One for me , please.

Here is the link to the N900 manual:
http://davestechshop.net/sites/daves...-US_es-LAM.pdf

Let me know if there are any problems downloading it.

Hi all,

My name is Harri Suhonen, and I work at Nokia Markets, Care.

First of all, thank you all for the feedback regarding the US English version of the User guide, I will forward the issues raised in this thread to the people concerned in Nokia.

For me personally, it's interesting to see such high interest for the User guide, and I'm glad to see that the maemo.org community cares about the quality of Nokia Support, even though you may not need the User guide yourself . It really is a sign of passion for the Maemo devices.

Of course, the purpose of having a User guide for any Nokia product is at least three-fold: 1) it's a way to help users to solve problems they may encounter, 2) it serves as a reference guide, and 3) it's a way to enhance feature usage. For the less tech savvy people or those unfamiliar with Maemo, browsing thorugh the user guide may give them information about features they, for some reason or another, were not aware of when buying the device. The Nokia N900 comes with a rich feature set, and in my opinion, and also from the users’ point of view, it’s good that these features are introduced and the usage of the device explained in a single document.

Daveb70, you replied that 100% of the users never read the manual. I acknowledge the fact that for the really tech savvy people, and especially within the developer community, this may be true, but we also need to keep the whole life-cycle of the product in mind, and that support is given to those people who need it. The Nokia N900 will surely be bought by people who have never used a Maemo device before, or never even used a Nokia device before, so in that sense user guides do serve their purpose.

In the end, it may be that some people don't ever read the user guide, but at least it's reassuring for them to know that if there are issues with the device, the user guide is there to help them. Unfortunately, errors may end up in the User guide, for some reason or another, but I just want to assure that these things don't happen because we wouldn’t care for the quality of the guides because “nobody reads the user guides” - on the contrary, accuracy is our top priority in regards to the guides, too.

It is also worth remembering that in many countries, the local legislation and the consumer protection laws require a printed manual in the sales package: it's there so that the device can be sold in your country in the first place, and that you can buy this great device when it hits the stores

Thank you.

@HSuhonen
Is this the final version of the user guide? There is no word on line change /second voice line in that guide, therefore I guess that the N900 does not support Alternate Line Service? Thats really sad! Why is that?

HSuhonen is not responsible of any feature available or missing in the N900. Please concentrate on the discussion about the User Guide itself and the dialog will be more productive. Thanks!

HSuhonen, the manual we were downloading and commenting on here was removed from the Nokia server a few days ago. Could you please give us a link to the new official manual? While it can be hosted by a member of the community (as it has been), it doesn't seem like a good solution.

Thanks for making time to post and for letting us know our comments are actually read. Knowing that, i think many of us are more inclined to give feedback about the manual.

Hi Harri... as you've noticed, our passion for this product line runs deep. I know some of the criticisms may sound scathing and maybe bordering on insulting. I assure you it's only because we want this thing to be as close to perfection as it possibly can be... not only for ourselves but for the platform as a whole.

Yes, a lot of us might not ever use the manual... but to overuse an analogy I've used here a few times...

If you're a carpenter that makes wooden dressers, sure, you can just slap a cheap piece of plywood on the back of your masterpiece. After all, no one really ever sees it, right?

We just want to make sure that the same quality that we see from the product itself is carried through everything else about it... yes, even to the instruction manual. I know that this whole situation is probably very different from what other devices see, but let us help you make this a masterpiece all the way through.

I checked what the manual said about the battery. And this is quite good: Nokia finally updated the battery section(s) to match the fact that there's a Lithium-based battery in the device.. instead of copying out the section from some very old Ni-MH-based device, like they did for the N800/N810 manuals (and also for some phones) which had irrelevant and wrong advice. This time they've got it basically right. Progress!

@Flandry: The final user guides will be released when the sales start, so unfortunately, at this point I can't give you a direct link.

Daveb70 suggested earlier that the User guides could be reviewed by a selected group of Maemo community members before the sales start, and I see a lot of potential in the idea. I will take it up and look into it, and find out if we could develop such a process to support our internal processes when writing the guides. If you find any bugs in the User guide (language errors, technical errors, etc.), please file them in Bugzilla. All the relevant ones will be checked and corrected.

@zerojay: The analogy you used is very good, I completely agree with it Quality should be thought in every aspect of the product.

We have successfully done some community editing of documentation in the maemo.org wiki. I would be very interested in participating in something like that for the user manual.

Filing bugs in bugzilla for typos in the user manual seems inappropriate to me.