Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Respect

Through unimaginable hardships, we managed to pull a rabbit from the hat and get N9 done.
Schedule was just insanely tight, we got blows from all directions: Vanjoki leaving us, Ari leaving us, Elop dropping of meego from strategy, key developers leaving the company when we needed them the most.

Swipe UI, that we are now admiring, required every single application and framework to be rebuilt almost from scratch. All the blows and all the work in the course of 9 months. I never knew how much sweat and tears there needs to be to get this baby out.

What I want to say to the people who beared all that: Respect. You have my utmost respect and admiration. We didn't just do our best, we crafted the software to near perfection. Simplistic UI is easy to imagine, but extremely hard to execute. And execution includes design. Devil is in details and temptations are many. Keeping the boat steady on course needed a lot from you design and product management.

It's nothing short of miracle that the fruit of our labor is now admired by millions.

I am extremely proud of what I am holding in my hand right now. As a user, I'm loving every minute of using it and wouldn't change it for a thing.

All of maemo: I salute you. Job well done. Be proud.

88 comments:

  1. Thank you. A lot.

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  2. Thank you and the whole N9 team this seems like an awesome device, I can't wait to get my hands on one. It's a shame that it had to go the way it did. Let's hope for better time for Meego at Nokia.

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  3. Congratulations guys. You have managed to make the whole world buzz about this fantastic device. We all hope that you keep MeeGo as a backup plan and release at least a new MeeGo phone every year or so, for all of us linux lovers.
    Kudos once again, you have proven why Nokia is (and can be) the undisputed king of smartphones. Keep it up!

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  4. Thank you. I hope there will be other meego(maemo) phones in the future.

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  5. Very well said.

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  6. Anonymous13:03

    Thank you for all the work. And for creating a UI designed for average bears.

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  7. Anonymous13:07

    It's great, I just started programming and can't belive how to write ALL every bit of it from scratch! Fantastic work, I'll buy one and I'll hope it will became the new leading OS! :)

    GB!

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  8. BEAUTIFULLY done guys! YOU are the example for all of Nokia.

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  9. Wow.

    I mean. I had my doubts and with the news and shit. But really. If that thing contains what you say and works like it looks like. That pretty instantly made my Android and iOS devices look outdated.

    Wow.

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  10. thanks!!!

    please dont let meego die it needs more devices with hardware features n8 have like 12mpx xenon flash, fm transmiter and adobe flash!

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  11. Anonymous13:55

    Thank You All.

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  12. Thanks to all of you who worked on this, i can only imagine how hard it is to work with everything thats been happening but you still managed it ! Congratulations , you've gotten the worlds attention and now lets hope that sales marketing and carries can help you prove that Meego should be the high end Nokia os :)

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  13. Really great job to all the maemo/meego team @ nokia, you guys are a true inspiration to all your colleagues showing them that with great dedication and discipline truly revolutionary things can be done. Can't wait for the N9 to go on sale and get my hands on one!

    Cheers!

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  14. Good stuff! Congratulations!

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  15. congratulations!

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  16. i have to say i'm really impressed with the UI and the level of detail that went into the small things. devil in the detail indeed. there will be people who will knock it in some way or another but don't mind them. the UI is outstanding! thank you for freeing up a hand and making less work to do something :)

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  17. Finally, I can be proud of Nokia again. Now, you need support of developers. If MeeGo will have apps, more devices and frequent updates, it will also have users.

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  18. Anonymous14:54

    "All of maemo: I salute you. Job well done. Be proud."

    Thank you, thank you all.

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  19. Everyone, do sign this online petition if you want Nokia to keep MeeGO.

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  20. Everyone, do sign this online petition if you want Nokia to keep MeeGO.

    http://twitition.com/3c3ah

    [Forgot link in previous post]

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  21. Respect for all Nokia developers.. My hat is off to you all for such a good effort despite the cataclysmic odds.

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  22. Thank You for all the hard work and dedication ! Don't forget about us N900 users !

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  23. I have only one word for the work you guys did and that is RESPECT.

    Thank you for your work and I hope we will get to see more of it in the years to come.

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  24. You made a thing of beauty... be proud. This are the kind of things that give mraning to one's life.
    I'll buy one for sure, and advice it to my circle of friends. It has to be a success!

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  25. Congratulations on your great work. Now let's only hope this does get in the hands of consumers like me and others who can't figure out why it must take so long and be so mysterious and restricted to India Australia, Austria and whatever... Looks like the actual development is becoming every day a smaller and smaller part of making this happen.

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  26. all of us nokians are proud of this shiny little thing.. :) there has been a lot of effort from a lot of people.. god bless and god speed to n9 and meego..

