Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

This is the supposed "N900 buyers guide" (54 Users Say Thank You) as stickied by you, our beloved mods.

Quote:

Originally Posted by etuoyo (Post 682664) - I have never ever owned any phone that is not Nokia;

There will of course be some comparisons with iphone despite the fact many will hate that. However, that is the phone most potential buyers of the N900 would also be considering.

(6) The device can sometimes be slow and unresponsive. If you are a Linux expert or are lucky you will never have any slow down or apps freezing up. However, it is generally not as snappy as an iphone for the general user where you tap an icon and it opens up immediately.

(15) No proper functioning software to sync with your PC the way itunes syncs perfectly with iphone. You can use drag and drop but that is only helpful for the first sync of all your music and when you add new songs to your PC and are sure exactly what the news songs are and can just drag and drop them. There is Ovi Music but it does not work with the N900. Third party PC software programmes can sync but many of them just sync to the main documents folder or the main music folder rather than in an organised manner (via artist, album artist, etc) and so create a huge mess and will kill your use of file manager. You may get something to work properly but will be quite an effort compared to using itunes and iphone.

(6) This does not work properly with the N900. I may be wrong but at present it is not even working at all. Also if you are using your PC you cannot easily load apps from Ovi Store to your N900 the way you can with itunes and iphone. If you choose to install an app on your PC all that happens is you get a link sent to your phone by sms and then you have to follow the link which takes you to the Ovi Store. You can of course browse directly to the store from the device but would be nice to have the option to also search for apps on a bigger screen and have them download automatically to the device like you can with iphone.

My take on this one:
First of all most buyers would be choosing between some Android and N900 since the open source experience is the choice factor around N900 IMHO.

Second most of the iphone items can be ironed out and expressed as they are without indulging a subtle comparison with the iPhone.
Eg: The device can get slow.
a) you don't have to be a linux genius to reboot
b) iphone gets slow to the point of sending it back after it's been cycled to a large number of installs/uninstalls.

Eg: No proper functioning software to sync with your PC.
Not to mention that as far as I know someone has actually made wireless sync or that there's an amazing amount of applications that allow USB drive syncing...

Third, what is the point in claiming the device does not have a feature when that feature can be obtained via a free app?

Fourth, even if this were not to be yet another iPhone comparison post, this should not be a sticky as it is not made according to PR 1.2.


And here's another most relevant example:
N900, yes it sucks (34 Users Say Thank You) from someone that doesn't even have an N900 (yes, proved long time ago somewhere in the thread and also by reading the first post)

- Scrolling anywhere is like a bunch of mini seizures, really close together. In other words, garbage. Why the hell is this not perfectly smooth like the iPhone? It's the same hardware.
- Missing features that make you go WTF: no playlists, no searching email.
- Desktop widgets are cool but take facebook and news...you get 2-3 lines that keep scrolling and no way to make the widget larger. Completely useless.
- Music player widget is great but does not work with A2DP. Why?
- RSS reader is slow as hell to update (wifi or not). Scrolling is painfull at best.
- Transitions in the OS are nice but they often turn choppy and fail altogether. If you want to use transitions see that 2 year old device...what was it again...oh yeah.
- Try playing music and going online at the same time. The choppy scrolling gets even worse. Can I still scroll in the browser? Yeah. Is it painful as hell? Yeah.

This time a complete bunch of FUD that you guys took as "constructive criticism". It actually went so far that there's a video that disproves all of the above statements as this post has been spread on as many GSM forums as you can find.

So, my beloved mods and fellow maemo users I have to ask you, are you dense?
Every time somebody shows up and says:
a) N900 is a decent device but it sucks
b) N900 is a decent device but sucks compared to the y brand I'm a fan of
you start raising them on a pedestal.

I love this community and the fact that we never censored anyone but to actually make a sticky out of a brand a vs brand b topic and call it a buyers guide? How much more naive can you get?

