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I’ve talked about the Maemo platform’s commercial failure in the past, and recent months following the N900 – both on the Maemo.org forums and in Engadget coverage – haven’t exactly convinced me of its longevity in the US market. As a phone the device is limited to AT&T for voice and 2G data, or TMobile for voice and 3G, and as an app platform it has an extremely weak Ovi Marketplace. Seeing Intel and Nokia announce the merger of their mobile platforms at Mobile World Congress, however, has given me even larger doubts about the platform’s relevance.

I can’t help but see this merger as Nokia giving up on Maemo and tossing whatever assets it had left in that fight to the Linux Foundation to merge them into Moblin. As far as I can tell no Moblin product has ever hit retail, and the Linux Foundation Wikipedia entry notes that Intel basically handed off its Moblin project to them some time ago. So far the score looks like this: Failed Open Linux Platforms: 2, commercially successful Open Linux platforms: 0, and both of those failures are now in the hands of the Linux Foundation. Read more »

I started playing one of the oldest games on my shrinkwrap stack this week, Far Cry 2 on the PlayStation 3. This game was released in October of 2008, right alongside LittleBigPlanet if memory serves, and I believe I purchased it in early 2009. I think I'm at just 5% complete with the single player, so I'm just starting out. Here are some notes on my early impressions of the game.

Playing at the Easy difficulty level is a welcome option since it appears no single player Trophies depend on completing it on any particular difficulty.

Having to choose a person to play as, plus the bits of the game that take control away from you briefly such as when a malaria pill wears off gives me a stronger sense of identity. This plus the occasional grisly first-aid you perform to stabilize your condition shows more of the character to the player (e.g. pulling bullets out of arms, etc). Read more »

Google's browser hasn't quite been out for a year and a half and it has just surpassed Safari according to one online bean counter's stats. It's now the number three browser, behind Internet Explorer and Firefox right behind it.

Both Chrome and Safari have mobile versions to bolster their numbers, and Safari has to date been emblematic of Apple's comeback. Those Apple stores are still humming along happily, but the Google juggernaut can't be underestimated. The mobile version of Firefox, code named Fennec, is in development and can be found for the Nokia tablets, but those devices are so niche -- I should know, I own one -- I don't expect them to make any kind of dent in Firefox's numbers.

In the end I imagine this just makes the folks at Opera really angry. All of these years of putting out quality browsers for all sorts of platforms and they haven't been able to reach the number four spot. One possible way to boost Opera's numbers? Promote the Internet Channel on the Wii that uses the Opera browser. It seems like everyone owns one of those now.

Seen on CNet.

I recently finished the main story of Red Faction: Guerrilla on the PS3 and found myself suddenly relaxing, as if unwinding from a tension I'd been holding onto while playing. It took a little while of motoring around Mars and cleaning up various leftover missions before it fell into place in my head. I'd been waiting for the single player game to start sucking, and it never happened. The pieces were there, the potential to fall apart, but it never did fall down like that. So thank you, Volition, for not screwing up this game. How could it have gotten messed up? Just three ways to start with: plot, trophies, and the last mission come to mind. Please note that talking about these below obviously deserves a Spoiler Warning! Read more »

The G1 had a famously small app space of just 70 Megs, and early indications are that the N900's space might be 256 Megs. It's taken me wading through a handful of Motorola Droid reviews to finally find out how much of the Droid's storage is reserved for apps.

The New York Times review of the Droid has it: 560 Megs. Smartphones are supposed to hook consumers with an always-internet-connected experience. "App phones" as David Pogue calls this class of phone add in often-paid small applications that add functionality and make the experience even more compelling. Do you really want the space they can store these things in to be limited?

In the end it really depends on how large these apps are on the phone, and whether for those apps that have large reference-style data sets those data sets can be loaded onto the external storage micro SD card or not.

From David Pogue's review, which coins the new term "app phone":

I still like what I've seen of the Droid, but I haven't put my hands on one yet to know how much I might like using one.