I think it is time to DEFINE what is called power on/off enigma.

Start from myself. My N800 will NOT do NO squat when it has the power on/off enigma, i.e. dead. There is no light, no hands, no animation or whatever, you can keep pressing the power button and pray, there is absolutely NO NOTHING. Period. That is my understanding of this power on/off enigma. My solution: plug it in and wait, it will always turn on after awhile, so far.....

Now, we start to see people posting, saying their N8x0 gets only blue light, or only hands, or hands and blue light or what-not combinations, I would NOT classify that as power on/off problems. Instead I would call that as boot up problems. And, if you see only partial booting, i.e., Nokia logo, or hands, and the tablet turns black, I have seen that before, no sweat, your battery is low. In that situation, you do not have boot up problem nor power on/off enigma. akd: what do you think? Or what is your tablets' symptoms?



bun

I had the same power on/off issue as Bun. The device did not respond to anyhting until I plugged the device in and waited....and waited....

Agreed, plus that the only actually successful fix (i.e. one that isn't just a coincidence that it happened to turn on at around one of the times it was tried) for this described in this thread is to return the unit as faulty and get a working one.

I do not think any sensible user will argue against sending it back as the ultimum solution. What I, or some of the users here, would like to avoid this pathway if possible and 'tough' it out till a software fix. For the time being, I have a reboot switch on my screen top, and have been able to use the tablet as normal as it can, and reboot anytime I would like to. So the power on/off does not bother me any more, except when I need to switch MMC cards, then I have to turn the tablet off and pray.


bun

Sorry if I haven't read this ENTIRE thread, but I was sure my N800 had h/w problems of a smilar nature, plus odd clicking noises, and flashing to OS2008 'healed' it all. Be sure you've tried that.

I got mine back a few days ago from Buy.com. So far, so good! It does things the other one didn't do... like finish charging and tell me to unplug.

UPDATE - turned the IT off cause I didnt have my cell phone charger and it didn't turn on right away every time. What I said below does not apply to the problem.
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disclaimer - I have no idea if what I did and solving the power on/off enigma are related.

My N810 had this problem until I performed the operating system update. Now it turns on every time. This update to OS2008 has to be done in red-pill mode.

I used to be afraid to turn it off as it would not power up immediately but now does every time.

MY OS is still OS2008 vers 2.2007.50-2

How to update the OS in red-pill mode......?

Try this thread

http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...+system+update

Guys, I know a forum is not the best way to share information but as I have posted before, this power up thing has been identified as a software related bug by the developers. Look here: https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2673

They say that it's timing a problem in the OMAP initialization code. (OMAP is the processor, or more precisely the SoC in the tablets.) It seems that the timings are not totally off, so some devices work and some don't. They are not totally identical even if they are built from the same parts. Some blogger, for instance, had a hack, that was to put the device into the freezer for some time. If cold (I mean physically) the device would consistently turn on while on room temperature it would consistetnly NOT turn on. That actually helped the develpers to indentify the problem. Cooling the device changed some parameters of the electronics and the timing issue went away.

Now everyone can decide themself if they want to return it, which very probably results in getting one that works with the current software, or wait for a fix. For some of us not having the device for weeks is not really an option or at least is a worse compromise than waiting for a few more weeks or even months.

Another note to every user from the same thread on the bug tracker: there's no point in turning of the device for short periods of time. Short period means a few days. One of the developers noted that if teh device doesn't run any application (including desklets) that periodically wake up to do some work and the network and the screen are off then the device uses less energy during a few days than during the boot up process.

For those of us having this problem it would make life easier and more secure if there was a reboot option in the system menu that pops up when pushing the power button. I already had two cases when the device wouldn't react to anything but the power button and the screen lock latch (once it ran out of memory and in the other case the browser went nuts and eat all the processor time). As far as I know the system menu is modifiable by editing an XML file. I'll try to do it and then post the result here.