I love my Nokia E71. I can listen to podcasts, browse the Web and navigate using the built-in GPS. But for a long time I’ve had an itch that needed serious scratching. When I wanted to make a quick note I always used the Active Notes app. So my ideas were safe. Unfortunately, Active notes were accessible only through the device. I wanted my notes to be available anywhere, just like the Evernote client. I’m a geek, I spend a lot of time on the computer. The notes on my computer are not in sync with my mobile notes. This is a big problem since the bigger players in the notes-anywhere market like Evernote refuse to do a Symbian application, forcing users of Symbian S60 3rd Edition devices (a HUGE user-base) to either use stripped-down version such as evernote.com/m or sync notes by cable/Blutetooth.

What I needed:

1. A note-taking app that works on my Symbian 3rd Edition device and syncs to the cloud (Active Notes – out)
2. This app should also work offline, since I’m not always connected (Evernote’s mobile site – out)
3. An interface for editing and making new notes on the computer
4. This interface should be cross-platform, preferably web-based

Enter Upvise.

“Upvise provides mobile on-demand sync & collaboration software and hosted services for small businesses and individuals. With Upvise, you can organize and share information with your co-workers, and sync data between all the mobile phones and web accounts in your company.”

A free user’s account gives you much more, but let’s just focus on the Notebooks application. You download the Java-based app here. You will notice you can set it for online/offline mode. I removed all other menu options and just left Notebook. Sync your notes when you are ready by pressing the space key. Signing in at Upvise.com and visiting the Notebooks page will get you a fairly usable online interface for organising and editing your notes.

Not much to it, is there? Well, while this is kind of true, Upvise remains the only application I know that currently offers this functionality, for free, and I’ve done a lot of research. All the current workarounds don’t satisfy my 4 basic criteria. Being able to create and edit notes anywhere, anytime is a huge productivity booster and helps me remember cool ideas. So I hope this helps all of you Symbian users who, like me, have been searching for a client with this basic functionality. It certainly made my day.

Evernote Mobile Alternative for (Nokia) Symbian S60 3rd Edition – Upvise

This script is not valid anymore (well it works, but there is a newer, better method).
use this PPA repository, you can see instructions here: http://code.google.com/p/gma500/wiki/PPARepository

A little heads up to every angry Intel GMA 500, “Poulsbo” chip-powered netbook owner who has not been following this great thread on the Ubuntu Forums: a user called Lucazade, the main driving force behind the 9.10 script, brings you the new modified Poulsbo driver install script.

Owners of netbooks like the Asus EeePC 1101HA, Dell Mini v10, MSI X320, Sony Vaio P and similar Poulsbo machines can now rejoice because you can install Lucid Lynx and have acceptable graphics support right after installing Lucazade’s patch.

If you already installed the patch on a previous Ubuntu version, try to clean your system with the following command:

sudo apt-get remove –purge poulsbo-* psb-firmware psb-kernel-* xpsb-glx* xserver-xorg-video-psb* libdrm-poulsbo1* libva1 libva1-*

Then get the patch:

wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1338581/Gma500/scripts/poulsbo_lucid.sh && sh ./poulsbo_lucid.sh

The patch now reportedly works, but it is still being improved. I am not the author of this script and haven’t yet had the chance to try it on my own machine. If you are having trouble installing or want to troubleshoot please visit the Poulsbo thread on the Ubuntu Forums. If the script works for you, please also take the chance to thank Lucazade.

HOWTO: Intel GMA 500 (Poulsbo) on Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx

Here is the Ogg version if you don’t have Flash/Gnash

Courtesy of PCworld.

Apple iPad Review for Linux Users

I am writing this now because Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is still in beta and we can help, by letting Canonical know what is wrong with the distribution before the stable release hits the “markets”. Open source is not a democracy, but companies use beta versions to do “field testing”, right? We all want to make Linux look as good possible, so make sure to share your thoughts on 10.04!

