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Posts: 23 | Thanked: 5 times | Joined on Jan 2010 @ bay area ca
#1077
Products are not released like what you described below. Exchange server like it or not is defacto mail server for corp. You do not release it unless it is baked. You will create more confusion than winning few tinkerers. Are there good features yes abs, switched to Nokia N900 for that reason. Start using it and then it falls apart.
For ex: On Contacts : Can't group. very basic feature.
Media player : Good but , indexing bug I still cannot display jpegs photos. People can come to maemo and go through the emails and make it work. Is that supposed to be the norm here.
No unicode support to display the website in my language (Indian) : I am sure there are many other folks who have the same issue. Nokia is world leader in phone accross 46 countries and iphone supports unicode from gen 1 device. Did not have to do anything.

No Isync plugin . Getting contacts is a pain.
On ovi cannot stick my default location. Needs to constantly input it.
I can go on ...... point is not whining. You do not release a half baked product . You do that for 300/400 developers whose feedback would make it a near perfect product. I am really surprised who were the 300 developers nokia gave the product for usability testing. I question their judgement big time. I can volunteer for their next gen product and will give them real feedback .

Not all is lost if they release the software to take care of this. Coolness of N900 hype can last for a month or so or less then it will start exposing the real weakness on nokia's software and I think I suspect that is what is starting to happen to most of N900 early adopters.




Originally Posted by nightfire View Post
Jesus, people. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

If they'd held back the release until March (another 5 months), people would be whining about the delay. They released it as early as they could, and, as should be expected, the code isn't fully complete.

So they released it early to get it in the hands of users, and people yell loudly about it being incomplete!

Coding is not easy. It takes time to get it right. I know it's hard to have patience after dropping the better part of $1k on a device, but consider that for every feature that's "half-baked," 50 other features work flawlessly.

Consider:

Multimedia framework (transparent audio routing!)
Task switching
Suspend/resume cycle
Phone calls
Bluetooth handsfree/a2dp
Contact merging (incredibly difficult to implement well, and it's brilliant)
Wifi (except some advanced WEP configs)
Camera (still _and_ video, with focusing)
Input and special characters
The package distribution system
IMAP/SMTP
Desktop widgets
SMS, MSN, Gtalk, and a host of other IM protocols
FM radio (transmit and receive)
.. and a whole host of lower level services running in the background like power management, charge controller, GSM firmware loader, etc, etc.

It's an incredible amount of software packed into this little device, and it's still only a couple months on the market. The features that are badly broken can be counted on one hand, while the ones that work acceptably or perfectly are in the dozens/hundreds.

No amount of hoping will make perfect code appear... it takes effort, patience, and time.

EDIT: To make this post more constructive.... for the first couple weeks I couldn't get my exchange working either, but the Nokia PC suite worked perfectly for sync'ing my contacts and calendar. It's not ideal, and didn't sync email for me... but it at least helped. Has everyone tried that?