Nokia recently updated the OS of its 770 Linux tablet. The new oprtation system is called OS 2006 and consists of Nokias latest Maemo version 2.0.
A list of new features is available right here, but this is not the really interesting bit of news. According to Nokia, all OS2005 applications will stop working on updated versions of the N770.
This IMHO proves that Nokia does not intend the N770 to see PDA usage. Classic PDA houses like Palm always attempt(yeah attempt, NVFS is calling) to keep their organizers downwards-compatible and usually are successful – users want to upgrade while beeing able to keep using their precious, expensive software.
Whereas, for a web tablet, every extra application installed onto it is a support pain – so maybe, Nokia had enough of the support issues and decided to “wipe” the platform clean…
What do you think?
-via TheRegister
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I disagree… the reason why the new OS release isn’t binary compatible with the new one is because of a fundamental shift happening in the ARM tools space. OS2005 was built with the older GCC ABI, while the new OS2006 is built using ARM’s EABI. This has only started working on Linux in the last year, but the shift was needed to provide a stable platform for future development. Given that there were not-too-many apps for OS2005, I think it was a good choice for Nokia to get the change done as soon as possible instead of spending lots of engineering effort to keep compatibility — Linux can support both ABIs, but at the cost of lots of flash and RAM memory consumption.
Hi Benjamin,
oops. Thanks for clearing this up..
Nevertheless, existing users will probably find this annoying. Is porting going to be very difficult?
Best regards
Tam Hanna
what are windows based mobiles. are they good enough than a normal mobile.