A new hardware accessory for the N900 will allow mobile gamers to enjoy a better emulator experience with properly positioned and sized input buttons. The $15 accessory is a mechnical device that attaches to your phone's keyboard. Button presses on the Game Gripper simply press buttons on the phone's keyboard. A video of it in action is available after the break.
Ian Stirling has posted on update on where he, and the project to bring USB host mode to the N900, is; and the news isn't good: At the moment, things have stalled, due to the fundamental problem that to do it right - a reliable USB hostmode without screwing around plugging it into a PC - seems to involve a bit of relatively complex kernel hacking. Experienced kernel hackers welcome right about now.
Since MeeGo was announced, it was known that vendors would - in the same way as Android - have the option of releasing their own UI on top of the core user experiences (UXes) that are provided by the open MeeGo project. Indeed, Nokia have long believed their ability to differentiate and add value is in the UI layer. A video showed up on YouTube this week which appeared to be a brief walk through of some of Nokia's MeeGo/Harmattan user interface. Looks sweet, right? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, someone captured a video during a survey on mobile phones. The OS happens to be MeeGo, Nokia’s upcoming OS for their high-end mobile devices. Let’s take a closer look. We see homescreen widgets in the first scene. The person using this phone for the demo is Amy. She clicks on her name inside a social networking widget to update her status. As the video has now been removed, the images and discussion on Mark Guim's blog are the best you'll get - at least until Nokia World, in September, when people expect (or, rather, hope) for an announcement.
Pre-built images are now available for MeeGo for the N900, so those interested in testing out MeeGo on their N900s no longer need to build their own. Follow the link in the first post of the thread after the break (where you'll need to enter your IMEI) to download the images. A guide to installing them is available on the wiki.
Pre-built images MeeGo images for the N900 should be available soon, according to Carsten Munk, who is working on the N900 adaptation layer and currently working on having automatic images built along with daily trunk/weekly/major release built versions of closed binaries, published automatically to the outside. The purpose of these images is to accelerate the development of the issues - MeeGo is still a very long way from being a day-to-day OS on existing Maemo developers.
Some enterprising community folks have managed to put together kickstart files to get MeeGo working on GMA/Poulsbo (PowerVR) based devices (like the O2 Joggler). There's a wiki page outlining the steps required to test the build on your own GMA500 device, which includes many netbooks.