The Theme

I was waiting eagerly for the day Ubuntu changed their theme, I wasn’t a fan of the brown. It can always be worse, though. I’m not going to talk about the window buttons, there have been enough rants on the subject. Just look at this screenshot (hint: Ooo.org button: right, window button: left, mouse slalom?). The other problem with the theme are the colors. Can you even see half of the X button in OpenOffice? I am not a professional, and I saw violet and orange are related (as opposites) in the color wheel, but my eyes weren’t very happy. There is a reason most operating systems ship with light colors – websites, program workspaces: most of these are white. Try drawing on a white canvas for 2 hours with a black window border and toolbar. Yes, it’s doable, but very uncomfortable. Trivia question: Which other distribution uses a combination of orange and violet? Hannah Montana Linux.

The GIMP vs Pitivi

Ubuntu is a flagship Linux distribution. It should show people how powerful Linux is, how much you can do with only free software. The way things are now, with the removal of GIMP, Lucid simply reeks of “Me too“. F-Spot does the job nicely, as far as red-eye removal goes. However the GIMP is a great image editing tool that should not have been replaced by a simple (and unstable) video editor.

The GRUB 2 bootloader

More specifically, I’m talking about configuration of the Grand Unified Bootloader, version 2. In most cases, people simply want to switch the order of the operating systems in the boot menu and threads are popping up on linux forums where people are asking about how to do this on GRUB 2. While the new method may be safer, it is still unnecessarily complicated. Adding a simple GRUB configuration GUI to the default install would certainly be a step in the right direction. I’m also not sure if everyone’s thrilled with having a mile-long GRUB menu after a few kernel updates (seriously, this should be an option, not a default feature).

Disclaimer: as always, these are my opinions only. Post yours in the comments.

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• Canonical has released the first beta of Ubuntu Linux 10.04 (robbiz1978.blogspot.com)

Things I Hate About Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx (beta)

The Web Browser is evolving at a mind-bogglingly rapid pace, and the changes it went through in 2009 only are incredible. That is why I was really happy for a chance to talk to Asa Dotzler, community coordinator for Firefox marketing projects, who has been with Mozilla for 12 years. This is my first interview and I hope you’ll enjoy reading Mr Dotzler’s answers as much as I did. We cover Firefox, Mozilla and the new Web. Don’t forget to check out Asa’s blog for even more on the topic.

The interview:

In your personal opinion, what is Firefox’s flagship feature?

Probably not the kind of specific answer that you’re looking for, but I think that customizability is Firefox’s flagship feature. This feature takes many forms in the product but add-ons are clearly at the top of that list.

I don’t believe that any single browser feature set can satisfy everyone. I don’t believe that there’s even a “80%” case to strive for. Everyone engages with the Web in their own way and a browser that individual human beings can bend and mold to their own, very particular, use cases is a powerful tool for making the Web better for people and that’s what Mozilla’s all about.

In addition to customizability, I think another very powerful “feature” of Firefox is why and how it’s made. Firefox is not here to further some business interest. We have Firefox because Mozilla’s public-benefit mission is to promote choice, innovation, and participation on the Web. Firefox is a browser you can trust because of who makes it, why they make it, and how they make it. The public-benefit goals, combined with the open source development process, managed by the not-for-profit Mozilla Foundation, means that users never have to worry about ulterior motives. Firefox is a browser you can trust.

Benchmarks aside, Firefox still feels much slower than other browsers, except IE. Do you think Firefox’s slowness hinders wider adoption? Is Gecko the problem?

I don’t believe that Firefox feels slower than other browsers. When I’m in Web apps, Firefox works as fast or faster than all of the other browsers I use. It also includes features and offers extensions that let me accomplish my online tasks much faster. One example that you can try yourself is scrolling a long spreadsheet in Google Docs. Firefox destroys the other browsers in that use case, even Chrome is awful there.

So, performance is also a very personal measure. If Firefox is really fast compared to other browsers at something you do often, like working in Google Docs, then you’ll think Firefox is great. If Firefox is slower than other browsers at something you do often, like starting up the browser, then Firefox might not seem so great. We have to get better at some things like startup speed, but we’re leading the pack at other things.

Also, some people who are on very old hardware or who have installed certain add-ons can find Firefox slow. My advice there is to try to move to more modern hardware and to be careful about which add-ons are used. It’s also important to keep those add-ons up to date — especially plug-ins like Flash which cause significant slow-downs and crashes in Firefox. Fortunately, the next version of Firefox won’t crash when Flash or other plug-ins do. You can even see this in action today in the Firefox developer preview builds.

