I really suspect that the sluggishness of PDF viewing is because floating point is emulated in software. Clearly Nokia is using hardware, specifically the OMAP-1710, for which they already have a volume purchasing agreement, until they can figure out how successful the product will be. And I suspect strongly that the OMAP-1710 lacks floating point. The next model should have a faster processor, with floating point, and more RAM. The OMAP-3430 (550 MHz) has it (and how much is TI going to charge for that monster?) I think the OMAP-2430 doesn't. Notice that I'm not saying the machine is a slug. It takes slightly longer for the stripped-down Opera web browser on the ITB to start and display an easy page, than for the full Opera to do the same on my laptop (Pentium-M 1.6 GHz). That means that the processor is [probably] properly scaled for the software it's running and for the storage device available. But there's this one issue that really holds back an important class of applications, that needs to be improved in the next model.
Recent Compaq (HP) iPaqs have a fingerprint reader. If reliable this would be a whole lot more convenient than the numeric lock code. Some business uses of a PDA necessarily involve sensitive information, and it's important to keep it out of enemy hands, enemies who steal your PDA. BIOS PASS NUMBER: If a casual thief re-flashes the filesystem image and BIOS, does this reset the BIOS pass number, resulting in a working ITB? --James F. Carter <jimc@math.ucla.edu>
You can't hack what isn't there. In this context, if the ITB isn't running any inet daemons, those daemons can't be hacked. But it's inevitable that it's going to be used for peer-to-peer connections, or other uses that nobody has thought of yet. I would feel a whole lot more comfortable with a complete firewall. I went to put my standard firewall on the ITB and was told (for the nat table), "Table does not exist." (Do you need to insmod?) Perhaps iptables or your kernel needs to be upgraded? The iptables utility has a complete set of setting modules; I'd really like to see a complete set of runtime kernel modules to go with them. --James F. Carter <jimc@math.ucla.edu>
Nokia should grease the wheels for a port of the Skype VOIP software to Maemo. It may not be happening, however. Skype is one of the leading reasons people give for buying a Nokia 770, until they find out there's no software for it. The recommendation for Skype is not to be interpreted as discouraging porting other VOIP software. But Skype's advantage is that for a very modest fee, they will bridge your call to PSTN land lines or mobile phones. While I encourage do-it-yourself VOIP users to make such a bridge for themselves, I believe this capability is rare.
Backing Up Everything It should be possible to find and back up all relevant data. When I horked my root filesystem I was able to restore most settings. The ones which I've noticed are missing so far are these: A) Web bookmarks, in /usr/share/osso- B)Bookmarks/bookmarks/MyBookmarks.xml, mode 666, hiss, boo. C) The glyphs themselves seemed to have been restored, but not the Handwriting Shortcut CONTENT. D) X.509 certificates, in /usr/share/certs/certman.cst Everything involved with user data or user preferences in applications, like bookmarks and glyphs, should be in the user's home directory; everything changeable that's involved with machine configuration, such as the display brightness and the WLAN connection list, should be in a well-defined directory, probably a subdirectory of /etc, such as /etc/osso.
Take some hints from the guys that did TCPMP. They managed to turn a Treo into a video playing device. It is just amazing. The 770 hardware should be capable of so much more.
Well, my expectations & hopes for the video player are partially based on a potential bit of information on the 770 video controller. It seems that it may use the Epson SD13472 controller and thus it may possibly allow for setting the full screen mode to 400×240 for video, and double buffering the image. Since any video playback on the 770 is currently much less than 400×240, there is some potential there for significant improvement - IMHO ---ubergEEk