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

You're blowing this out of proportion.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

Nah, I'm only bolding my point and it's not the first time I'm complaining on this matter.
I agree the N900 is far from perfect and that a user can be more or less informed by the issues ahead when browsing this forum.

I never said etuoyo's post wasn't good/useful. All I wanted was for it to be a honest warning as I specified above and not a subtle variant of previous trolling posts (ahem coincidence apple related).

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

I actually believe that was his intention. Read on.

I must say I agree with this in essence, but at the same time your taking it out of proportion... and certainly attacking the moderators isn't going to help (that is how the thread titles comes off to me)

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

I only partially agree. Yes, the comparison with this iPhone everybody talks about misses the point. You're right that probably the only reason people go for the N900 is that they want a free&open phone. There's no use comparing it to non-free phones.

What I don't agree with is the Android part. Android may exist in an open source version. It's licensing make it perfectly OK to distribute most of it as proprietary software. In my book, that makes it a non-free operating system. I don't believe that people who really care about free software would consider buying an Android based phone.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

I'm going to quote that part as it's why I bought the N900, and I suspect it's also the same reason a lot of people outside Europe did. It would have to be, since the only reason you'd have heard of it is if you were using a NIT previously, or were looking for just this sort of thing.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

Attacking isn't the right word. Perhaps chill is what you could describe internettabletalk before the N900. However like it or not the users have changed a lot as having on open-source powerhouse has made users of other brands feel threatened. Why, I fail to realize but that's how it goes and cheering won't help.
http://img67.imageshack.us/img67/123...vslinux1ib.gif

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

Well you are right but as far as open goes Android has made a huge leap forward. Sure it doesn't come close to maemo but it's a start when you're looking at other OSes.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

I now believe this community has become the N900's worst enemy.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

I concur...

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

Oh, this is what really frustrates me about Android. They not only consider it, they're now dyed-in-the-wool supporters of it. So many free software people have been completely duped by Google PR image of Android the Free Software platform (just look at folks like gnuite), but the reality is about as far from that as it can be where it really matters.

Apple may be closed, but at least they're not pretending to be something they're not to subvert the free software movement.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

downplay definition down·play (-plā′)

transitive verb

to play down; minimize


down·play (dounˈplāˌ)

transitive verb down·played, down·play·ing, down·plays
To minimize the significance of; play down: downplayed the bad news.


But NOOoooooo, y'all go on and on.

A poster complains in the wrong way and you have a few agreeing , 1 post that helps and 37 assorted negatives, putdowns, and arguments.

Next thing you know a minor complaint gets more attention than honest positive facts about the frikken device.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

Are you suprised lol ALL the faults are on here and people are going to read this lot and think OMG no way am getting the N900 lol.
Will certainly sort out the men from the boys and the geeks from the android ipod fanatics lol.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

I have said it before. I believe this forum is infested with astroturfers.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

Nobody is thanking the original post for a reason. Its a work in progress phone, not mass market and people need to be informed about what they can and can't do before they drop the bucks for it.

It is a credit that its been stickied.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

The problem is the way Nokia marketed this device as a FLAGSHIP mobile computer so if they had their way it would indeed be a mass market device lol.
But very true what you said and i agree 100% that people should have been warned of the capabilities not being anywhere near that of apps etc etc of an android for example only UNTILL future development got it there.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

So Google is exactly like Nokia in this regard.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

/me slowly opens one eye.


/me goes back to sleep.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

Bec I have to agree with you on some points.

1. I do not believe it should be a sticky thread as some of the points are just opinions and not necessarily fact about the phone.

2. The thread is not up to date and so, is not a true reflection of the N900. From what I have seen on other Forums be it mobiles or not, usually a sticky thread will usually be kept up to date with the latest info.

3. Some of the points are not relevant and state "you can archive this with an app". IMO these points should not really be included. The phone does have this attribute even if Nokia did not add it.

