Reuters adds to rumours Nokia Meltemi

Editor: Andrew Flegg

Stefan Constantinescu writes of a new Reuters article discussing Nokia's fortunes, including at the low-end: Nokia has also been working on a new Linux-based software platform, code-named Meltemi, to replace its Series 40 software in more advanced feature phones, industry sources told Reuters.

The Series 40 platform has been used in more cellphones than any other software, reaching a cumulative total of 1.5 billion units a few months ago. Meltemi would enable a more smartphone-like experience on those simpler models.

Nothing exactly new, but good to see further discussion. However, your editor would note that the Reuters article quotes unnamed "industry sources", making claims of a "confirmation" a little strong. However, Meltemi's existence isn't really in doubt. The questions are: when will we see it; will it continue the Maemo heritage and will the devices be interesting to smartphone-toting tastes, as well as the low end?

Harmattan Bugzilla closed for new bugs

Editor: jaffa

The N9 Developer blog posted some news which was both unsurprising and surprising at the same time: In November 2011, we opened a public Bugzilla to interact with the N9 user community and receive end user bug reports and enhancement requests. To this date, we have received over 1100 bug reports. We thank you for the active contribution.

At this point of the product lifecycle, we have identified the major issues to be addressed in the upcoming software updates beyond the PR1.2 release. While we will continue to address issues already reported, we are unable to accept any new requests in Bugzilla.

Reaction in the comments on the blog post has not been positive; particularly citing the immediate nature of the closing, rather than giving a grace period. It's claimed this doesn't affect Nokia's ongoing support, but it is just one of the signs that Nokia is continuing to wind down its Harmattan operations, with (in your editor's opinion) but a handful of people left by the end of the year.

Decrypting N900 backups without a device

Editor: jaffa

Jonathan Wilson has posted instructions for decrypting Maemo 5 backups without a working N900: Thanks to Pali Rohár finding some old osso-backup source [...], I was able to build a tool that decrypts encrypted osso-backup files without the need to have a working N900 Fremantle install. Source is also provided.