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The N900 is now 15 years old! (8)
to Nokia N900 by whayong - 14 hrs, 13 mins ago -
Sailfish OS for the Motorola Moto G7 Power (XT1955-5) - (ocean) (4)
to SailfishOS by Maemish - 5 days, 10 hrs ago - more...
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2010-07-03
, 15:53
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Posts: 724 |
Thanked: 1,255 times |
Joined on Nov 2007
@ Cambridge, UK
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#62
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Originally Posted by gerbick
This is something I completely agree with, the core UX needs to be FOSS IMO. I'm not talking about the stupid little sketch application, or any of the actual "Applications". I mean the dial UI basically the system functions should be FOSS.
Forgive me for quoting the person I quoted, my statement isn't directed to that person at all; however it's a general inquiry where I'm either overlooking something or totally oblivious to something. Neither is new to me.
However... if the community can make Maemo, any iteration of it, as polished as they wish it to be; why is it not as polished as some members would want it to truly be? The problems are very minor, you can overclock it for a better experience, change the transitions... but those aren't really polishing as much as helping the platform along.
To me, polishing would be... well, eradicating the existing bugs that are hampered with WONTFIX tags. Hit Bugzilla if you're missing my point on that. Or... totally changing the UI, to make it leaner or more versatile - the recent ApMeFo is a great example of this in motion. But those level of apps are far and few in-between. And the bits that really need polishing - incoming phone call, look at in portrait and that delay for instance - will more than likely never happen because that bit is closed.
So how can this community really polish Maemo 5 when the parts that need it the most - besides Modest - are really closed?
On the other hand, we can rewrite callui and drop it in pretty easily.
PS. At least I believe it to not be _too_ difficult
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2010-07-03
, 16:06
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Posts: 267 |
Thanked: 408 times |
Joined on May 2010
@ Austria
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#63
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Originally Posted by kureyon
When one of the main arguments is that Nokia is marketing this as a smartphone - then the fact that Nokia is NOT marketing it as a smartphone seems pretty relevant to me...
How or what Nokia market it as is irrelevant. When they launched the N93 (or was it the N95?) their marketing nonsense was something like "It's what the computer has become".
What is relevant here is whether they have put in love and passion to make it a polished product. Where features are complete and work as advertised and there are no nasty surprises.
As far as we know, they were given the task to design a device that will combine the power of a pocket Linux computer with the advantage of having a SIM card inserted - and I dare say they did a pretty good job at fulfilling that task.
Actually, for a pocket computer, there's by far more out-of-the-box applications installed than I would have thought. And it's by far more "pretty" than a pocket Linux computer would have had to be.
But the fact is that all Nokia's phones for the past 5 years at least are works in progress and most are never finished and are abandoned in favour of the next new phone.
This is more of a UI issue. It's obvious the people who made maps for the N900 didn't read the maemo UI guidelines.
Apple: because they use a traffic light
Cannonical (the guys behind Ubuntu): because they use up and down arrows
Opera: because they use down and down-left arrows
Exactly. The average user is used to the "fullscreen" button having an arrow pointing in a NW direction. Along comes maps and decides that having the arrow pointing SE would be a good idea, and having it pointing NW would toggle it back to non-fullscreen mode.
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2010-07-03
, 16:14
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Posts: 670 |
Thanked: 747 times |
Joined on Aug 2009
@ Kansas City, Missouri, USA
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#64
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Originally Posted by kureyon
That's your opinion I guess. I never had a Symbian phone so I can't speak to those. But I've found the Maemo UI to be much more intuitive and faster to negotiate around than Android no matter how much I fussed with customizing it or even the supposedly ever so user-friendly iPhone. It's not perfect, but some very good thought went into Maemo 5.
The simple answer is that Nokia programmers suck. Plus they have no idea of usability.
...what about the ability to select more than 1 app at a time to install/uninstall? After all it can already update multiples apps in one go.
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Registered Linux user #266531.
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2010-07-03
, 16:19
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Posts: 267 |
Thanked: 408 times |
Joined on May 2010
@ Austria
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#65
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Originally Posted by tswindell
I can only second that.
This is something I completely agree with, the core UX needs to be FOSS IMO. I'm not talking about the stupid little sketch application, or any of the actual "Applications". I mean the dial UI basically the system functions should be FOSS.
But that's not really a problem of the N900 not being polished, but rather a problem of the N900 not being as open as it SHOULD be.
Though, then again:
On the other hand, we can rewrite callui and drop it in pretty easily.
PS. At least I believe it to not be _too_ difficult
We don't have any chance of changing the closed source applications, but a lot of the functionalities those closed source applications address can be re-created through the Maemo libraries, so it's possible to write a new, better application for it.
Why didn't anybody do so yet? Because we need more developers, but looking at the various "free software = junk" and "Maemo is dead" threads I fully understand why others don't want to start developing for Maemo...
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2010-07-03
, 16:31
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Posts: 63 |
Thanked: 11 times |
Joined on Oct 2009
@ greece
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#66
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i dont know if this was answered between page 4-7 didnt read after that ,
but multi email selection was/is available since day 1 ..
when u go to mail app > mail account > inbox
tick the inbox ( mail name ) , and select delete , a new window will pop up , so u can multy select mails for deletition .
dont know how u could miss that .
as for the app manager , yeah its slow , some time too slow , specialy when u go to check for updates etc .. when installing an app and then have to wait for the hole list to be refreshed again , but i can live with that .
but multi email selection was/is available since day 1 ..
when u go to mail app > mail account > inbox
tick the inbox ( mail name ) , and select delete , a new window will pop up , so u can multy select mails for deletition .
dont know how u could miss that .
as for the app manager , yeah its slow , some time too slow , specialy when u go to check for updates etc .. when installing an app and then have to wait for the hole list to be refreshed again , but i can live with that .
