MeeGo release for N900 will be a code dump release: interesting to platform hackers only
After the first MeeGo Technical Steering Group meeting, and as "day one" approaches (this week); expectations started to run high about what the first releases of MeeGo, running on the N900 would mean. qgil attempted to play down the release, saying, Please set your expectations right for next week: nothing beautiful, stable or fully featured will be released for handsets next week. 99% of you don't want to install that release in your N900 and the rest probably have two devices or is used to reflash. It's a first code dump release, nothing else. It is very important from a platform development point of view, mildly interesting for application developers (because of the architecture announced, mainly) and nothing the average user or blogger will be interested playing with. Non-Maemo operating systems have been booting on Maemo devices since 2006 and, although MeeGo will have more support from the N900's hardware vendor, expecting an end-user polished OS any time soon is unrealistic. Indeed, it's also worth noting that Nokia will (almost certainly) still have closed source "value-add" applications on their MeeGo devices; as such, only the open source web browsers, calculators, RSS readers, email clients, calendars will be runnable on a fully open MeeGo system.
PR1.1.1 finally released for UK firmware users
UK users can finally update to PR1.1.1 (only a month and a half late!). As usual, Nokia UK trails all other regions by a significant margin in shipping updates to UK users. UK device owners can install the update over the air through Application manager. No explanation has been provided as to why this region was so delayed, which impacted owners of devices bought directly from Nokia as well as through carriers like Vodafone.
Configuring borderless/4:3 TV out on N900
harbaum kicked off a thread on the maemo-developers mailing list on how the composite video out on the N900 could be tweaked, in particular to improve the output of emulators: The problem these have is that the have a black border left and right to accomodate for the 800x480 main screen and on tv-out they get another top and bottom border to display the entire internal display contents on the tv-out. The result is a 4:3 image on the 4:3 tv-out with black borders on all four sides and with pixels being lost. This isn't useful at all. The thread contains a number of different settings which developers can use to tweak the output.
Make sure phone cases for N900 don't contain magnets
nakkebar warns users to avoid device cases that contain magnets, as many of the hardware features in the N900 are controlled by magnetic detectors (including things like the lens cover and SD card) and can be confused by magnets in a case.