Opinion after 6 hours of use. (New owner)
 

Yay! Got my tablet today. First thing: I updated it. Then added a 8Gb and 2Gb cards. Now have added a ton of stuff... including mplayer so I can can Watch Ren & Stimpy. (MP4 format.)

UPS will deliver my NavKit tomorrow. Seems they can just decide to reschedule a "two day delivery" and make it a 3 day delivery whenever they feel like it. <sigh>

Oh well... I've been busy playing with the N800 itself.

SUMMATION AND OPINION: Here is my summation and opinion of the N800 after using it for 6 hours from sight unseen. WOW... NICE. It is small but has a VERY VERY sharp screen. Going back to my regular 22" and 15" dual monitor setup HURTS MY EYES. And the laptop? Don't make me laugh.

I used RDP to log into my main computer. Then had the main machine use Citrix to get into my work computer. I lost all keyboard use... but I can put passwords into files and then cut and paste them as needed. Not really secure... but I can at least get logged on and see what is happening from remote sites.

I got e-mail going... setup up Skype (I already had an account.) I don't like the google or jabber IM... so I'll grab something else. But for now the Skype chat is okay.

I was impressed with the video and youtube stuff. After reading a lot of people claim that it had problems with those types of videos... I'm happily surprised that it seems to play them with no obvious problems.

When I hit play on the first video... the Nokai video on the unit itself... it stuttered and was awful. Of course I was copying a few gig worth of files to the internal SD card at the time. So we can see that the CPU is just at the border between good enough and too weak. (That's okay... I'd rather have 4-6 hours of unit use than 2-3 hours of faster unit use.)

So... just a fast review. It does everything I'd hoped it would. In addition I don't see any of the problems that some people have.

Now I get to figure out how to do things it's not supposed to do. <grin> Now I have to actually go read stuff... and gainroot etc. First task: Learn how to move things in the menu. I had a lot of stuff just put into the EXTRA menu.

Re: Opinion after 6 hours of use. (New owner)
 

Congrats on getting an N800, I assume the lower price swung you?

The screen IS good, isn't it? I had to take some photos of an N800 displaying pictures for a review and the screen came out looking so sharp and bright that it just looked fake. I had to put a caption on the picture saying that I hadn't photoshopped it.


Yeah, I think this is what a lot of people fail to understand about mobile devices: they all have a limited amount of battery life, so any gains in one area cause losses in another. The N800's CPU is probably the fastest it can be right now while also having a reasonable battery life. If you add a bigger battery, that makes the unit bigger and heavier. There's just no perfect solution in the mobile world, everything has a downside.

Maybe the best example was when Sony artificially capped the CPU speed of the PSP for so long, because they wanted to trade off processing power for battery life.

Re: Opinion after 6 hours of use. (New owner)
 

I have to agree with you. After I got mine and used for a day or so I was ecstatic that I got mine. Even though I paid more for mine, about $370 USD, I was not upset when the price came down. It was worth it to me to have it earlier and to get to use earlier than waiting for the price to come down. I also couldn't understand why some people were complaining about why it couldn't certain things, to me it's obvious there is no one perfect device for everybody. But for me it works out great and still after 6 Months of using it I am still exited about it and finding different new things that I can do with it that I couldn't before. Of course it doesn't do everything I want it to but then again nothing ever does, but it does do a majority of things I want very well.

Any way glad to see some positive posts about the unit and someone who is glad they made the purchase. Welcome the the nuthouse, Uhh I mean Forum,

Re: Opinion after 6 hours of use. (New owner)
 

control panel->navigation->applications, organize (TBC actual titles, I'm guessing what the English menu titles are from my native language setup)

Re: Opinion after 6 hours of use. (New owner)
 

Crud. That was too simple. Even a caveman could do it. "Hey get me a 5 year old... I need some help here with this techie thing. A freaking Altair 8800 is simple... but this newfad gooey stuff?"

I had run the navigation tool.. but had NOT seen the small "Applications" button.

OKAY... so I need something harder now... uh I want to ditch Linux and move it all to a FreeBSD kernel but keep ALL the same functionality by running it all in Linux compat mode. Anybody have a step by step FAQ for that? <evil grin>

make world; make kernel; install kernel; reboot; install world; Enjoy goodness.

Actually the price didn't hurt... but I was ready to buy at $350.00. Paying $244.00 just helped me rationalize the loss if the new version is so much better I must buy it. (And I didn't REALLY know if I'd really use it... now it's been 1 day. How did I NOT have it?)

The screen sharp enough that I might actually read some of those free PDF files available online. I've never read some of the classics.Things like: Alice in Wonderland, Jekyl and Hyde, The UNIX Hater's Handbook, stuff like that.

Re: Opinion after 6 hours of use. (New owner)
 

Tip:
The PDF reader that came with the device doesn't scroll "pages" in any zoom level so you have to press the center navigation button to get out of full screen, finger tap on the arrow at the bottom to go to next page and then press the center button on the navigation pad to get to full screen again. Evince PDF reader allows page scrolling with finger touch but it is not very stable for large PDF files and slow in rendering pages. Between those two PDF readers, I get most of my PDF eBooks covered. If you rotate right in Evince PDF reader, you can scroll pages by touch flick like iPhone photo or weather application.

Re: Opinion after 6 hours of use. (New owner)
 

"The screen sharp enough that I might actually read some of those free PDF files available online. I've never read some of the classics.Things like: Alice in Wonderland, Jekyl and Hyde, The UNIX Hater's Handbook, stuff like that."

Try Fbreader and the Project Gutenberg stuff; that should keep you busy for a few thousand years. I'm currently reading Westward Ho!, an entertaining classic about the people who shipped with Francis Drake.

(But actually, at this moment I'm playing with Puppy Linux on a 2 gig flash drive on my Dell Latitude D400. Works great, after I figured out how to boot from the flash drive.)