I’ve just stumbled on an incredible application for the N900 that can translate text from images into various languages. So in a foreign country you can simply take a picture of a boarding/sign/menu, put a box around the text and the application will extract that text and translate it for you.
The knowledge about the existence of this app comes from a video uploaded by CybercomLab on YouTube, this does not look like a community project and my guess is that we should be seeing it on the Ovi Store soon. …

At the MeeGo announcement there wasn’t much clarity on whether Nokia was going to keep the ‘Maemo 6′ brand for now and then transition into MeeGo, but a simple post from Quim Gil, of Nokia’s Maemo Division requesting the renaming of the Maemo 6 / Harmattan sub forum at Maemo.org to MeeGo / Harmattan has brought much needed clarity to the picture.
In addition to the request he has taken the time to clarify a few aspects which I am sure all of you are very interested in. Below are a …

The Nokia N900 has received a new firmware in the form of PR 1.1.1 (version 3.2010.02-8). This looks like a minor update and is available as an image from N900 firmware section as well as over the air if you search for updates. The OTA option is a 16.2 MB download and looks like a precursor to the major PR 1.2 update.

This update adds a number of regions to the N900, as quite a number of countries were earlier missing from the N900’s list. Apart from that there is no …

In terms of branding? Uncertainty. Otherwise? Potential.

We already know that Maemo 6 will be completely compatible with MeeGo, and according to Ari Jaaksi, we even can consider Maemo 6 already a MeeGo instance. We also know that the MeeGo announcement will not affect the Maemo 6 rollout schedule.

The one interesting thing is that Nokia has still not decided if they want to call Maemo 6, Maemo 6 or MeeGo something …

In what is huge news coming out of the MWC, Nokia and Intel have come together to create Meego, a mashup of Nokia’s Maemo and Intel’s Moblin. You grab the press release here, but to give you a better idea of the direction Nokia is going to, read the following extract from Ari Jaaksi’s post.
MeeGo is an open software platform – an operating system – for a wide range of devices. It’ll run on X86 and on Arm based hardware. It will be developed as an open project hosted by …

Okay, so did you know that there are Maemo based devices that Nokia doesn’t make? If not, its time to meet the Optima OP5-E, a MID that is made by China Optima. The device was primarily made for the Chinese market, but the company not has plans of making a HSPDA variant for the rest of the world as well.

It incorporates a SIM card slot and is telephony capable, much like the N900 but is its OS is no where as pretty Nokia’s Maemo 5. Although the specs hardware wise …

As I have mentioned before, unlike Nokia’s Symbian devices, the N900 does not have a code that you can enter to format the device and restore it to the factory state. However, if you like playing with software in the extras-devel repositories, chances are that sooner or later you will like a fresh start and want the N900 to be restored to the state in which you first picked it up.

There is no seemingly easy way to do this and I really hope Nokia is doing something about it. That …