No N900 for me
Well, got an email from Nokia, no N900 for me.
A few weeks ago I went to Qt Dev Days, both of them, one in Munich, and one in San Francisco. I had a real nice time, met brilliant people, gave my presentation and got great feedback from that. As part of the event, during the conference dinner, they organised a quiz game. If your table won, everyone got an N900. Trick is that they gave the same quiz on both events, so guess which table won on the second event ;-) Well not so fast, they have rules. So the three of us at the table that were at both events will not get one, the 5 others will (mostly thanks to us is I dare say so). I have no problem with that, really, it's the rules. They may have been made more clear at the time but no problem. Would have loved to play with the device though. I can do Qt with my eyes closed and although I have never developed for mobile devices before, this one has enough features and power to start imagining applications that would have been fun to do. That's what the iPhone has done best I believe, provide a great mobile platform so that programmers not previously experienced in mobile devices (or constrained by their limitations) could come in and provide applications that no other mobile phone could provide. And Apple has done it be providing a first class, and still unmatched, tool set to help you build those apps. Now, I know little about ObjC and Cocao and as with many powerful tools, you can hurt yourself when you start using them ;-) But I know C++ and Qt very well so I was looking forward to playing with the N900. I tried the dev kit and boy has Nokia still a lot of work to do to match Apple & Xcode. It had been a while since I had wrestled with Linux but it was not pleasant to setup. But I know Nokia, with Qt and Maemo, seems to be focusing more on a larger group of developers so I'm confident that will evolve in the right direction. So meanwhile, no N900 for me. I can't justify paying for a £500 device just to play with it. The company I work for has not plans for doing mobile apps (tablet probably though!). And I just think Nokia needs to expose the device to as many new programers as possible. Giving one to me would have been a great way of doing so ;-)
