Thread: iPhone's here... Say Goodbye to Nokia
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Karel Jansens's Avatar
Karel Jansens is offline Karel Jansens
2007-06-25 , 12:51
Posts: 3,220 | Thanked: 326 times | Joined on Oct 2005 @ "Almost there!" (Monte Christo, Count of)
#61
Originally Posted by sapporobaby View Post
Thanks Bernard. My actual first evaluation of the N800 was for a customer. The US military. They are looking into different devices with different applications, ease of use, robustness, durability, applications, etc.... In its current incarnation the N800 is not ready for this. The ability to sync contacts and have calendaring info is crucial for military applications. Without these basics the N800 is a non-starter. As for the other issues, touch screen, I did not personally have this but have read about many that did have it. Bad batch maybe. I did get the reboot cycle of death, and the crash and burn quite often. In its current state I could not recommend the N800.
If it was for the military, I'd have thought it would make more sense to look at it from a primarily hardware point of view. I can't imagine the soldier boys relying on regular Internet for their communications.

Since the N800 can essentially run any flavour of Linux interface on top of the built in stuff (see the KDE miracle), it'd be wiser for them to set it up to use some kind of sooper-dooper intranet only the brass knows about, in which case most of your points of criticism are moot. Even the camera could be used as an emergency "look-over-Grunt's-shoulder" assistent.

Then again, before the military would be interested, a heck of a lot of ruggedizing would have to happen to the N800, which I don't think is feasible with the current model (ironically, the underdog 770 form factor was much more forthcoming in this respect).

As an aside: I've had my N800 since february and I have had exactly none (zero, 0) of the issues reported in this forum. I have flashed it twice sofar without any hardship (granted, always from an Ubuntu desktop, running in WmWare in Windows XP) and I have been known to install version 0.1 software on it from quite unreliable sources. It just won't crash.

To say that my N800 is more stable than my 770 would be akin to stating that the Canadian Shield is geologically slightly more stable than the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.