Nokia N810

[Bill McGonigle]

On 2008-12-01 7:41 PM, Ben Scott wrote:
>    Anyone here have/had an N810 who cares to comment?  Good product?
> How's the software?

The hardware is excellent.  Quite a marvel of engineering.  (except for 
the GPS which takes minutes to lock).  The battery lasts forever.  I 
almost never used my second battery.

The Access PalmOS emulator just works, at least for all the stock Palm 
apps.  Network Hotsync even works.  Having the keyboard on the long side 
of the screen makes for non-optimal Palm layout, but it works.  If 
you're happy without the keyboard you can use it zoomed to fit, 
otherwise it's single-sized using the higher res of the n810.

Skype, evil that it is, works really well too.  It's so cool having a 
pocket video conferencer.  That works on 802.11 and paired with DUN. 
The n810's phone pairing/control support is really good.

The OS is another story.  I don't know how big the Nokia team is, but it 
doesn't move fast.  e.g. WPA2 doesn't work for lots of people and they 
just closed the long-standing bug on it because a certain subset of 
ciphers do work, and people are invited to open other bugs on the ones 
they complained about earlier.  This happened immediately after it grew 
to be a top-10 bug.  Nobody else can step up here because the wireless 
hardware is proprietary and Nokia has to run requests up the flagpole to 
the obscure vendor, AIUI.  At least with the GPS they've written a 
userland daemon for interfacing, that's good.

It runs an embedded linux from Maemo, and there's lots of packages for 
it, but few are great.  I've been waiting for the Canola software to get 
out of beta for a year so I could do wireless podcasts but it still 
doesn't do most of what I'd want for that.  There's a python script 
somebody hacked up to do podcasting but that doesn't usually work 
either.  Same for video; even after re-encoding to the right resolution 
and profile it can't play an .mp4 file without major skipping.  Lack of 
proper hardware acceleration drivers seems to be the issue.  I also had 
problems rsyncing the thing for backups.  Sometimes it'd work, sometimes 
not.  Perhaps a problem with the unsupported rsync port.

The Maemo project is also not smooth.  I spent an hour writing up a 
tutorial for the Wiki, but then the wiki ate my work and I come to find 
out it's been doing that for a month.  There's talk about Nokia 
switching to Ubuntu, and there's a flavor of Ubuntu for it.  Not sure 
about driver issues or what's supported but that probably is the path to 
the highest level of functionality, though I don't know whether you get 
to keep the Palm emulator there.  There's also an Android port which I 
downloaded but never tried.

I also wanted to sync wirelessly.  I started down the path of a full GPE 
installation, and was going to figure out a server that could handle 
SyncML and then interface my desktop to that through a wrapper script... 
and grew weary after the first three hours.

I was surprised how I really didn't type any faster on the n810 keyboard 
than the Treo 650's.  I guess a thumboard is a thumboard no matter how 
small.

My n810 just sold on eBay today.  Shipping it off in the morning.  I'll 
have a 10" eeePC on order soon to replace it.  My pockets aren't quite 
that big, but it's small enough to throw in a backpack when hiking, and 
sleeping to SSD ought to work out just fine.  My Motorola cell phone 
(e815) syncs with my calendar and address book and photo album.  I guess 
it all depends on what you want to do with it, but it didn't meet my 
needs.  If you only want the basic Clié functions it'll probably do 
that, but a replacement Clié will too.

-Bill
-- 
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