Benchmarks of rendering time and JavaScript execution put most browsers all very close to each other and for most use cases on the web the difference isn’t really perceptible. We’re much faster at some things and not as fast at others, but we’re always working improve and Firefox has gotten consistently faster with every release.

Will we ever see a WebKit distribution of Firefox?

WebKit could never replace Gecko. One thing that I think people don’t understand about browser platforms is that there are actually a lot of pieces. WebKit in Safari is not the same as WebKit in Chrome for example. Both of those browsers have their own JavaScript engines, their own rendering and graphics layer, their own networking code, their own security services, etc., etc. Chrome on Linux actually uses Mozilla’s NSS security module because that OS, unlike Windows and Mac, didn’t provide them with one.

Mozilla’s Gecko also provides lots of features not available in WebKit, like XUL which is the foundation for most of Firefox’s extremely popular extensions, and a cross platform networking stack and security module that we can improve as we need without waiting on the OS vendor to release new versions. In addition to those long-established features, we’re leading the way on many Web standards where Firefox’s implementation is actually informing the standards and helping to work out cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility issues. The flexibility and feature set we have with Gecko makes it an ideal platform for Firefox and I can’t imagine WebKit offering that any time soon.

That being said, just as Google is borrowing from Mozilla’s code, Mozilla is and should be borrowing good ideas from the WebKit project. Having several different implementations of an agreed upon set of standards is a good thing and I’m thrilled that Apple, Google, Microsoft, Opera, and Mozilla are all competing to have the best implementations. With competition like this, we can insure that the industry never stagnates like it did when Microsoft stopped development after the release of IE6.

Web video: HTML5 with proprietary codecs or Flash? Do you think Ogg Theora has a chance, despite its poor performance in comparison to H.264?

There are really two discreet issues here. The first is the HTML <video> tag. The <video> tag is a first-class Web citizen that integrates video with the rest of a Web page because it is scriptable with JavaScript, stylable with CSS, and fits in the standard web page as a normally functioning block-level HTML element.

Video has become an integral part of the Web, like images and text did 15 years ago. It deserves to have the same status on the Web as images and text. The <video> tag in HTML5 and the DOM media API give us that. This is a much better long-term solution for video on the Web than proprietary plug-ins which, in addition to performance and stability problems, suffer many compatibility issues because they are not “native” to the Web.

The second issue is codecs. I think the way to think about this is to consider the <IMG> element in HTML. You can put a jpeg image in the <IMG> element. You can put a png image in the <IMAGE> element. The tag doesn’t care about which of the several image codecs you might be using. Different codecs are good for different things. A jpeg, for example, is much more efficient than a png when you’re putting photographs on the Web. A png is much more efficient when you’re posting line art or other hard-edged graphics. A png can do transparency and alpha-blending so if you need that, you wouldn’t use a jpg.

Different video codecs have different strengths. (As I mentioned earlier, irrespective of codec, the <VIDEO> tag is a win for the Web.) The most commonly used video codec on the Web today, H.264, is a very efficient codec for all kinds of video and there are lots of tools available for creating and playing H.264 video. But it’s got some down-sides too. The most important negative, as I see it, is that H.264 is patent encumbered and requires a license and a fee for commercial use. The terms of that license are also subject to change at the whim of the group that administers the license. That makes it not well suited to the Web because participation on the Web shouldn’t be restricted to just those with money and lawyers.

Theora is another video codec that’s growing in popularity on the Web, thanks to support in Mozilla’s Firefox, Google’s Chrome, and the Opera browser (which combined make up about 30% of all Web browsers.) Theora is also an efficient codec that produces good quality video all the way up to HD. It is not patent encumbered and requires no licensing fee to use for producing content or consuming content. It’s a simpler codec than H.264 so it doesn’t match H.264 in quality under all circumstances, but it’s “good enough” for almost any Web use case and because of its simplicity, it requires less processing power. The downsides to Theora are that it doesn’t yet have support in IE or in Safari, except though third-party codecs or plug-in.

So, these two issues are closely related, but not inextricably bound and the <video> tag, regardless of the codec issue, is a very good thing for the Web. We do still have to sort out the codec issue and I expect we’ll see the landscape changing pretty dramatically this year so keep your eye on this one.

Browser ballot screen… good or bad?