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  27. ..been using Nokia phones for whole my life and now using N9 as my daily phone. This is simply the best of Nokia's creations.

    Absolutely fantastic piece of work! Kudos and respect!

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  28. I have to admin - I didn't expect it to set such a high level. Especially after trying to follow development... So, please accept my sorry :) Great work.

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  29. You too, Urho.

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  30. Congrats Guys, it looks a wonderful UX, cant wait to get my hand one one of this.
    I rely want to see this baby blossom and sprung even more wonderfully diverse new baby's.

    Again Congrats guys for a wonderful piece of work.

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  31. Thanks, appreciated. N9 is a beautiful piece of work.

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  32. Thanks for not giving up; and many, many congrats. This is my next.

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  33. Beautiful work! Your passionate work and brightness are worth to admire. Thank you for enduring such a hard task. The fruits of it are well worth it. Once again, thank you thank you

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  34. keep bearing the torch for maemo/meego @nokia please!
    You guys truly are, legends!!!!

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  35. Anonymous08:53

    Thanks for your effort, Konttori!!!

    The MAEMO is a 'near-perfection' in operating systems, and MEEGO has come to improve it.

    Thousands of people (me included) are buying N9 to show for Nokia that they did the wrong choice (going to M$ crap).

    Thank you very much (again) for this beauty! =]

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  36. Well said!!!!! awsome...

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  37. Well done, looks great. A fantastic achievement in the face of Nokia's idiocy.

    I'll certainly bear it in mind for my next handset, despite lack of qwerty keyboard.

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  38. thanks for meego. plllssssssssssss. pressure elop and make meego alive.

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  39. Anonymous14:46

    Thanks! Massive thanks!

    Thanks for not leaving "to the other side" and for believing on it! Long live Maemo/Meego!

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  40. thanx for the hard work... i still wonder why nokia is taking WP7 over meego... a meego device has been out for less then 2days and it already stirred up more joy than the announcement of "Mango"... i mean c'mon elop the choice is clear!

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  41. Sir Konttori I have some questions regarding n9. I am really a fan of it and specs are good enough for me, but lots of people including me are curious about it's 'missing or just unannounced' hardware/software.

    1. Will N9 support dlna or hdmi or any similar hardware for it?

    2. Will it support full flash when it is released?

    3. Is coding or making application for meego easy. Coding an ipa/android app/pc app to meego app? Can an app for n9 run in different meego devices without recoding?

    4. Being an open source what types of extensions can meego run? .jar/.sis/qt?

    5. Will landscape view of homescreens be available at the final release?

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  42. The whole team, a great job done! Congratulations!

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  43. Anonymous01:55

    Amazing Job! Noone has to trust me, but since I got my first mobile phone (NGage), I always stuck with Nokia. I love you Nokia for so many beautiful moments I spent with your phones, and I want you to flourish, and ma(emo)Goo is big step towards that goal <3

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  44. Thanks for the good work

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  45. Congrats for everything! I have a question, is this gonna be the first and also the last MeeGo phone ever?

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  46. Having really enjoyed both the 770 and the n900, I'm grateful for your hard work building awesome products!

    You make the best phones on the planet, thank you!

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  47. Nokia are really nuts!!
    Do they plan to use WP7 instead of this beautiful and open source MeeGO interface? I really can't believe it, they are going to crash.

    Greetings to all engineering teams. You have done a really wonderful job, despite of all bad things Elop's strategy has brought to Nokia dev teams.

    I have noticed nobody says anything about open source in any review, nor presentation. I thought this was an advantage... a really huge one.

    If this has Mail For Exchange working properly I'm seriously going to think about getting one by the end of the year, if they are available here in Spain (not so sure about that).

    Really great hardware, but even better software UI.
    Let's hope Elop gets fired soon and Nokia will deliver the best phones again. They have the hardware, and now the software too.

    The main problem with Maemo/Meego is that Nokia announced their end of life just after their release date, so developers fled away to Android.

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  48. Anonymous13:17

    bravo, you probably design and build the best phone

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  49. Thank you. I hope you keep on working on MeeGo even after Nokia leaves it.

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  50. Great work, I am trully impressed with the UX. My GF needs a new phone(good cam and simple UI), I was thinking on N8, but she will have to wait for this now;) I will also reommend it to everyone I know, put it on facebook, like it and all;)

    I personally need a HW keyboard so will go for N950... Hope they make enough of them for at least us TMO+meego.org members.

