I just read a recent thread about how the GPE Calendar alarm is unreliable, and, worst case, goes off hours after it was supposed to, and of course YOU have to remember to keep it running if you want it to work at all. As a PDA, the N800 is disappointing. Palm is in a different league altogether.

The N800 is not marketed as a PDA.

No, it's not marketed as a PDA. However, it should be marketed for what it happens to be: "A Programmable Computing Device, use it for anything that can be done with a PCD you can think of, and expect to use it for new exiting things you hadn't thought of". Instead it's marketed as "do this, don't do that".

i switched to n800 (os2008, gpe) from palm zire 31.

palm zire has simply better calendar and todo list than gpe, but for basic functionality, gpe is ok.

what's worse than palm:

- starting apps is quite slow (1-2 secs instead of instant starting in palm)
- UI could be simplyfied
- tasks have no advanced options, such as repeating and alarms, priority is almost unusable
- tasks on palm have more filter, such as those based on date
- syncing with desktop (not critical for me, for now) (not sure about backup)
- palm apps are more reliable, gpe crashes sometimes
- on my small zire 31 i can see 11 tasks in standard view, in gpe todo i see 10 tasks (12 in fullscreen)
- gpe todo list uses too much of screen estate for "status" column (in progres/not started/completed)
- i don't know about alarms, i do not usually use them

as far as i know, there is no other solution than gpe right now than gpe for os2008. there are more pim apps for os2007 and they may come to 2008 as well.

I came to the N800 from a few years of Palm lifedrive use so Im used to both chrashes and very long startuptime of apps!

I agree with you that the todo app is bad, I find it completly worthless since I could not even sort my tasks. The calender is a bit better as long as you dont try to do anything more complex then adding items.. try to move an item between 2 calendars and the interface gets so compressed that it collapse.

I think one of the biggest problem with the opensource community is that the developers tend to focus more on advanced backend functionality then on getting the userinterface to work smooth and effective.

Whoever made the GPEtask I bet he dont use it himself!

You are right, but wouldn't it be nice to have a (much) simpler way to write programs for the tablets?

I thought that Eagle was going to do this at one time, but the project seems to have gone dark.

What we need is 'Visual Python for the N8**'

Well, I agree with that. But as far as I can tell it's pretty easy to write applications with PythonGTK or what it's called - for sure some of the quite advanced applications I see are all written with this. The problem for me is just that I'm quite unable to adjust to using Python, but that's just me. I don't think it can get much simpler than that -- if only I had been a Python guy.

For myself, I plan to use the Vala compiler for most of what I'm developing (for OS2008, when I get there).