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2010-07-03
, 16:32
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Posts: 474 |
Thanked: 283 times |
Joined on Oct 2009
@ Oxford, UK
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#67
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This thread isn't "was I mis-sold the device" or "was I stupid because I expected something else": it is "will it ever be a polished product". How it's sold and even what people expect is not relevant to that question. So please drop the "you were told it's not a smartphone" distraction. A smartphone is, in any case, a rapidly evolving concept which *includes* mobile computing functionality nowadays. It's reasonable to expect both in one package.
Personally I'm quite happy with the "phone" functionality. Sound quality is excellent, phone controls work quite well, dialing is easy. As a phone, it's one of the best I've used. Contacts are a bit limited and annoying, but that's true on most phones.
It's the "mobile computer" part which is showing lack of polish, imho.
Following is just one example:
Since updating to PR1.2, the device freezes for a few seconds every so often. Occasionally it does it in mid transition, so you can clearly see it's doing something odd or badly implemented. There isn't anything unusual running in the background or taking up RAM as far as I can tell.
Usually it happens in the browser - I touch the screen to scroll a bit or click on a link, and there isn't even a feedback click. After a few seconds it unfreezes, and there's a rapid burst of clicks - all those touches queued up in the interval.
Sometimes the result is what I thought I was touching isn't what it registers. Last time I wrote a long (and imho interesting ;-) post to a forum, my simple wish to touch the bottom-right fullscreen icon resulted, a few seconds later (because it froze), in a delayed click preceded by a screen rotation which caused the browser to register my "fullscreen" as "go back", thereby deleting my half an hour of writing before it was posted. Very annoying, very crap behaviour.
When it didn't freeze (before PR1.2), it was still possible to touch the wrong UI elements if you're lying on your back and it decides to rotate because the angles are borderline (fair enough), because you touch before the (unexpected) rotation and it registers on the UI element in that position after the transition. Result: mis-clicks. But it's much worse since the random freezes.
A "polished" N900 wouldn't have those behaviours, and if such a behaviour slipped in, it would be treated as a bug and fixed *quickly* because that's what polish is all about: attention to detail, caring about those details, getting it just right so it's a pleasure to use.
That's what seems to be missing: That careful attention to details, and caring about them.
Personally I'm quite happy with the "phone" functionality. Sound quality is excellent, phone controls work quite well, dialing is easy. As a phone, it's one of the best I've used. Contacts are a bit limited and annoying, but that's true on most phones.
It's the "mobile computer" part which is showing lack of polish, imho.
Following is just one example:
Since updating to PR1.2, the device freezes for a few seconds every so often. Occasionally it does it in mid transition, so you can clearly see it's doing something odd or badly implemented. There isn't anything unusual running in the background or taking up RAM as far as I can tell.
Usually it happens in the browser - I touch the screen to scroll a bit or click on a link, and there isn't even a feedback click. After a few seconds it unfreezes, and there's a rapid burst of clicks - all those touches queued up in the interval.
Sometimes the result is what I thought I was touching isn't what it registers. Last time I wrote a long (and imho interesting ;-) post to a forum, my simple wish to touch the bottom-right fullscreen icon resulted, a few seconds later (because it froze), in a delayed click preceded by a screen rotation which caused the browser to register my "fullscreen" as "go back", thereby deleting my half an hour of writing before it was posted. Very annoying, very crap behaviour.
When it didn't freeze (before PR1.2), it was still possible to touch the wrong UI elements if you're lying on your back and it decides to rotate because the angles are borderline (fair enough), because you touch before the (unexpected) rotation and it registers on the UI element in that position after the transition. Result: mis-clicks. But it's much worse since the random freezes.
A "polished" N900 wouldn't have those behaviours, and if such a behaviour slipped in, it would be treated as a bug and fixed *quickly* because that's what polish is all about: attention to detail, caring about those details, getting it just right so it's a pleasure to use.
That's what seems to be missing: That careful attention to details, and caring about them.
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2010-07-03
, 16:38
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Posts: n/a |
Thanked: 0 times |
Joined on
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#68
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A "polished" N900 wouldn't have those behaviours, and if such a behaviour slipped in, it would be treated as a bug and fixed *quickly* because that's what polish is all about: attention to detail, caring about those details, getting it just right so it's a pleasure to use.
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2010-07-03
, 18:01
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Posts: 61 |
Thanked: 23 times |
Joined on May 2010
@ Dallas, Texas
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#69
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I have read other people complaining about the email feature. I just don't use it. The N900 is a great internet device, so I use web based mail, and the built email just notifies me when I get a new one. I am using gmail in the full normal web mode and it works great.
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2010-07-03
, 18:22
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Posts: 52 |
Thanked: 15 times |
Joined on Jul 2010
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#70
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I love my N900....yet am not someone who really understands this whole brand loyalty stufff......
i like the device for what it is...thats why i bought it ....i love the landscape UI..more like a computer....better than the meego UI which seems more phone oriented....but if thats what is needed for nokia to expand its profit margin thats what they would probably do ..in other words dumb down the device which is a shame .....
i like the device for what it is...thats why i bought it ....i love the landscape UI..more like a computer....better than the meego UI which seems more phone oriented....but if thats what is needed for nokia to expand its profit margin thats what they would probably do ..in other words dumb down the device which is a shame .....
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I have a theory that Nokia employees don't use Nokia phones- most probably use iphones