    @RichardM
    2.)Flash Lite4 for sure, they focused on HTML5,silverlight is also likely
    3.)Qt/python is rather easy(you can pick it up in 3month with no prior programming xp). Qt apps can easily be ported to MeeGO/Maemo/Symbian/Windows. More info on Qt is on meego.com
    Android apps might not need porting due to 'Alien Dalvik'.
    4.)Default pkg manager should be RPM, .jar files likely will also work(I think they work on Maemo although never tried).Otherwise Linux can run anything without an extension as long as it knows what to do with it(dependencies met).

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  51. maybe I won't buy the product, but I can appreciate the hard work you've all put in under the circumstances.

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  52. Respect and Thanks

    I believe all understand the hard time you guys went through

    I am so sad Elop killed Meego, but all together, we can still revive it!!!

    I my self will support it, will convince other to support it too

    N9 deserves the support!

    Thanks again, and keep it up

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  53. Fantastic job you guys! Don't let the Harmattan/Meego die @ Nokia, it would be a huge injustice!

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  54. Indeed, amazing work here. Rewritten in 9 months! Wow. All of you pulled some amazing stuff off. I won't ask the hard questions here, this isn't the moment for that. You all made this amateur UX guy bristle with glee with the video and documentation. Congrats, and respect indeed.

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  55. The device is awesome and that because of your passion and efforts to Meego and Linux on Nokia generally.
    I believe now what we all have to do apart from supporting it, is to try retain Qt framework. lets say at worse N9 is the last Nokia meego device, then we have to get Qt on Microsoft phones. How??? I don't know yet. But i am more than happy to support any action towards that.

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  56. just thank you keep it up

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  57. I am amazed how simple yet functional UI of MeeGo looks, everyone who worked on this You have my utmost respect.

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  58. Job well done it seems. You can't help the poor strategic decisions by Nokia. Looking forward to using one.

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  59. Well done. We should all be proud of your achievements. Sorry to see it all go the direction that it is doing.

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  60. Awesome Job! You and your team have made a very desirable successor to the N900. It really is unfortunate the direction Nokia are taking with Meego 1.2 Harmatten as it looks like you all have created a worthy flagship device - I like a lot of other people have no interest in wp7. I am patiently waiting and hoping that Nokia release this globally as I am in the USA and so far there been no official notice and I cannot wait to be able to buy this device...

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  61. Would you like to post more details? Your story should live and be celebrated the same way as the original Macintosh development team is. You did a fantastic job in such a little amount of time. I am gob-smacked by the beauty, functionality and attention to detail of the N9 software and I'm crying inside knowing that it may have been for nothing.

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  62. I'll respond to some of the queries.

    N9 has exchange support. We use it internally a lot, so it's in stellar shape.

    Qt is easy to develop on. You use QML to do the UIs, which is like turbocharged HTML. Then the additional logic you either code in c++ or python. Really easy. SDK has a one click packaging tool. Development easyness is definitely in the same ballpark as android.


    Qt will live on at nokia also in other areas than just Symbian. I think officially the next billion strategy is the one we refer to. More details come later. And I won't go into those.

    DLNA stack is there on the device by default, but not in use. We didn't have the time to make sure it works just perfectly, so we'll either roll the UIs out later or 3rd parties can enable it very easily. N9 doesn't have HDMI.

    Package management is still debian based in N9.

    Fash is supported in fennec, but not in the default browser. We wanted to keep a clear differentiation between "desktop" -alike browsing and mobile browsing. Default browser focuses entirely in one handed use and relaxed browsing, where as fennec just does it all and acts like a desktop browser (tabs and all)

    Landscape home is not available as default. You will need to install a theme that pretty much just inherits the default theme and overrides one property. I'm sure that will be available on sales start.

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  63. @Konttori, you guys are my heros, you've all made developing around Maemo & MeeGo a joy for me and many others for the past 6-7 years, it's a shame that this journey with Nokia is coming to an end. But I think the N9 will be remembered in a similar vein to Nokias' N95. You've created something that is truely breath taking and all kinds of knock-your-socks off awesome :) Thank you for all of your hard work.

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  64. Konttorri, if you've got time i don't suppose you could help with this debate?

    http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1041029#post1041029

    Thank-you very much if you can.
    All the best!

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  65. truly awesome news about the flash support!

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  66. i want one, distribution its gotta make me hard to get one here in panama with Claro

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  67. Anonymous12:05

    Jukka Eklund says on his Twitter, that Fennec does NOT support Flash. Which way is it?

    http://twitter.com/#!/jukkaeklund/status/86094818245226497

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  68. Hi Konttori,

    If you've got time I don't suppose you could help with this debate?
    http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1041066#post1041066
    Is this an area of knowledge, perhaps one of your colleagues can help?