I'm not attacking etuoyo, I appreciate every ones contribution to a forum and have even thanked him for his article. It obviously took him time to put this together and does raise some valid issues. I guess my main issue is it being a sticky but hey ho!

Regards

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

No wait i have to add one more thing.

Sometimes i just look around in here and it's just amazing how a shty piece of branded plastic with electronics inside has the powers to make people generate such a load of slipslop. Wtf are we doing here anyway.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

Mmm . . . no. Let me lay it out for you:

Nokia contributes code to existing community projects. Unlike Google, they don't go off and create their own closed-door projects whenever possible (examples like icd2 generally exist because the existing options didn't fit their requirements well enough and would've cost too much to make work). In fact, Nokia is one of the biggest drivers of mobile development in Linux. BlueZ, Mozilla, ConMan, oFono, Telepathy, GStreamer, kernel, GTK, Qt, and Scratchbox (to name a few) are all projects where Nokia or Nokia-financed contractors are major contributors in their development (especially in mobile directions). Note the only major commercially viable open source GSM stack is a Nokia/Intel project.

Unlike Google, Nokia works well with upstream. Chris DiBona's comments about their relationship with the kernel at the Linux Foundation Summit last month were revealing. He thought they were one of the best behaved companies in the industry here, and Nokia is clearly kicking their ***. Nokia is a good open source citizen that understands open source isn't there just to be abused.

Nokia's nothing like Google here—they're very nearly everything that Google pretends to be, in fact. You need to look only as far as the kernel to see how well Nokia is doing at the whole open source thing.

Re: Mods of this forum don't know when it's time to stop turning the other cheek.
 

Oh, I used to believe that, but then I saw just exactly how many times Nokia went off and chose to "create their own closed-door projects" with the N900.

For Fremantle, the plan was to open source tablet-browser-ui, at least according to http://wiki.maemo.org/Why_the_closed...s_for_packages. timeless tells us what really happened: http://mg.pov.lt/maemo-irclog/%23mae...03-16T21:52:36

If tablet-browser-ui had been open, it would've saved conny from making his own clone of the overlayed fullscreen button, based on the maemopad source Nokia put out. The funny thing about the button they included in the maemopad source? It wasn't transparent, much to the annoyance of many in that fremantle-stars thread. Even funnier is that a member of the Browser team wrote that button for maemopad. I guess if it had been released with transparency, it would've been too much like the one in tablet-browser-ui and we can't have that.

What timeless fails to realise is that they did once open neteal and browserd (tablet-browser-daemon). I guess it's the Way of Nokia to not have the latest version of their sources published in the SDK repository.
It is possible to embed the MicroB EAL in an application without neteal just through plain dlopen () but why should third party apps be forced to have higher startup times and greater memory usage, when they could just be served an instance through browserd (via neteal) which Nokia won't open the latest version of.

(For that matter, the open components of MicroB are not even developed in the open anymore. https://garage.maemo.org/plugins/scm.../?root=browser hasn't had an update in months. How do I know it's not being done in the open? Look at the file browser-eal-0.5.5/.hg/hgrc in http://repository.maemo.org/pool/fre...6.1+0m5.tar.gz)

Now, let's take some applets. The applet Memory is closed in Fremantle, like how it has been in previous releases of Maemo. Why? **** knows. It's certainly not a danger to Nokia's secrets as they know it; it's linked to all open source libraries, and it sure as hell is not a USP so I don't think Nokia would lose out too much if some manufacturer in the Far East decides to use it.
For Fremantle, it wouldn't mean much, but for previous devices, it would mean people using/wanting to use higher amounts of swap wouldn't have to hit Terminal just to do so.
Oh, and the Certificate manager applet. This is a fun one as Nokia did actually GPL this and release the source in the SDK repository. But, alas, Nokia saw fit to take it down. Open sourcing a component? We can't be having that now!

