Thread: Basic Questions Before I Buy
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krisse is offline krisse
2007-11-20 , 22:10
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#2
Originally Posted by lny98 View Post
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?
Sorry to dodge the question, but it really does matter what you're doing!

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?


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?
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


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?
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.


I guess I'm wondering why thousands of apps aren't ready to use (disregarding screen size of course).
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.


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

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.