I don’t know yet whether it will turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing. The European Commission was quite keen on this but Mozilla never advocated specific remedies. In our communication with the EC, we focused on the principles that the Mozilla community believed were at stake, the issues that any remedy should address. The first two, and most important to us were 1) Microsoft must respect choices users have already made, and 2) Windows should not give any technical advantages to IE.

These two principles seem to be well reflected in the final settlement between Microsoft and the EC and I think that’s great. How the ballot, and the many other terms of the settlement, turns out is something we’ll need more time to learn.

Fennec, the Mozilla mobile browser, supports Windows Mobile and Maemo. What is going to happen to the Maemo version now that it is essentially a dead platform because of the MeeGo merge?

Maemo isn’t dead. All of the work that we put into Firefox Mobile on Maemo will easily translate to MeeGo. The two platforms were very, very similar and that’s why they could merge so easily.

Firefox Mobile is also running on Android now, though not in a release version yet. (And, while we’re on the topic, Firefox on Android handily beats the Android browser in JavaScript benchmarks.) As with the desktop version, we’re going to target all of the major open platforms. On the desktop, that’s Windows, Mac, and Linux. On mobile, that’s Meego, Android, and Windows.

Why did the community embrace Firefox rather than the (at that time more stable) Mozilla Suite (SeaMonkey)?

The community embraced the Suite enthusiastically from 1998 through late 2002 when Firefox (then Phoenix) started to gain traction. I believe that the Suite was chasing Netscape Communicator users (compare the feature set) and there just weren’t that many of those people left in 2002. Firefox, on the other hand, targeted IE users and there were a lot of those in 2002.

Firefox took the best features of the Suite and simplified them and made them more accessible to “regular people”, many of whom came online long after Netscape was a distant memory. With Tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, and extensions — all taken from the Suite but improved dramatically in usability, Firefox had what IE didn’t at a time when IE was suffering a major security compromise seemingly every week.

By 2003 and 2004, we had also managed to gain some major wins in Website compatibility. Gecko, Firefox’s rendering engine, was more compatible with Websites and, thanks to the efforts of Mozilla’s outreach programs, most major Websites had been upgraded to support Web standards and Firefox.

That’s a really interesting point, I think. Today, if you decided to build a browser, you don’t really have to worry much about Website compatibility. Thanks to the successes of Firefox in gaining market share and to Mozilla’s standards evangelism, most major Websites (with exceptions for a couple of Asian countries) work quite well with a standards-based browser. You might remember that when Apple launched Safari, it impersonated Firefox when identifying itself to Websites so that it could get the standards-based pages rather than the IE-only content. Now website compatibility, once a huge barrier to alternative browser adoption, is mostly a non-issue.

Let’s talk about Thunderbird. Is webmail killing the desktop client?

I don’t think it’s killing the desktop client in the general sense. It certainly has dealt serious blows to several desktop clients as they exist today, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a place for an innovative desktop mail client and that’s what the Mozilla Messaging community is working on.

Messaging is evolving really quickly, think Facebook and Twitter, and I think any desktop client of the future needs to do a lot more than the nearly 40 year email technology.

What do you think about browser-based operating systems?

For many of us, it’s already a reality. I spend 90% of my computer time in a Web browser. I rarely interact directly with the operating system and desktop applications. So, does removing everything but the browser make sense? For some, maybe. For me, I still do 10% of my computing in programs that haven’t made it to the Web yet or if they have don’t have as rich and powerful an experience there yet.

At Mozilla, we’ve been working on many new Web features that will help to close the gap for that remaining 10% of my usage. We’ve got geolocation support, experimental multi-touch input, a rich file API, Web protocol handlers, native audio and video, and several other capabilities that used to be considered the domain of the operating system. The more of this we add, the more Web developers will be able to build the kinds of experiences we used to get from the OS.

Your main workstation, OS, mobile device?

I have a Lenovo Thinkpad that defaults to Windows 7 but can also boot to Ubuntu Linux. I also have an Apple MacBook Pro that defaults to Snow Leopard and also boots to Windows XP when I need it for testing something. Finally, I have a Nokia N900 where I test Mobile Firefox.

One more question: Foxes or dinosaurs?

