Hi all,

I have a newly purchased (less than two weeks out of the box) N800 that's crashing a little more frequently than I think it should. I think it may be caused by a problem with the touchscreen.

The general symptom seems to be: touchscreen and sound stop working, often, but not always, while there's music playing. I am not completely certain, but it may be happening more frequently while I am using it outside or generally in motion as opposed to stationary on a table.

When this happens, touchscreen no longer responds to input and the sound just dies. Locking the touchscreen and re-unlocking it makes it work again, but sound does not come back. Eventually, the N800 just blanks the screen and after two seconds shows the standard boot-up screen. It boots properly and then works fine.

I've had this happen when running nothing but Opera and the built-in Media Player. I installed a number of apps on it: Canola, Kagu, Camera (which seems to make it crash particularly often, but I've definitely had it crash without touching the camera), sshd, Xterm, Xchat, Gaim, Devicescape (which seems impotent... I must be missing something).

I've looked with top and during idle, there doesn't seem to be anything that runs abnormally. (All processes under 1%.) Mildly oddly, ps ax shows it running two copies of /usr/bin/canola-conf, /usr/bin/mediaplayer-engine and /usr/bin/metalayer-crawler -F each.

It just crashed as I was writing this post. I just had it sitting on my table in idle with wireless on and running top into my ssh'd connection. Since last boot-up, I have used Opera, Media Player, RSS reader, and Xchat that I can remember, and then left it overnight plugged in. The screen went off into standard power save, but I was unable to bring it back on with a finger touch. A button press did bring it back, and I used the lock-unlock sequence to make the touchscreen work again. Within three minutes, it just rebooted. One of the last things I saw in top was canola-conf eating 11% of CPU power; is there a known problem with Canola causing instability? Apparently I'm using "Version 1.0 Beta 2" which I am pretty sure I downloaded off their website using the one-click install button on http://openbossa.indt.org.br/canola/.

Alternatively, and this is where my real question lies, I am wondering if I may have damaged my touchscreen. The previous weekend, my N800 took a fall from a table. It first fell screen-first about 15-20 cm onto a hard plastic somewhat-rounded edge (bezel of a computer case if that helps), and then another 45 cm onto a relatively soft carpet. It seemed to work fine after that, but I am wondering if it may have caused some damage to the screen or logic boards inside. I am somewhat reluctant to open it up and see if there's any visible damage because I hope to keep my warranty. Does anyone have experience with screen-first falls of a N800?

Thanks for any replies.

Did this rebooting ever happened while connected to the power?
Or in the cases you describe, after it rebooted the power meter was to red (one unit left only)?

I would start with the battery. I have noticed that the power indicator is usually crappy and shows full power until the device dies of juice.

I don't recall it happening when on power, however, the recent crash I described happened less than an hour after I unplugged the charger after it was left plugged in overnight. I'm not too impressed with the power indicator coming from laptops' down-to-the-minute estimates, but I haven't had major problems with it, it does show power level decreasing with use. I'll keep on watching for charger/battery circumstances of crashes, thanks.

So far I have uninstalled Canola, no crashes since, but it's only been a couple hours. Let's see how it holds up.

Are you runnung the latest firmware? The first step of any purchaser should be to flash to the latest.

I would reflash given what is happening to you, and if that doesn't help, return the N800.

Agreed... you can backup what you have in case you want to go back to it, but a fresh firmware flash will help you to determine if it is a hardware problem or just a problem with some app you loaded later. Play with it for awhile without loading any new apps and see if the problem has gone away.

Yep, reflash. I was having, basically, the same issue, and a reflash cured it.

Thanks for the replies. The tablet originally came with 26-8 firmware. I didn't know better initially, so I didn't flash it to the newest, and later on I had a bunch of applications installed so I didn't want to lose it if I didn't have to.

Tablet's condition deteriorated on Monday and by the afternoon it would no longer boot properly. The farthest I got was the desktop background showing, but the sidebar and the notification/tray area were blank.

I reflashed it Monday evening with the newest available firmware (38-2). The extent of the modifications since then was creating a couple bookmarks in Opera, setting it up to connect to my gtalk account, and using a 2 GB OCZ SD card (works fine in the card reader in my laptop) in the external slot. I'm also using the 128 MB mini-SD card the tablet came with in the internal slot.

Everything worked pretty much fine. I wasn't using it as intensively as before (little apps to use). I did get it to crash once on Monday, while attempting to skip around in a youtube video. At the time I thought I skipped around too much to ask of the CPU...

I just crashed it again using nothing but Media Player this time around. Stationary on a desk. The touchscreen and sound broke as before while I was messing around with switching from library to now playing and vice versa. I think I did it repeatedly in a short time.

After re-enabling the touchscreen through lock-unlock, I tried playing some music, but the error message told me "Unable to perform the operation. Try again." Within a minute the tablet rebooted.

I wonder if the problems are just caused by poor stability of the built-in applications? Alternatively, can the SD card be messed up? Is a certain amount of instability, demonstrating itself through touchscreen problems, simply to be expected?

It just did the same thing attempting to render a stupid large PDF (2 MB, graphics in the background of the page, overall excessive). The link to high CPU usage is clear now. I'll be sending it in shortly.