    Thank-you very much & all the best.

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  69. And a continuation of the discussion
    http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?p=1041259#post1041259

    Cheers.

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  70. Congratulations, it's awesome!

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  71. All my respect, well done, hope it's going to be a huge success and we'll see more devices like this from Nokia....

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  72. @konttori, i have a couple of questions for u plz reply
    1) does alien dalvik for android apps come with d phone or downloadable??
    2) there r a few photo leaks of d n9 in WHITE... do u hav any idea abt tht.
    thanks

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  73. Official statement is that we don't comment about white, so I won't either.

    Alien Dalvik is 3rd party activity and as such may or may not end up as a downloadable (I sure hope it will, as it's excellent project), but there is no official support from Nokia for it.

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  74. @Konttori,

    Regarding Alien Dalvik...

    Thanks for confirming there's no 'official' support from Nokia.
    I always suspected that would be likely, particularly given the new strategy.

    Can you see it not meeting Nokia store requirements, or even being deliberately blocked?

    If so...
    I guess the only other option for Myriad, would be to sell AD from their own store?

    Thank-you.

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  75. Been surfing around for quite some time not knowing who to thank for such a promising product.I've lived most of my adult life with a Nokia phone in my pocket (starting from the 2110i)and spent a lot of my time anticipating and recording the birth of my first child with the 5800 Xpressmusic. My second son will be coming in September and I can't wait to have the N9 in my pocket to accompany me in this new adventure. Anyone can make a smartphone, but few make devices that help bring a little more quality to the lives we lead. Keep innovating and striving, guys. My kids first smartphones will come from Nokia.

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  76. Can you comment this http://forum.meego.com/showpost.php?p=29487&postcount=15 ?

    In short, can I listen to radio on the N9?

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  77. Konttori,

    I posted a Qn to your blog some weeks back.
    It's still not showing-up in the comments.
    I don't suppose you've a minute to address it now?

    Thank-you if you can oblige.

    All the best.

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  78. @Konttori

    I posted here 7wks ago but it still hasn't appeared.
    Could you please spare a minute to allow the post, & briefly address it?

    Thank-you.

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  79. @Kusti: BT4 is there in N9, also NFC with tag reading (PR1.1) is there. Radio should work fine, we don't provide official support, but the kernel hooks are there just like in n950, except some additional tokens needed to get alsasink working.

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  80. @Jed: Sorry for the long delay on responding. Alien Dalvik is most welcome and Ovi Store won't block it in any way. I think it would be a nice revenue tool for myriad to sell it for a few euros. I know I would buy it.

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  81. @Manu: I was confused, fennec installed on our RD test images contains flash, so that's why I expected the public one to contain it as well. Alas, it does not ... at least yet. I know there is work being done to pull it in, but no promises and no schedule. Performance is pretty gret for video playback, as Flash 10+ requires video acceleration to be used for video decoding.

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  82. @Konttori
    Just a quick follow-up to those 3 posts of yours.
    If at all possible....
    I'd be hugely grateful if you'd respond relatively quickly.
    Instead of 5-6 weeks later. Thanks if you can!

    (1)
    Are you saying BT4 is there for launch....
    Or is it coming w/the 1st major update, along w/tag reading?
    How soon *roughly* after launch, can we expect that update?
    Yes I'm aware of the community efforts for RX/RDS, it's progressing nicely, thanks to Nokia's help!

    (2)
    Re Alien Dalvik, do you foresee any potential reasons...
    Why selling AD via the Nokia Store, or to end-users PERIOD, may not be attractive for Myriad?

    (3)
    Re Flash 11... Is is possible for someone to give jolo a "nudge"?
    It's been months since we've heard from him over at talk.maemo.org
    At the time he sounded quite positive for a good outcome.
    He was not making any promises of course...
    It was testing well, & the main hurdle left was the licensing.
    We've tried PM'ing him & posting in the thread, but to no avail.

    All the best!

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  83. Flashplayer 11, with 3D hardware acceleration is where it gets interesting: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgwi0lWgX8w Hoping for that to make its way over to mobile devices at some stage...

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  84. @Konttori,

    Can you please answer my post dated 09/09/11 now?
    It's the 2nd-last post in this thread...
    I really only need you to clarify point (1).

    It's clear now that BT4 never made it to 1.0 or 1.1.
    But there's so much evidence that it was done or very close.
    So please, surely it's coming to 1.2 or 1.3!?

    Thank-you very much.

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  85. I really don't know if BT4 will ever be enabled. It was indeed pretty much done completely. I haven't been following the internal teams progress in the last 3 months at all, so I don't know what has taken place there.

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