Well, Firefox isn’t really a fox. Nor is it precisely a Red Panda. Firefox is a mythical creature we invented to represent our product.

While I love the Firefox name and our Firefox logo, my history with Mozilla goes back to 1998 and I think I will always be partial to the red T-rex.

—
I’d like to thank Asa for his time!

Expecting a good discussion in the comments section

Firefox, Gecko, HTML5 and more: An (Email) Interview with Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler

So, without further ado, here are the top 5 netbook Linux distributions for 2010!

Ubuntu Netbook Remix – UNR

We can now confidently say Ubuntu is the de-facto Linux distribution and even the netbook respin of the 9.10 “Karmic Koala” release is no exception. The loading and login screens are simply gorgeous. The Maximus window manager  works pretty well on small monitors and neatly organizes your workspace. Despite the optimizations you should not expect stellar performance, though. My personal recommendation is to remove the default window manager:

$sudo apt-get remove ubuntu-netbook-remix ubuntu-netbook-remix-default-settings maximus

and switch back to GNOME, or install something faster like Xfce. On my machine I still had to setup the Poulsbo chip using a script and the wireless card worked much batter after using a windows driver through ndiswrapper. Not much to add, really. Otherwise, what you are getting is a heavily optimized version of Karmic Koala. And since we’re talking about the most successful Linux distro, there is a high chance that you will like it.

Jolicloud

By now you have probably gotten used to the new developer trends and are not afraid of trying out a product still in beta. Heck, I ran it when it was still an invite-only alpha. Jolicloud is web-centric and divided into three parts: the Linux kernel, the wonderful Jolicloud desktop and the web service, My Jolicloud. Installing applications is very easy and Jolicloud provides an aesthetically pleasing and well-integrated way of using online services just like normal desktop apps. This is not an operating system for people who like to dive into the details, but for those who are interested in stying connected, sharing and doing some basic work on the internet. You can add friends to your Jolicloud network, share and recommend applications. Your desktop experience will seamlessly switch from the cloud to your local environment. Another good thing about Jolicloud is the excellent out-of-the-box hardware support. If you use a netbook for relatively simple tasks, but are tired of waiting for Windows 7 to load or are having problems with a traditional Linux distributions, you should definitely give Jolicloud a try.

Mandriva 2010 (GNOME)

Even though Mandriva has been losing market share every year, it remains one of the best netbook distributions out there. The developers keep updating every release with all the drivers needed for a great out-of-the-box experience. This is one of the only distributions that will work without any tweaks needed. My only reason for not using Mandriva is that I am an avid APT user. All in all, Mandriva 2010 is extremely polished and gives you a choice between 4 well-integrated desktop environments, the major two being Gnome and KDE. To my surprise, the Gnome version looks really, really good. Albeit Mandriva’s userbase is not as large as Ubuntu’s, the documentation is well-written and it is really easy to install the distribution on your new system. Choose Mandriva if you need a full-blown Linux distribution, do not have time to tweak your system and can tolerate RPM

xPUD

Penk’s Underbred Linux distribution has been making waves since about a year now. And rightfully so: 10-second boot time is a killer feature for busy people. The xPUD desktop is mind-bogglingly simple and based on Mozilla’s XUL interface. A dumbed-down version of Maximus, if you like. Yes, this is both crazy and awesome. The basic idea of xPUD is that you boot straight into the browser. No real desktop environment, just the browser and you. The distribution is at version 0.9.2  at the time of writing, a Chromium-based version is also in the works, promising more speed (remember, due to Gecko and XUL, you get slower overall performance despite the fast boot; using WebKit could speed things up a bit).

Easy Peasy

Formerly Ubuntu Eee (fixed, thanks Scott!), EasyPeasy is Ubuntu respin tailored for Asus Eee PCs. But since it didn’t work on my EeePC, I’ll have to give it last place. The desktop environment is taken from UNR – the only difference is that the Easy-Peasy version isn’t ugly (where ugly means brown). You could call it the Linux Mint of the netbook operating system world, because the default install includes some proprietary software such as Skype, Adobe Flash and some common codecs to make your life less painful. The project documentation is not very professional. On the other hand, the guides are simple and very useful. I liek the fact that they chose Banshee to be the default music player. Those of you who do not like ext4 should skip this distro, though: as of v1.5, EasyPeasy uses ext4 by default. Due to the fact that the distro is basically Ubuntu, you can solve all your problems using Ubuntu documentation. Yet, aside from the nice theme and some very sound software choices there is no real reason to choose Easy Peasy instead of UNR. Try both and decide by yourself.

