Basic Questions Before I Buy
 

Been reading about the 800 and 810, and am all excited and think I'm about to purchase one. But, I have some questions (about the 800)

1. Battery Life: I know with batt life, your mileage may vary so to speak, but are there easy ways to get longer life? Can you easily swap batteries? Will the cell phone booster things work?

2. Linux/Unix: I've read all sorts of great applications that work on it, but what doesn't work, and more importantly, why doesn't it work? For example, I read Open Office doesn't work on it. Is it because of limitations in the Java VM? Is it because of RAM memory? (PS: It's not that I want to run OO on it, by the way). I guess I'm wondering why thousands of apps aren't ready to use (disregarding screen size of course).

3. PDF reader: A main app for me would be as an e-book reader. Will the PDF reader render pretty much any PDF of any size?

I'm hoping the Palm VM works well. That's what made me make the decision to buy. Say what you want about other platforms, there is a lot of great, incredibly useful, stuff that I have on my Treo that I would love to run.

Thanks in advance...

Re: Basic Questions Before I Buy
 

Sorry to dodge the question, but it really does matter what you're doing! :p

For example I listen to internet radio a lot on my tablet, which means the screen is switched off most of the time, which saves battery life.

Also bear in mind that the N800 is about to receive an OS upgrade from OS 2007 to OS 2008. This may add longer battery life, as updates tend to enhance the power-management. You will be able to upgrade your N800 at home through your PC, the new OS is free.

Swapping batteries is very easy indeed, the back cover has a very smooth mechanism and the batteries slide in and lift out.

I'm not sure what you mean by phone booster, can you give a link to an example?


Linux (which is different from Unix incidentally) is the core of the tablet's operating system, but it has a Nokia-developed platform called Maemo built on top of that. Generally speaking, software has to be written specially for Maemo in order to work on the tablet. Because it's based on the Linux core it's usually very easy to port applications from desktop versions of Linux, but not all programs have been ported like this.

If an application has been written for Maemo, and more importantly your tablet's version of Maemo, then it should work.

The 770 tablet uses a version called OS 2006, the N800 currently uses OS 2007 but there will soon be a free upgrade to OS 2008 available, and the N810 uses OS 2008.

You can download most stable Maemo compatible software from the maemo.org site:

http://maemo.org/downloads/

The software is pretty much all free and open source, so you can download as much of it as you want.

Here's a tutorial on how to add software using just your tablet:

http://tabletschool.blogspot.com/200...lling-new.html


It's not really RAM or Java, it's just that there is no maemo version of Open Office yet.

The tablet doesn't have Java VM, but that doesn't matter that much because most websites (such as Gmail, YouTube etc) use Javascript, not Java. The tablet is compatible with Javascript and Flash.


Essentially, one flavour of Linux isn't necessarily compatible with all other flavours of Linux. They're related, and it's easy for programmers to convert one flavour to another, but they're not "out of the box" compatible with each other.


I haven't had any problems reading ebooks or emagazines, but again I don't know how huge your ebooks are! :D

Incidentally, you might want to try some of the third party PDF readers from http://maemo.org/downloads/ . They're free, and I find them faster than the built-in reader.

Re: Basic Questions Before I Buy
 

Swapping batteries requires a shutdown and reboot - besides that (which might be undesirable while watching a movie or tracking a GPS route), it is trivial. External battery packs work - Nokia even have some as officially supported accessories.


OO does not run even in its Java-free variant because of its huge memory footprint, waste of screen estate and issues with input methods in a highly moving target, where enormous porting efforts would have to be repeated every few months. Which pretty much sums up the reason why many other applications haven't been ported either - stuff that uses other library suites or its own library system will mostly fail on space, display or input issues, making them practically useless.

Java, BTW, does run - but only in a variety of somewhat less useful environments, a JSE runtime engine is still missing, presumably due to licensing concerns with the Sun JSE and portability issues with the free alternatives.

PDF and evince together can handle any useful unencrypted PDF file - what does not work are PDFs with embedded scripting, and worse abuses of the format like bulk text made up entirely from drawing primitives or PDFs merely wrapping huge scanned images.

Sevo

Re: Basic Questions Before I Buy
 

Krisse: Thank You So much:

1. Sorry I didn't give an example of how I'll use it. You are correct that it will vary.
2. As to the phone booster, a number of companies sell external packs that one can use to recharge their phone/device. I believe there is one available.
3. As to the Linux question, I am a technical person, somewhat familiar with Unix/Linux, and I guess I was wondering what is 'left' out. I am sorry to see that a true Java SE VM is not available as of yet. I hope this gets solved.
4. As to my ebooks, I have a number of technical ebooks that are 400-500 pages long, with some graphics (but no scripting). I read a thread where PDF's can be about 100 or so pages, and this would really be too small for me. What can I say, today's programmer's are not as smart as yesterday's. In the early 1980's, Wordstar (my word processing program of choice) could edit documents thousands of times the size of RAM (and we are talking 64K!). I'm getting old.

Thanks again.

Re: Basic Questions Before I Buy
 

Sevo:

Thanks so much for your reply. I'm very glad that changing batteries is trivial. I have no problem carrying a spare when needed (or an external booster).

As said above, I'm dissapointed that there is no Java SE VM available, and I hope that is rectified soon. Technically, if the Java VM can't run on a 400mhz CPU, with 128MB of RAM and 800x600 screen, then an original 'ideal' for Java has been lost. Of course, Open Office might be incredibly slow, but heck, it should run. Not a deal breaker of course, but it would be nice.