...by which I mean an average car - not a luxury car with all manner of fancy devices but something like a Camry or a Malibu or a Jetta or a Ford Focus. Which would you say is the more complicated device, an N810 or one of those cars? I have my answer and will share it later but I want to see what other people say

The N8xx. Cars do not require a computer science degree or command line inputs to operate

Seriously, I'm enjoying my N800 but I am amazed at the need to use command line inputs to really dive into the IT and run many programs. For years I've been hearing about the superiority of Linux vs MS, but at least MS advanced beyond command line inputs over a decade ago......

At least only the N8x0 gets hurt if you crash the Nokia....

What are we measuring here? Number of moving parts? or number of transistors? I would actually bet on the N8x0 for number of transistors unless the car had a DVD/Nav setup. And number of moving parts goes to the car of course. I think that OBD-II compliant engine management isn't all that complex. It probably doesn't have a dedicated ARM processor and certainly doesn't contain that much NAND flash or RAM. Having said that, I actually wouldn't be surprised if some of the newer cars that have a turbo charger, variable valve timing and/or electronically controlled AWD to have something in the processing range of the N8x0, especially since it's so cheap compared to the cost of the car and the more power you have to play with the less pain you have to go through to optimize your code. In terms of software I'm sure the N8x0 is still more complicated though. :P

How many people on this site have a computer science degree? I would bet that very few do, percentagewise. I never took one single computer class in school. In fact, they didn't have computers, just quill pens and inkwells...

My answer is slightly different. I say the car is a more "complicated" device in the sense of how demanding the engineering has to be, i.e. that there is no room for error in some of its systems. With the N8x0, by contrast, lots of little things don't work quite right or they work right inconsistently. If this were true of your brakes, your lights, your accelerator, you'd die. Car-makers vary a lot in quality, but I think they've managed to make 3000-lb. hunks of steel flying around at highway speeds pretty safe. That's pretty complicated, although not like the circuits in an N8x0.

Both the N8x0's hardware and the car's components must be made to very exacting standards to work at all. In terms of physical tolerances I'd say the N8x0 hardware would be more demanding. Even the tolerances in the cylinders in the engine have lots more "wiggle room" than the N8x0's CPU: hundredths of a centimeter vs nanometers. And anyone with enough patience and a basic repair manual can trace all the vacuum lines in the engine compartment or all the wiring in the car for that matter. Try understanding what's electrically going on in the CPU without a good electrical engineering background.

Actually, if you look at it from a question of how much you'd have to teach a lay-person to get them to understand how the whole system works, the part of the car that would take the longest to explain would probably be the engine management computer. It and the CD-player/stereo are probably the only things on the same order of complexity as the N8x0.

Neither, people just expect both to work flawlessly off the lot/out of the box and would rather be helpless than learn something.

(I'm talking more about cars, *every* car owner should know how to change the oil... and tranny fluid... and cylinder head.)

I've been using linux since the 1.x kernel days and windows since 3.0 (and DOS before that). I'm very comfortable in both of those environments, so I don't "fear" the command line.


I think I've had to go there exactly once, and that was to fix my missing offline mode issue. I've installed a ton of programs without going to the command line, and I don't know why anyone really would. Of course I'm content to wait for applications to show up in the repository system as well.

To the question at hand, I don't think there's any question that if you broke out the number of components in an n800 at the transistor level and the number of parts and components down to the transistor level that a standard (non-satnav) car probably doesn't have as many parts. Take into account software, and I think the n800 is easily a more complicated device.

However, I think it takes a lot more effort to design, certify, produce, maintain and support a car - any car - than it does an n800. So in that sense, the n800 is a less complicated device. And let's not forget that you could easily install an n800 in a car, if you so choose, and that would make the whole debate a moot point.

A car is more complex. Linux (and the tablet) is dead simple if you just learn a little about it.