So my n800 arrived on Thursday, and I've been slowly migrating stuff across from my Zaurus. In general I am extremely impressed with the IT. It does everything I want ... GPE PIM has all the functionality I need, FB Reader I was using on the Z anyway, Canola is really nice. I'm looking forward to getting Mapper working.

Which leads me on to the only area where I am really disappointed with the device, and that is its audio quality.

The Z's audio playback is superb. Silent is silent. The n800 has this really annoying hiss. Maybe I wouldn't hear it if I was using the supplied headphones, but I have a set of Shure ear buds.

I'd be interested to know if this is common to all devices, or if anyone has a view about whether this is a hardware or software issue.

I've been reading these forums for a week or two now. Its interesting to see how much discussion parallels the threads that can be found on the Zaurus forums - possibly bricked machines, lack of a good PIM suite, perceived instability etc... I almost feel at home. Have a look at http://www.oesf.org/forums to see what I mean.

I was using Zaurus's for several years. I started with a 5500, then a c760. I still have a c3100 which I'm selling shortly.

In some ways, when Sharp produced the Zaurus originally, they seem to have had similar goals to Nokia, I'm sure for very different reasons. But at some stage, they missed the point of open source, and gradually gave less and less support to the developer community, so that now most have drifted off to do other things.

I think Nokia are in danger of making the same mistakes. Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see Nokia really engaging with the community. At least Sharp, in the early days, had someone who actively watched the forums and offered assistance.

Sharp, with the Zaurus, produced a really nice device for its time. It would still be the best out there if they had built in wireless and bluetooth, and increased the size of the screen a bit. But instead the stopped making it.

They sat back and waited to see if the developer community would produce the killer apps for free, and of course that didn't really happen.

I see history repeating itself. Let me know if I'm talking nonsense ...

Cheers,

Mike.

I used to have a Zaurus sl-5500. I think Nokia are a lot more involved than Sharp ever were. In the UK Sharp only launched one device (excluding dev 5000), if memory serves me right, they only gave one update and didn't bother officially providing version 3 ROM, you had to get it from the US site and ignore the warning about being suitable for US models only. The support for the Zaurus outside of Japan quickly died and I think that meant for many developers a sign that the future was limited. Nokia on the other hand have been around longer than a year and still going strong, with a new device launched. There appears to be positive moves to improve on the software with recruitment still ongoing.

My only concern with Nokia is that there seems to be more hardware quality issues than you used to see with Sharp devices. WSOD on the 770 and what seems more common touchscreen issues on the N800.

As for Nokia staff helping out in the forums, I've found that they tend to post to the maemo mailing lists or use of blogs.

Rich

I'm also an old Zaurus user, and I find my N800 much much more useful - even though the Z had well-functioning Java, a better (complete) backup system, and 100% total absolute never-failing stability - but I think these things can be fixed on the N800, given some more time. I can live without Java a while more, the backup isn't critical as it's fairly easy to reinstall from repos, and the occasional reboot doesn't damage anything. The Java stuff needs somebody actively porting it, the reboot may already be fixed by Nokia for the next version (at least it was hinted that the cause was known), we'll see about the rest.

I've heard mention of the hiss, but I have yet to experience it on any of the N800s I've examined.

I found that the hiss occurred when I used an inexpensive patch cable. The connector jack has actually 4 poles with 1 of them used for the microphone. The cheap patch cable jacks I was using did not precisely line up with the stereo contacts. The hiss may have been form the microphone circuit bleeding in.

The problem went away when I used a patch with higher quality mini jacks.
Hope this helps.

That makes sense... thanks for posting!