Nokia announced a home automation system based on the open source OpenWrt Linux distribution. Due in late 2009, the Z-wave wireless radio-equipped Nokia Home Control Center will let users remotely control security, automation, and energy management applications via their mobile phones, says Nokia.

According to a newspaper report, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia plans to equip future high-performance phones with the Maemo operating system. The report (German language link) in the Financial Times Deutschland (FTD), says the company is expected to launch its first Maemo smartphone within the next few weeks.

Nokia's recent announcement of the upcoming N810 Internet Tablet is very exciting news for mobile Linux enthusiasts. We have already covered the initial announcement, but this followup discusses some additional details about the N810 operating system and development platform that have been revealed by Nokia's Maemo team.

Nokia to acquire Trolltech to accelerate software strategy

Trolltech’s Qt-based technology facilitate application development for multiple platforms and devices
Nokia and Trolltech ASA today announced that they have entered into an agreement that Nokia will make a public voluntary tender offer to acquire Trolltech ...

Ari Jaaksi, the vice president of Nokia's MeeGo unit, is moving on to other things. His resignation is an unfortunate loss for Nokia, but it's especially troubling at this time when the Finnish phone giant is working to deliver its first MeeGo-based product.

"... 'The new Nokia is a company that wants to sell you a mobile device that you’ll use to purchase lots of music and other forthcoming content (N-Gage games) and lock you into their portals and services (navigation subscriptions). The device is only a means to an end, and giving customers choices by making the devices open limits Nokia’s future revenue.' ..."

A Mozilla-based web browser is available for Nokia's Linux-based N800 Internet tablet. The "MicroB" browser was released last night, by the Nokia-sponsored Maemo community that maintains open source software stacks for Nokia's tablets.

"Nokia has filed a submission with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) objecting to the use of Ogg Theora as the baseline video standard for the Web. Ogg is an open encoding scheme (On2, the company that developed it, gave it and a free, perpetual unlimited license to its patents to the nonprofit Xiph foundation), but Nokia called it "proprietary" and argued for the inclusion of standards that can be used in conjunction with DRM, because 'from our viewpoint, any DRM-incompatible video related mechanism is a non-starter with the content industry (Hollywood). There is in our opinion no need to make DRM support mandatory, though.' ..."

Nokia N900 ... [is] being branded as so “open” that software freedom lovers would love it. This seemed like really good news, no? Well, like the saying goes… when it’s too good to be true… it most probably ain’t.