Thread: Does Free Fail?
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Posts: 2,869 | Thanked: 1,784 times | Joined on Feb 2007 @ Po' Bo'. PA
#42
EDIT: It took awhile for me to compose this post so forgive me if the quote has already been address or is no longer relevant..

Originally Posted by silvermountain View Post
Point is that there is a multitude of applications that are developed to 60-70%, being posted about and discussed and used by many. Then..nothing.

There is an another slew of applications that works well to 95% but with an annoying bug. Developer is gone.

Do I have to use them? No - but sometimes they are the only way to get an application for a particular purpose on the NIT.

Would I have preferred ONE application developed by company X and paid $25 bucks for it rather than four applications that ends up unfinished? Yes. Thing is I also love the community development spirit and to try out new applications - I just wish that there was a mechanism to ensure some level of continuity/contingency of community developed app. Sure open source but honestly that seems to be applicable in these situations in rather rare cases.

It just feels that it's a constant playground with players that gets bored and moves on - and a 'host' [Nokia] that is not willing to provide a) updates to the existing applications or b) new developments.

I'm a NIT user just like you. Granted only with close to 3 months of NIT experience and ZERO Unix experience before I came here. My views are just as valid and I would not be surprised if my frustration is shared by others like me.



No but I speak Swedish and lived in Helsinki for a year.


Sorry but I stopped reading your post after that as I don't think there is a common platform.
Wow! In one paragraph you, (imho) correctly assert the validity of your views but then end the post with the statement that implies if you don't agree with someone, you stop reading a post because their view is not valid.

***

It all comes down to expectations, fulfillment, and perceived value I suppose.

I was attracted to the hardware, simple as that. I have a company supplied phone that I had figured out how to BT tether to and have a home WiFi broadband connection.

5 years ago I thought Nokia meant just S40 phones in which I had no interest. I drank the J2ME kool-aid and thought Motorola had a lock on it. (boy was I wrong )
HP offered a handheld that had the H/W I needed so I bought an iPAQ 4250 and thought that I was good to go @ $400+.

Wrong!

It came with WinMo 2003 installed but no real web browser. That would be extra from a M/S pre-approved app store called Handango.

No way to easily launch apps from the home/today screen, again extra.

No way to view office docs without first converting them... extra.

No way to unload opened programs from memory... extra.

With the purchased browser, no way to tweak slow loading pages, no JAVA, no flash... extra, extra, extra.

Add a decent file manager, MP3 player, PDF viewer... extra, extra, extra.


After 9 months of use I had racked up another $300+ buying extras and was still not happy with it. I spent an additional $200 for a BT GPS receiver and TomTom navigation to run on it but the BT stack could not handle concurrent connections with my phone and the receiver very well. No worry though, that will all be fixed in the next generation of WinMo.

Woo Hoo! My troubles will all be over for another $100 more or less for the upgrade.

Wrong again!

Even though the OS continued to improve with the attention of a large corporation like M/S, the dang upgrade required more onboard memory than my then 1 year old, state of the art device had. I would need to spend another $500 on new hardware.

I didn’t invest anything more in the old H/W because I couldn’t. As soon as the upgraded OS was released, development stopped on the apps I had purchased and went into newer versions that required more memory.

***

Enter the N800 in January ’07…

My N800 took half the time to set up even with the Linux (new to me) learning curve. The apps were free and available in repositories reachable by the device wherever there is internet access. Most of the original apps still needed polish however, since that time…

The OS has evolved and had 3 or 4 major upgrades… no charge.

Personal Menu, Personal Launcher, OMWeather upgrades… no charge.

Major apps like MaemoMapper and Canola continue to improve with user contributions to the code…

And, when a new OS ships that can’t run on this h/w, a user contributed OS called MER will be available with limited support from the manufacturer.

Over the past two and a half years after the original purchase, the costs to me to operate and develop my N800 into a useful appliance have been free… as in free beer, btw.

With the conventionally marketed iPAQ I spent $900+ that I will never see again.
The N800 I use every working day.

What is it that you expect from your NIT?


Addendum: I lied about not seeing anything out of the purchase of the iPAQ. I just purchased an N810 from a member for $150 as a second device and found that my old iPAQ soft sleeve fits it pretty well
 

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