My work is done.

Textrat, although I haven't always agreed on the verbiage you chose in some of your posts, I do applaud your efforts to advocate. However, it is not unimaginable Nokia's stance on your participation as such. In fact I would have been surprised if a major corporation acted any differently.

After spending millions of dollars crafting and promoting the message they want to get across, they usually want as much control over it as possible.

Now here is the rub for N800 users and perhaps qgil can provide some insight...

What is Nokia's N800 message?

Who is the pro-typical user or targeted market?

How many units have been produced?

What were the projections?

Did the N770 meet it's sales forecasts?

What features and benefits were added to the N800 that would improve it's prospects of attaining its sales goals?


Published information from Nokia that answers these questions would go a long way toward quelling the speculation and rumors found in these and other forums. For those of us whose first Nokia purchase was the N800 these answers would relieve the anxiety over wondering if Nokia even had a plan for its future in the first place. I mean, what does Nokia tell its stockholders?

As far as bugzilla goes. It, itself has a dang bug in its web site security certificate. I only found this out after realizing the links I saved to the bug I did report were no longer valid. Bugzilla moved to a new address and left no redirects. (Major time suckage BTW, and I wonder how many don't bother using bugzilla because of this.)

And finally, an example of how little or no information can lead to speculation...

The bug I reported in February was closed in March with this comment,
Since this was not addressed in the latest release (4.2007.26-8), should I assume that;

a. They just forgot.
b. There is an additional future release that will address this.
or
c. They changed their minds.

What ever the case, lack of information leads to negative speculation.

It wasn't the entire company, of course, but one unnamed individual who challenged my desire to reach out more to this community.

One.

Can I just clear up this AbiWord bit once and for all? Nokia's INdT out of Brasil actually ported AbiWord to Maemo/Hildon themselves, and contributed the patch back. They also contributed the initial ODT support to AbiWord, for which we are grateful. I'm also told that they contributed the build of 2.4.6 available on the AbiSource site.

Now, that brings us to today. Everybody using AbiWord on the N800 is using a build for the 770, unless someone has a build from Aleksandyr (sp?), which is not the official, upstream hildon port. As such, since the N800 Bora maemo is ABI-incompatible (cannot depend on functions being callable in the same way) with Mistral/770, certain functions in the fully Hildonized AbiWord don't work properly: for instance, it will crash on N800 if the tablet wakes back up.

I am hoping that most of these issues can be resolved with a recompile. AbiWord is maintained by a small group of volunteer hackers, and while developers do occasionally get sponsored to work on it, no such activity that I know of has taken place on the Maemo port in a while. I have been with the community for several years, and am currently a Google Summer of Code student, working on the AbiCollab facility. While it's not a part of my project description, I do plan to at least attempt to get AbiCollab running on the N800 as well. In addition, a forum member here did the "right thing" and reported the DOC import problem upstream - in our bugzilla. One of our developers committed a possible fix, and as soon as I can, I will be testing that out. I'm working to get all the information and sources (specifically the debian packaging files) needed to get AbiWord working properly on the N800 together, however, until I hear back from several people, it can't happen yet, and because the folks I am asking aren't being funded to work on AbiWord on Maemo, I can't guarantee when they'll get back to me.

Now, back to the positives. The embedded environment (like N800, OLPC, etc) is important to AbiWord, and so improvements across all embedded platforms are on their way. The official Hildonization still exists and should still be buildable - I just need to get proper versions of the dependencies. We do care, and I am doing what I can to get an N800 build out there for you and for me, but at this point we're volunteers standing on the shoulders of paid giants. Right now, Google requires that my priority be AbiCollab, but I'll try to sneak in some Maemo/Nokia time in there, since I want to use Abi on my N800 just as much as you do - it's part of why I got it.

For those of you turned off by the length of this post (writing a lot is an annoying habit of mine), here's the condensed version. Nokia/INdT did a lot for AbiWord in the past, and we are grateful. The N800 issues with AbiWord are not evidence of some great fundamental flaw in AbiWord, but merely a caveat of AbiWord being so well integrated with Maemo that the upgrade from Mistral to Bora breaks it. As a volunteer, I'm working to get AbiWord built properly for the N800, and will keep an eye on it to ensure it is available in the future, preferably (I don't see why not) on both the 770 and N800 platforms.

Please be nice to the other AbiWord folks - I'm newer and so have more patience. If you want to help, file useful bug reports at http://bugzilla.abisource.com , or contribute source and binary packages of the AbiWord dependencies to me (just PM).

Thanks for your patience and understanding! I want AbiWord to rock on N800, I just need some time!

Thank you! The fact remains that reviews, for example, of the iPhone mention that you can read Word docs in it. Some of the reviews of the N800 mention that you can't do that. Abiword is one of the last hopes for solving that problem. This problem is a deal killer for many prospective purchasers of the N800. Word must be the main doc handler for what, 90% of the computer-using public? (WAG) Unless Nokia is not interested in selling N800s, this problem should be something Nokia itself worries about.

Fortunately, most purchasers don't realize that the N800 is totally Word incompatible. If there was a little notice that all purchasers of the N800 automatically got saying that it doesn't work with Word docs, my guess is that sales of the N800 would drop to about 20% of what they are now, which I think isn't all that big anyway.

I am saying this not to be a malcontent, because I love my N800, but because frank discussion is the traditional remedy against dumb corporations.

This thread is very interesting. The key issue is imo:

ITs were launched to surf on internet but they re so versatile and ''evolutive'' that they're expected to become PDA and smartphone. And naturally solve the main issues ( PAN)

People on this forum know it is possible. to Nokia, it may cause internal competition, at least at the resource allocation level.

It doesn't happen fast enough from the end-users point of view, given the competition,and this forum and this thread are the echo of this anxiety.

However we re seing a good reaction. let's see...

I don't care what anybody says, the eventual trend is for a do everything device that fits in your pocket. Hands up, all those who, given the choice of buying a phone + internet browser + pim + camera + computer and another device that was just a phone and another device that was just an internet device, how many of you would go for separate phones and internet browsers? I only have so many pockets, so I want one mp3 player +camera + phone + web browser + etc. That has to be the wave of the future.

In a few years, wireless will be everywhere, so the N800 is perfectly positioned to be the all-in-one cheap device. A free Skype is bound to be more popular than a $40 a month ATT account.

So Nokia is sitting in the catbird seat (whatever that is!) if it only realizes it. "Tomorrow's Internet today" could be its motto, unless it's already taken.

Seriously, no. I made I comparison that's perfectly valid from my point of view, and all you do is say it's seriously flawed (thank you very much) - without going any further into it. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to think of your statements.

First, Tomorrow s Internet Today stands for T.I.T. I don't know if this is smart ;-)

Second: Although it is agreed a all-in-one device is THE solution, it raises issues:

- The minimum size of the screen to browse comfortably and efficiently is the Nokia IT screen size. I ve been comparing E90 (top of the range in Nokia), HTC devices etc, no way, I won't surf on anything smaller.

- No we won't carry our N800 (no matter how much we love them) anywhere anytime. We won't take it to the beach, to nighclub, to ski, etc etc. It s too big, and it s too fragile. the rest, yes.

So, however we need the IT to do absolutely everything, we still need small cell phones. They could be a module pairing with other devices (laptops, IT, etc).

Let's not forget the (IMHO) most important point: Nokia launched an Internet Tablet and meant for it to be OSS and community-driven (they made that abundantly clear). The community, in turn, has made it clear to Nokia that they want the Internet Tablet to be more than just a couch-surfer. Isn't it now up to Nokia to follow the community's lead?