just to bad that screen had a design flaw in its controller...

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

I happen to think the N800 is sex-ay!

This stuff is fascinating just from a cultural point of view -- i.e., what people want in terms of who they are.

Two comments:

Someone said that non-geeks don't want to read screens. This is just untrue, witness the Kindle, which has at least been somewhat successful.

"A quick glance at your handheld will tell you (roughly ) where your friends are, what they're up to"

This is really interesting to me, because the LAST thing I want people to be able to do is check up on where I am and what I am up to, just like I don't want ANYONE to be able to contact me instantly and demand that I respond.

I wonder if it's a generation thing. I grew up during the McCarthy era, when you might be called up to inform on your friends at any time.

I think the N800 is cool looking in a late-1960's retro-moon-shot sorta way.
Also, it's not so much that the display controller had a flaw, as much as TI's OMAP System-on-Chip couldn't handle the big beautiful screen, so Nokia had to jam in an external controller to get it to work; by putting the controller off-chip, it slowed everything down and limited the throughput.

i guess i should have specificed, i was talking about the 770's "ability" to go wsod...

but then that screen is specifically designed to look as much like good old paper as can be done right now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_paper

im not that old but i can see the wish to turn said info off. but then one get strange questions like "why where your location data hidden, doing something naughty?". innocent until proven guilty? not in social life...

thing is i guess, that parents would love the technological variant of the wall clock of harry potter, showing the location of all members of the family.

and as kids grow up knowing that they have that tracking them, they will device ways to access the same data on their friends, and how to fake data so that they can appear to be an approved place, while being somewhere else entirely.

one can get used to the strangest of things...

tso,
with all of modern technology people are still a bit freaked out if you hold a camera at their face all the time.
The etiquette around how and where you can use digital devices is complex and unnerving. People stop talking when they know there is a camera or microphone in front of them.

on the computers, people seem to expect digital surveillance without question, everything is recorded and everything is available.

We create full streams of data all the time and people like to organise that.
My graffiti wall is expanding to include images and typed notes and hopefully things like scanned barcodes (by virtue of it being a default mode of the camera) and gps breadcrumbs.
Some of this data can be pushed and pulled from current online services, other things require new services to be created and I see complete device transparency, I want to have full access to my data (and let my friends see that as well) from any device and expect to have different views on different devices as I go through my day.

The online aspect is not so important personally for the other user aspects, but for my mind I need the information synced and available anywhere - i have an small noticeboard next to me I would like to replace with a touch monitor displaying my ongoing items, things im thinking about, people ive seen things I need to do and new stuff, and if I happen to do something on there, it should of course be available on my handheld.

sounds like im living a highly disorganized life in comparison

but then when i try to organize i end up drowning myself in minutiae...

you should see my desk.
I lose things all the time, its the primary reason why I want it all contained digitally.
At least I should be able to tag and rate what I do and keep ontop of it.