Every Maemo release and the device it shipped on
Maemo 5, codenamed Fremantle, was the fifth and final Maemo release Nokia shipped, launched on the Nokia N900 in November 2009 with a compositing Hildon 2.2 interface, four scrollable desktops and, for the first time in the line, a cellular telephony stack.
Everything before it ran on tablets with no phone in them. Six releases carry the Maemo name in one form or another, and they are numbered two different ways at once, which is why an old changelog can look like it belongs to a different product.
How the Maemo releases were numbered and named
The Maemo releases were numbered twice: once for buyers, as Internet Tablet OS 2005 through OS2008, and once for developers, as Maemo 1 through Maemo 4. The two schemes describe the same builds. From Maemo 5 onward Nokia dropped the year based marketing name and used the number alone. Each release also had a codename, and every codename in the series is a wind: Mistral and Scirocco, Gregale, Bora, Chinook, Diablo, Fremantle and Harmattan. Fremantle takes its name from the Fremantle Doctor, the afternoon sea breeze that blows in off the Indian Ocean onto the harbour at Fremantle in Western Australia.
Fremantle is also a port city in Western Australia, famous for its harbour, its markets and its football club. This page is about the software release Nokia named after the wind there, and nothing on this site concerns the city.
Every Maemo release and the hardware it shipped on
Every Maemo release maps onto specific hardware, and the mapping is close to one release per device generation. The table below is the whole line, in order.
| Marketing name | Version | Codename | First shipped | Devices |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Internet Tablet OS 2005 | Maemo 1 | Mistral, then Scirocco | November 2005 | Nokia 770 |
| Internet Tablet OS 2006 | Maemo 2 | Gregale | 2006 | Nokia 770 |
| Internet Tablet OS 2007 | Maemo 3 | Bora | January 2007 | Nokia N800, plus a Hacker Edition build for the 770 |
| Internet Tablet OS 2008 | Maemo 4.0, then 4.1 | Chinook, then Diablo | November 2007 | Nokia N810, N810 WiMAX Edition, and the N800 |
| Maemo 5 | Maemo 5 | Fremantle | November 2009 | Nokia N900 |
| MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan | Maemo 6 | Harmattan | September 2011 | Nokia N9, and the N950 developer device |
Two rows in that table need a caveat. The 770 spans two releases because Nokia updated it from OS2005 to OS2006 and then handed OS2007 to the community as an unsupported Hacker Edition rather than a product update. Harmattan carries the Maemo 6 version internally but shipped under the MeeGo name, and it is Debian packaged like Maemo rather than RPM packaged like the MeeGo core. The platform those releases all belong to is described in full in what Maemo was and what its userland actually consisted of.
What Maemo 5 changed against OS2008
Maemo 5 changed the interface layer, the toolkit story and the radio, while leaving the Debian foundations alone. Hildon 2.2 replaced the old stylus scaled widgets with finger sized ones and put a Clutter based compositing window manager underneath, so the task switcher showed live windows rather than icons. The desktop became four panes you scrolled between, each holding widgets and shortcuts. Underneath, the N900 ran a 2.6.28 series kernel on a 600 MHz Cortex-A8, with 256 MB of RAM extended by 768 MB of swap on the internal flash, and the screen dropped from the tablets’ 4.13in to 3.5in while keeping 800×480, which works out at roughly 267 pixels per inch.
The larger change was the telephony stack. OS2005 through OS2008 had no cellular radio to drive, so Maemo 5 added one, along with the contacts and conversations model that merged SMS, instant messaging and calls into single threads per person. Nokia’s own developer material treated Maemo 5 as the transition release for toolkits as well: GTK+ remained the native toolkit, and Qt arrived as a supported option during the update cycle rather than at launch.
The updates Nokia shipped after launch
The updates Nokia shipped after launch were labelled PR, for product release, and there were three significant ones before support ended.
| Update | Released | What it brought |
|---|---|---|
| PR1.1 | December 2009 | First maintenance round after the November launch, with stability and battery fixes |
| PR1.2 | May 2010 | Qt 4.6 as a supported toolkit, browser updates and portrait mode in parts of the interface |
| PR1.3 | October 2010 | The last update Nokia released for Maemo 5 |
After PR1.3 the maintenance passed to the maemo.org community, which ran the Community Seamless Software Update, or CSSU, in stable and testing variants for years afterwards. A device reports which of these it is running under Settings and About product, as a string of the form 20.2010.36-2, where the middle figures are the year and the build week; that is how you tell a PR1.3 unit from a PR1.2 one without guessing.
Where the release line went after Fremantle
The release line went out of Nokia’s hands after Fremantle. Nokia and Intel announced MeeGo at Mobile World Congress in February 2010, merging Maemo with Moblin under the Linux Foundation, and Nokia announced its switch to Windows Phone in February 2011. The N9 still shipped in September 2011 with Harmattan on it, and then the line stopped as a commercial product.
What continued were two community efforts with different starting points. Mer rebuilt the MeeGo core, and Jolla built Sailfish OS on top of it and put the first handset in buyers’ hands in Finland at the end of 2013; Sailfish OS is still shipping. Separately, the Hildon side of the family was rebuilt on Devuan as Maemo Leste, the continuation, which targets the N900 along with newer ARM hardware. Neither is a Nokia product and neither is a firmware update for an existing device.
This is an independent reference, not Nokia, not Jolla, not maemo.org and not the news blog that published at this domain between 2009 and 2015. No firmware images, flasher payloads or repackaged applications are hosted or linked here; the version numbers above are historical facts, not download offers.