(Totally starting a flame-war) Distros I Do NOT recommend:

- Moblin: it is now essentially a dead project because of MeeGo. If you really like Moblin, get Mandriva 2010 and choose the Moblin interface.

- Puppy Linux or TeenPup: You are root by default. Thumbs down.

- Chrome (Chromium) OS: not reliable enough; do not forget it’s a developers’ preview.

Top 5 Netbook Linux Distros: 2010 Edition (with Gallery)

I believe donations would be too much to ask since I don’t offer any service in exchange (the content will always be free and under a CC license), so I decided to publish a Kindle-optimized Internetling at Amazon.com – if I’m not mistaken, the subscription will cost you $1 a month (after a 14-day free trial).

So if you are Kindle owner, not interested in ads, or use AdBlock (not a problem, it is a great plugin, I use it myself), but were wanting to give something back, you can consider getting a subscription. Most of the money I earn goes to hosting costs and I am trying to get enough money to possibly hire a co-writer (or proof-reader, god knows I need one). Even if you do not want to subscribe, you can go for the 2-week trial: since I’m not a Kindle owner, I’d be really interested in your thoughts on the optimized edition, e.g. how it looks etc.

And I promise you, this is the first and last ad-related post you will ever see on this blog. Thanks for reading, see you in the comments

Internetling, Kindle Edition

Most of you will remember the flak KDE got for releasing an immature desktop environment experiment as “gold”, and rightfully so: even though many Linux distributions almost immediately included it, nobody could really fit the unstable KDE 4.0 into their workflow.

But since then a lot of time has passed and I have to admit this is the first release in a long time that tempted me to switch. I downloaded a Fedora-KDE nightly build and tested it in a virtual machine.  Before you bury me in angry comments, please keep in mind this is my first KDE experience since 4.1 so I might mention some things which are already known to you.

What a sight! Let us begin with the aesthetics – the window manager theme, with its round, grey buttons, reminds me a bit of Mac OS X, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I probably don’t have to tell you about how gorgeous the new icon theme is – this is the first time I enjoyed waiting for Konqueror to load (a small version of the program icon jumps alongside your mouse while the application is staring up). Speaking of loading, the wait is worth it because of the absolutely delicious progress bars. Ironically, the default theme is so good that it doesn’t encourage you at all to make modifications, an ability KDE excels in. I don’t remember where exactly, but I’m sure I’ve already mentioned in some article how I enjoy the KDE Desktop concept: your desktop is not just a folder with a pretty background, it works more like a workspace, you can actually do things from your desktop.

Widgets, or Plasmoids, are a big feature of the 4 Series and while they don’t enable you to electrocute or incinerate your arch enemies, they offer a convenient way to insult them via their Facebook wall, directly from your desktop. The included widgets are standard, like a battery monitor, by pressing “Get new widgets” you can access the online library. There is a very nice Dropbox plasmoid, however the Gmail plasmoid is down right hideous. New in v4.4 is the Social Desktop and the widgets around it: this way you can interact with the KDE community directly from the desktop environment. The tightly-integrated compositing engine KWin got some improvements, too. You can now group windows together to get a tabbed interface, and is it just me or are the widget animations much better now?

The flexible Plasma framework, on top of which the desktop environment is built, made it possible for KDE to get a netbook mode, and now it is an official feature. Unfortunately I couldn’t try Plasma Netbook on my machine, but for those of you who find netbook interfaces useful, or necessary, can read Ars Technica’s lengthy article on the topic.
To my surprise, I’ve noticed that the Kickoff menu hasn’t changed a bit – if I were not familiar with the way KDE 4.1 did things, I’d have trouble navigating back and forward through the context menus. Luckily, the search dialog works a bit faster now. Konqueror is not an integral part of the KDE experience anymore, although Fedora’s community still includes it in their builds. Dolphin (now with Nepomuk integration) is a very mature project and can fully replace Konqueror’s awesome file-browsing capabilities. All in all, it would be nice to see a light file explorer option as well. Lots of new improvements have also been made under the hood, e.g. Akonadi is a new cache that manages data in your address book and similar applications.
This review of course depended greatly on the quality of the KDE 4.4 integration in Fedora 13, so take it with a pinch of salt, though I’m confident you will get pretty much the same experience on production releases. I recommend you try KDE 4.4 only if you have a decently powerful machine, I wouldn’t run it on a netbook, to be honest, it consumes more resources than other lighter desktop environments. The KDE guys are doing an excellent job and they deserve more users, so give v4.4 a try, it might just be a keeper!

