One of the really attractive things about the N900 is the possibility of customising it. You see, I’m a bit of a geek at times. A nerd, if you will. And the idea of being able to tweak the way my phone works appeals to me, whether it be in fixing a bug I find in an app or out-and-out writing a new one for something the manufacturer hadn’t though of (and I think a lot of the iPhone’s appeal to geeks is represented by that too, app store policy issues aside). But that’s not an option on symbian. First off, well, programming for symbian is fairly horrible; and secondly, you’d need the source code to the app which most companies aren’t going to provide without a rather large chunk of change.
But the N900 runs linux and therefore it should be really easy to code for (if you’ve written code on linux before). And since Python is one of the easier ways to write an application, I wondered how long it would take me to get up and running with Python on the N900, from nothing installed through to getting “Hello, World” running. So here’s how it went. Continue reading →
