Nokia N810 Frustration
 

Been looking for a good strategy game and a good calandar app for my Nokia N810 Diablo. Anything that I find comes with cavets, e.g. "this or that doesn't work yet", "problems with music". A good example is Calend (Gene Cash's python PIM programs) which is a calander app that has been ported to 2008. At first this looked like a sweet app - just what I wanted, but upon further research I find it is bug-infested ( https://garage.maemo.org/tracker/?at...12&func=browse) .

This seems to be the state of most 3rd party N810 apps which seem to be hacked together by hackers and hobbiests. Damn I love the hardware and default apps of the N180 but many of the 3rd party apps are basically unfinished junk. This is very disappointing to me.

Re: Nokia N810 Frustration
 

Let me understand. People that create for the love of technology and share for free with others are a disapointment to you. Clearly the quality and completetness of open source software varies as it does for commercial products -- think Vista. Some open source is excellent and some a work in progress. Projects are frequently released when something useful has been accomplished even if the long term plan is for considerable enhancement and expansion of the feature set. In the open source community the community participates in the quality control effort. Bugs and feature enhancements are reported by all members. The price of free use is participation. If a member of the community perceives a lack of function they are free to create that function and share with the rest of us. True members paticipate within the limits of their capabilities.

Re: Nokia N810 Frustration
 

What bothers me is that there's not much commercial level 3rd party software for the N810 (unlike the iPhone/iPod touch). What would make me feel better is if the open source movement had a simple two-tier classification system: 1. Ready for mainstream use (commercial level, NOT EVERLASTING BETA SOFTWARE). 2. Under development (not ready for commercial use). The decision to put a piece of software in category 1 or 2 could be made by a panel of open source luminaries (whoever that may be).

Re: Nokia N810 Frustration
 

I have been using the open source GPE calender for about a year and have had no problems with it and my two google calenders. Open source is what it is, if you want more commercial software you are better off with an iPhone, Symbian s60 or a Windows mobile device.

Re: Nokia N810 Frustration
 

This may come as a surprise for you, but it is really hard to find any applications that are not bug-infested (be it commercial or free software). Of course exceptions exist for the areas where bugs can cost human life or introduce huge expenses.

It just happens that commercial vendors do not usually publish any information about their bugs for free access to everyone and put efforts into advertising their products as being high quality/superiour/best in the industry/etc. It is understandable as they want to make money and being completely honest does not pay off.

On the other hands, public bugtrackers of free software projects may contain a lot of bugreports, with quite a large share of them being duplicates, old unconfirmed bugs (somebody reported a single crash for example, but nobody could reproduce it later and the problem might be fixed long ago already), behaviour not expected by user but questionable if it is really a defect, very minor rarely encountered problems, etc. Really important and especially critical bugs are usually fixed quite fast. You can't directly judge quality only based on the number of issues registered in the bugtracker. Bugs are just not equal and a major bug may be a lot worse than a whole bunch of minor ones. Also popular and heavily used projects may have long error lists, with none of them being critical, while less popular projects may have lower quality with lower number of people caring to report bugs.

Re: Nokia N810 Frustration
 

Thanks for your help mobiledivide. Although I went to the website for the GPE Calendar and got the impression that it is a hack of an old Palm app, I'll try it out.

And you're right about what I should do if I want more commercial software. But I do love the N810. It's just that when I bought it I had expected more support in the near-future from commercial-level 3rd party developers. But it seems that numbers outweigh superiority - and they ran to support iPhone/iPod Touch which really makes sense if one is "commercial".

Re: Nokia N810 Frustration
 

I agree with you about commercial software also being buggy and about commercial developers' incentive to be less than honest. But at least commercial software is usually more finished when it is released to the public (after getting out of the beta stage of course).

Re: Nokia N810 Frustration
 

What a hilariously messed up way to determine application quality. I believe this is one of the tactics Microsoft uses, actually.

Re: Nokia N810 Frustration
 

Hi Dan,

Be happy you're able to see bugs, and remember you're able to contribute your pennies to such problems. If you'd like to see the bugs in Microsoft Windows you're gonna get quite a shaft: they don't have a public bug tracking system. If you take Apple, they're not open about their security patches either. Bugs in Symbian and Windows Mobile applications have existed; some for long time.

Don't forget this community has contributed a lot to Maemo, Nokia, and the members of the community.

The state of PIM (or PIM-esque) applications is low on the NIT, I agree with you on that. There are many options available but none of them is polished or perfect. However, one can use cellphone for this, or use Google Calendar integration, use a Palm emulator, or one of the many PIM applications available.

You can help to contribute to solving the problem by following this thread and expressing yourself after you read the thread.

As for strategy game. Look at the Games subforum. There are tons of games for the NIT as well as tons of emulators.

If you prefer a vendor lock-in, closed source and proprietary solutions, limited set of applications, SLA or commercial grade support then the (current) NIT is not made for you.

Basically, the current state of the N800 and N810 is that they're not yet end user friendly in some regards. The tablet and new OS to be released approx summer 2009 will make huge leaps forward in this regard. Stay tuned!

Re: Nokia N810 Frustration
 

some quick thoughts on software availability and quality.

quantity: symbian and windows mobile have been around for quite a while. iphone is the current media darling, so if you get your app known related to that you can make good money, quickly.

quality: again, two platforms been around for a while, so its apps have gotten time to mature. oon the iphone app store apple is doing some degree of sorting, stopping some junk apps from getting access.