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2010 will also be the year when Google becomes a major player in the physical world. Think augmented reality, real Google hardware and cloud services. In just a few days the Nexus One will be released and we are just 6 or 7 months away from the first all-Google cellphone. Whatever happens, this will definitely be the year of the Goog.

Google Chrome will match Firefox’s browser market share

Google, who is by the way Firefox’s biggest revenue source, is pushing Chrome to users by all possible means. Now that the snappy browser supports extensions, it would almost not be an exaggeration to say Firefox’s days are numbered. If Firefox does not step up its game (I certainly hope it does, being a Firefox user), especially in the speed department, we might see a very different browser market share chart next year. Except the sheer number of addons, there are now almost no advantages to running Firefox.

Android will overtake the iPhone

Apple might own most of the phone market at the moment, but there are millions of people out there who still have not upgraded. The trick to reach many people is to match their needs perfectly, giving them a reason to switch: Android is not tied to the same company – we have juggernauts like HTC, Motorola and Samsung working on numerous new models, all somehow different. Apple will surely present a new iPhone this January. However, they will never be able to reach every consumer with their small and expensive lineup.

Chrome OS will be a huge flop (initially)

You might think I am contradicting myself due to mentioning “light” operating systems as exciting technologies. But, like most of you guys, I am not an average consumer. I will probably install Chrome OS ot of sheer curiosity, then delete it because I know many other competitive operating systems that offer much more. I am betting on people’s distrust to the cloud. We have Linux distributions that do much more and can even run Chrome, plus in a few months they will boot just as fast. Why use a handicapped OS? The hardware for both reliable local and remote storage and applications is already almost cheap enough. My guess is that Google will be disappointed by the slow adoption and Chrome OS will become more and more similar to standard operating system, driving adoption in the following years through the Google brand name.

Ubuntu 10.04 will not start up in ten seconds

I think there is no way they will make it. Be sure to check out the Internetling around the release date, when I will see if the new version will boot in under half a minute on a minimal spec machine. Because now it takes a lot more to boot on 2 gigs of RAM. I believe Canonical has a very capable developer team, but this is a bit too optimistic, even for Linux.

Overall, more ARM and MIPS-based “smartbooks” will be sold than x86-powered machines UMPCs

I am willing to bet the so-called “smartbook” market is just short of exploding. With chips like the Longsoon and distros like xPUD, there is no way people will be able to resist under-$100 smartbooks. This will be achieved in 2010, it is the next big thing, not tablets. I am aware of the broken promises by vendors in the recent years. Now it will be different, prices have been driven very low, we just need to wait for someone with a vision (no, not Negroponte).

So, let’s talk about 2010 in the comments! What are you excited about, what do you think will happen?

I also want to thank everyone for reading the Internetling in 2009! It has been a very stressful year for me, but I am determined to keep writing. Thanks a million for your support!

Linux and FOSS-related Predictions for 2010

And today I want to talk about Opera Mobile 10 beta, because even though they are not very well accepted by the open source community, I cannot help but to think they have a team of experts from another planet, because what they just did with my 2008 Symbian S60 Nokia phone is just incredible. They literally modernised my phone.

Opera mobile 10 features a complete overhaul of the interface and a ton of new features, providing Symbian users with a very smooth ride (Animations), TABS, Bookmark Sync and one of the best mobile rendering engines I’ve ever seen, rivalling even the other WebKit-powered browsers on more powerful devices and it is not even the final version.

These are real screenshots from my Nokia E71.

I am not kidding, you have to test this browser yourself. The UI is just incredible. And I’ll be damned if it’s not one of the best pieces of programming Symbian has ever seen.

Opera Mobile 10 beta scores 100% on the Acid 3 Test