Update on Nokia N950 Developer Device Programme

Quim Gil has been working tirelessly to get the N950 developer kits into the hands of the 250 lucky meego.com developer who will be loaned one to prime the N9 with open source applications on its release. At the time of writing, four rounds have now been completed, with a handful of devices left to allocate. Quim describes the process: We will continue deciding on 3 (approved) and 0 (declined) today. Let's see how far we go. We have a mix of

- Several developers applying for the same kind of app/feature: music player, comic reader and the likes. We need to find a balance and see who can squeeze the device with great skills and other features.

- Several developers proposing interesting stuff but leaving no record about why they are capable of actually develop what they promise. We need to distill the shy developers out from the dreamers - if you know what I mean.

- Several developers promising to implement features that actually we are not so sure they are possible at all in this platform, or maybe the developer is no aware of the difficulties. Here we also include many projects that require porting of libraries, and we are not sure whether the developer knows the status of those dependencies.

Your editor was a guinea pig for the process and received his N950 on Friday (your other editor notes we all hate Andrew). It's an excellent device, and he looks forward to (at least) 200 packages being in apps.meego.com in time for the N9's release.

Hot Summer release for MeeGo 1.2 Community Edition for N900

Jukka Eklund has announced the latest release of MeeGo 1.2 CE:

Another week, another milestone for the Community Edition! Since there were some issues and missing items in last week's (mid)summer image, we wanted to keep on improving and now we can all enjoy the results. So head on to http://wiki.meego.com/N900 to download the image. One hint: when you boot it up for the first time, let the system stabilize for some time before taking it into use. For the adventurous, you can also try the MeeGo Tablet UX image for N900, which remains in a very experimental stage.

I am happy to tell that there is a new Helium Mobile Browser [1] included now for the first time. This is a light-weight browser using WebKit, with a Qt Quick UI. We have placed the icon for that in the quick launch bar (the yellow globe). We want to thank Orange Labs UK for developing the browser, and helping to bring it to Community Edition. Mozilla's Fennec browser is also there in its familiar place, and you can recognize that from the MeeGon character icon. Also Fennec has seen continuous improvement all the time, thanks for that!

Since last week we managed to fix the critical "screen wake-up" problem, that made the battery life suffer in many cases. Now the lifetime of battery should be in the regular range of a full day or even several, instead of few hours.