On the topic of previous devices: I think we can all ascertain (just as surely that Justin Bieber's balls'll never drop) that Nokia has no intention of bringing updates to them. Fine by me (genuinely), but where's the source to metalayer-crawler and all those other programs et al. that Nokia will never bring updates to so that someone here can do it? I'm not talking about the components that will make Nokia liable if someone decides to add kamikaze traits to BME, but components like metalayer-crawler which nearly everyone disables because it does a **** job of indexing cards with a large amount of media on 'em.

Take components like IPHB and the FM Transmitter. Nokia have contributed open source drivers for them to the kernel (congrats to them for that) but libiphb and fmtx-middleware? Uh-uh. Hell, even the Status Menu applet for it is closed source. 'Twas an annoyance for me as I did not want it to hide once the transmitter was turned off. It wasn't a particularly complicated applet so I looked at what it did and managed to write a (even if I say so myself) a damn perfect clone, even taking some better approaches to things than what the guy at Nokia was doing.

And being able to share any file to any service. In the beginning, Nokia didn't want you doing that. All http://wiki.maemo.org/Documentation/...ing_dialog_API would only contain information on how to send files via Bluetooth and email; both were already possible on previous devices.
Now, I'ma be arrogant here and say that "Using Sharing dialog API" was added because of me and Stskeeps for opening the bug, Why? You see, I'd already figured out how to bring up Nokia's undocumented Sharing Dialog in Petrovich and had released the function signatures for all the world to see. So, really, there was no point in holding back the -dev package for it and, indeed, we got to see it in Nokia's heavily-populated nokia-binaries repository. Still, no source, but truth be told, I don't think anyone has much interest in that component anyway.

No, what people would like to see is libcumulus, another closed source component, for its tagging abilities so that they can be utilized in third-party programs. But, alas, no source nor headers.

libconnui_cell. Ah, a favourite of mine. This, like its brother libconnui (which also features in previous versions of Maemo), is also closed source without any headers available for developers to use. Nokia have employed interesting logic here, as they've placed headers in the nokia-binaries repository for controlling the cellular chip.

Had the headers to this one been released, I wouldn't have pissed time away looking at undocumented D-Bus methods to change what mode the phone is in re. connecting to networks (3G/2G/Dual) and finding out how to change the Caller ID state.
Nor would I be waiting on the delivery of O2 SIM cards just so I can figure out the get_service_provider_info method. This is the third of two other undocumented methods I've looked at just so that I can retrieve the name of the current operator!
fiferboy wouldn't have also have had to write his own functions to get and interpret the data counter values.

I've just talked of a fraction of closed source components here. If Nokia really were interested in open sourcing many of theirs, they would've started with Diablo, a version of Maemo they have no plans of bringing updates to.

And the policy system. Made up of an open source component, OHM, with closed source parts. Responsible for, among many, many other things, disabling the headset button outside of a call and not allowing third party applications to play sounds in Silent mode (through a PulseAudio plugin that communicates with the Policy System; again, closed source). Now, on https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6694, I was told my way was wrong. Fine, but why the **** wasn't we told the right way? Hell, still, to this day we don't know the "right way" because that -doc package hasn't been released yet.

Here's the kicker: Nokia won't fix many bugs in applications that come with the N900, but they refuse to open source the component in question so that someone else can do it.

I do recognise Nokia's contributions to Open Source (of which there are many, like Mission Control). I think it's great that the kernel and modules are all open source on the N900 (for the N8x0, you had umac.ko - something outside of Nokia's control - and building a new cx3110 module for the N8x0 was made a fun task because of this) and I'm sure Nokia's contributions to Tracker to make it more power-friendly help people running GNOME on a battery powered device, but when looking at the amount of closed source components and headers that Nokia will keep back from you on the N900, these achievements mean nothing to me as these aren't the areas of the N900 that interest me, not in the slightest.

[Congrats to me. This is the longest post I've ever written, I believe.]