… It is quite fun to experiment with this using SIP enabled WLAN devices and ad-hoc WLAN connections.

Today I participated in a day long seminar and I knew that the location would not have a open WLAN access so I didn’t even bother to bring my laptop with me. For the first time I decided to take my 770 with me, since I could check my RSS feeds and read my personal email with it using 3G. I thought that it would be better than nothing. It turned out to be a lot more.

While others were struggling with their Windows XPs and bluetooth modem connections, I already had checked my emails and was reading through today’s new blog posts via Bloglines. 3G connectivity with the 770 hasn’t failed me once and the device is instantly ready to be used. I like it… I like it alot.

I had also read about the application called Xournal and decided to give it a try. It is still rather slow, but somewhat usable for taking quick notes. I can’t wait for it to develop a bit further. This is definitely the kind of application that Nokia should have included in 770, not just the stupid and useless sketch and notes utilities.

So far I’ve just been hacking around with 770 at home or office, but this experience encouraged me to carry it along with me all the time. The day got a really nice ending when I was travelling home from the seminar and was able to write some emails in the train. And the battery lasted all day long. Well, battery indicator had one bar left when I arrived home… but hey, that was enough.

In my previous post to this blog I was experimenting with Pygame and found out that a game called Nannoid worked almost fully on the Nokia 770 without modifications. Well, I decided to modify it a bit and now it should be fully playable.

It requires you to have Pymaemo runtime installed. Also, since Python for Maemo does not yet fully support LibOsso (or something?) you wont be able to switch back to another application during the game and you don’t see the “loading…” sign when launching the application from the menu. After clicking the menu item, just wait a couple of seconds and the game will launch. You can play the game using the stylus or the keys.

Download the installer package from here. I hope you enjoy the game. Here are some screenshots…

It’s been a while since my last post to my blog and yesterday, while watching OC and lying on the couch, I thought I gotta post something. Then I started to browse through the Pygame site since I thought there might be something cool stuff that I could try on my Nokia 770.

First I started at the Gamelets section. I thought that these should be simple enough and work without any editing on the device. To be honest, that was not the case, but at least I got this small game called Spacepong working. It worked really nice and I could control the ball on the screen using the stylus. The game itself is not the coolest kind, but might offer a good example on how to develop games using Pygame. Here are some screenies from the game taken from Nokia 770.

Now, encouraged from this nice experience with Pygame gamelets, I decided to go for the actual games. Since I’ve always liked Arkanoid I immediately wanted to try Pygame version of that called Nannoid. To my surprise, it also worked right out of the package. Well not fully. As you can see from the screenshots below, the game didn’t quite fit to the screen. Anyhow, this seems like something that would be really cool with some modifying.

And remember people, this was all done while watching OC. All you need to do is to install Python for Maemo. Then download the .tar.gz packages of the games, for example, to your memory card. Then go to the directory where you downloaded them using Xterm (MMC is found in /media/mmc1) and type “tar xzvf the_name_of_the_package.tar.gz”. Change to the directory that was extracted and start the game by typing “/var/lib/install/usr/bin/python2.4 the_name_of_the_file_that_starts_the_game”. If you have errors, you might have tried to start the wrong file or it just doesn’t work. If you find more games that would be cool for Nokia 770, I’d like to hear about it. That was all this time… happy gaming.