The N8 has been on everyone’s mind recently and over the last week, some interesting snippets about the N8 have come to light. The first is that the N8 supports animated wallpapers, the second is a behind the scenes look into the making of the N8 and the final is a real world look at the N8′s video capture ability.
Behind The N8: This video published by the Nseries blog shows Axel, Pinja and Mikko from Nokia’s Mobile Computers design team discussing the inspiration and craftsmanship behind the newest addition to …

Opera Mobile with all its goodies including server side compression (Opera Turbo) for fast web browsing on slow connections has just been released for Maemo. It also features bookmark and Speed Dial sync with other Opera products, and multiple tabs. There is support for a QWERTY keyboard in both portrait and landscape modes.

This is also this is the first public release of Opera Mobile to include Carakan — Opera’s new Javascript engine …

Last time we told you about the awesome Lfocus hack that allows you to get manual focus in the video mode on the N900. Apart from that the same hack (packaged as a .deb for easy installation) also gives you the ability to turn off the annoying red light during video capture and even turn on the LEDs for better lighting. If you have not installed the Lfocus app, use the following part else skip to the next section.

In order to get started you will need to download the script, …

The world has been anxiously waiting for the PR 1.2 firmware for the N900 for what seems like ages now. The release date speculation thread has crossed 4 thousand posts and we have numerous others that keep popping up.

It is common knowledge that the code has been frozen for quite some time now, so what then is causing the delay? Does bug fixing and testing really take so much time? Apparently it does, read on for some of the reasons as to why the world’s favorite firmware is delayed.

The N900 records video in the 800 x 480 resolution and is one of the few Nokia devices to be able to focus before starting to capture video. But if the position of the subject changes, the N900 is not able to keep up as the focus remains fixed once the video capture has started. This however is about to change.
m2cm2c has put together a python script using v4l2-ctl that allows you to change the focus during capture. It adds two buttons to the status bar that allow you to …

The first result of Nokia and Microsoft’s alliance to build productivity solutions is the Microsoft Communicator Mobile for Nokia’s Eseries devices. The first ones to benefit would be the E72 and the E52 and the application would be available from the Ovi Store. In future, the app will come preloaded on new devices.
Communicator Mobile enables people to see their colleagues’ availability, and click to communicate with them using the best method, from IM to email, text to phone call. The names and status of colleagues are embedded …

If like me, you have been dying to get portrait SMS working on the N900, its time to rejoice. VertSMS by ossipena is still a work in progress, but the first version has hit extras-devel and with that comes the ability to SMS in the portrait mode. If you haven’t enabled extras-testing, here’s how to do it, the usual warning about software from extras-devel applies.

There is no predictive input so far and it lacks notifications as well. Another annoying thing is that the phone’s default virtual keyboard comes up when …

The much awaited N900 PR 1.2 feature got leaked this morning on this talk.maemo.org thread and initial reports suggest that this is a release candidate and that it seems to be working perfectly on the devices of those brave souls who have tried flashing it onto their N900′s.
Key changes/improvements that come with this release include:

A revamped virtual keyboard. Screenshot via OptX.

Longpress to enter numbers/symbols on the keyboard.
The ability to rearrange icons,  no ‘more’ button in the menu.
Changes to the camera UI, and a night mode for both photos and video.
Qt …