maemo 5

[thanks to WOMWORLD Nokia for the N900 review unit, the following is my usual stream of consciousness; conclusions later :-) !]

Things I like:

1. Eye Candy - Great Effects
2. Audio - Fun sound effects
3. The truly open potential of Maemo since Maemo (now Meego) is a "normal Linux" not some half open / half proprietary b*stardized Linux like Android. This means out of the box I can install with minimal effort and do all the normal Linux things like install Ruby, python, use SSH etc
4. Firefox ! Yes. Being able to write Firefox add-ons and HTML5 webapps is (eventually once the speed is improved and Firefox has some time to iterate and improve)) going to be very very good thing
5. Camera while not as great as the N82 is much better than the iPhone

Things I don't like:

1. Phone is an app and seems like a half baked app at that. Not sure how to invoke it.
2. The media player app doesn't multi-task with the camera app. If I am playing music and switch to the camera app, the music stops
3. Touch Screen is unresponsive
4. UI performance seems to lag and the latency of the UI is often too slow. Seems very sluggish in other words
5. No real twitter client, give me something like Gravity please
6. No ShoZu - the built in sharing programs and PixelPipe are not my cup of tea; I prefer my multi-media to be uploaded automatically (or at least not 1 at a time; need to be able to select unlimited number of photos and videos and upload them)
7. Maemo UI is non-intuitive but it has potential (to me Meego has more potential in the long run than Symbian!)
8. Camera is sluggish when processing photos and is also slow to power up and auto-focus and to take a shot when compared to the N82

What I am looking for in my ongoing mobile art experiments is REAL!

1. Read the sensors (GPS, accelerometer, compass, etc)
2. Evaluate the data from the sensors
3. Art - Make some art (sound, graphic, image, etc) and display and store it on the mobile
4. Loop - Back to step 1

And I want to do it in a dynamic environment that doesn't force me to do yak shaving like spawning separate threads for each of the sensors or other such needless complexity that's not needed by my artistic algorithms. Nor the slings and arrows of outrageous certificates or certifications or developer programs or DRM malarkey :-) !

After reading the N900 technical reviews from the Maemo summit, it appears that the unlocked version of the N900 is the closest current device that could do this:

1. It's Linux so assuming the sensor APIs are available from a standard Linux C (i.e. not using some non standard craziness like Carbide C++ for Symbian) library, Python, Ruby, name your favourite dynamic language here, etc (C++ and Java are just not malleable and easily hackable enough, sorry!) bindings could be (and probably are or are in the process of being) built to those C libraries
2. No need for developer fees or ridiculous certificates
3. It has all the sensors I want for my current experiments
4. It's NOT mass market, but it's mass market enough for hackers (unlike Bug Labs Bug which I love but already probably has less than 1/10 the amount of developers working on it as the N900).

Am I right? Time for me to watch the blogs for signs of the N900 and Maemo 5 and 6 making dynamic languages first class citizens unlike on Symbian where S60 Python was far too many steps behind Carbide C++  (and time for to save up for the N910 since the N900 will probably be crippled in some significant way as all 1st gen Nokia devices are e.g. N95-1 not having enough memory)