Excellently put, Mil. The sad part is, just how many times has the exact same conclusion been (more or less excellently :-) posted hereabouts over the past eighteen months, by various users coming from various angles ?

Certainly no one at Nokia has given the slightest hint so far of having listened (and "learned") from THAT...

The irony here is that the PIM part could actually be a piece of cake if Nokia just decided to do it. They wouldn't even have to code something complicated like a special version of the Windows PC Suite that supports the 770/800, just to sync with Outlook...

As a smartphone maker Nokia is one of the founders and proponents of the SyncML open standard, with the corresponding in-house expertise. All they would have to do is come up with a properly Hildonized GPE or Dates or whatever, and give it a SyncML engine -- either through a native maemo port or by finally supporting Java and thus the Funambol client.

Then they could just lay back and wait for the REST OF THE WORLD to come sync up to their device... Outlook, Google Calendar and other web services, phones, whatever...

Sounds like such a no-brainer that sometimes it makes me wonder if I'm the one not thinking straight :-)

The main (day-to-day) uses for my N800 is carrying it around while connected to some network one way or another, so that I can a) receive email b) get gmail notifications c) look things up on the 'net with the browser.

The only serious problem here is the email application, because it doesn't work well with IMAP: It ignores the 'message has been read' part of the imap protocol, which makes it almost useless. The only way to manage is to constantly _delete messages_ when I read them on the desktop. Now, if Nokia could fix this.. instead, they _will not fix it_ according to Bugzilla (I forget the bug ref.# but it wasn't difficult to find).
I'm totally bewildered by this. To me, these applications are what makes the IT different from yet-another PDA, and where the potential is. And if it's not good at this, then what?

(I have claws-mail installed too of course, but that one isn't integrated into the Contacts part of the N800 unlike the built-in app).

Guys, 3rd quarter is not a football analogy. He's talking about Q3.. the third quarter of the year.

I'm pretty surprised that Nokia would not release an iSync compatible device. it's about the only reason I still use my wrist PDA. I cannot take the chance of the device up and dying, getting stolen, lost, whatever and not having the data elsewhere.

This is what he said, "One thing I can pass along of the feedback I've gotten so far:

Nokia HAS heard you (us). There is going to be a "third quarter push" to get the momentum restarted (think American football, not yearly quarter). I don't know what that means specifically. I don't have a hard picture of what's coming. But I have renewed hope that the device is being supported in the right places-- and yes, that includes the most important piece: customer service."

the N800 is searching for that "killer app" that will make it indispensible and more than a "curious tech toy". I don;t know if there is one yet.

I regard it as a mini portable laptop and this should be useful on my next trip especially since I am able to get myself connected to the internet via cellphone. even more useful now that I can use larger SD memory cards.

I use my N800 for browsing the Internet on the go and in my home. work pretty well. just the other day, I used my N800 to browse movie times. Not a big IM user though. I think VOIP and Video messaging could be big. Maybe if there was more development in games/emulators this device would expand it;s audience. The touchscreen is a good feature.

formfactor wise, it;s about akin to a Sony PSP. of course the PSP is a better game device, especially if you have hacked yours with custom firmware. unfortunately, the PSP has it;s own shortcomings that the N800 touchscreen blows away.

As heavyt just said: nope. Football analogy was correct. Sorry if it became unclear... but given that I stated it, I'm not sure how it did...

Well, i do wish that the N800 can make better use of screen estate though.

There are just so much unnecessary fringes, whitespace and supersized icons which are simply wasting the precious screen space!

You never know... developers may be listening...

Hi,
I'm not a big contributor of this forum. I'm not a developer (anymore), so I tend to not post in all directions asking for this or that for others to do
In my view what can help the device is to make it more "usage friendly". Let me give you some examples:
- why do I need to have different contact list (default one, Gizmo one, tomorrow Skype one, my GMail account one, ...)
- the GPE calendar is great but how do I synch that with my calendar on Google? Yes it is possible, I know how to do it as a computer adict. But really, it is a pain in the ....
- A very stupid one that upset me a lot: why do I have in the catalog list "Daemon" and "Daemons", "Communication" and "connectivity", "Locales" (????), "misc" and "Others", "Multimedia" and "sound", "Utilities" and "util", ...
- The comments on email client are soooo true. On one hand we have this nice pre-integration with Google talk and on the other accessing a GMail account is a mess.

Don't take me wrong. I'm not complaining. I'm just pointing some pretty basic flaws that once fixed could advertise the N800 (sorry I don't know the N770) as THE user friendly device. In my view what Nokia should provide is needed APIs / libraries and recommendations for application developers.

For me the best example is Canola:
- Based on core N800 components (even if not very efficient video in first version
- a UI designed for the N800.

KDE on N800? I'm impressed, really. Very nice. But to be honest, I doubt KDE would be a selling argument for those devices.

Otherwise, I forgot about a idea for Nokia: make a N800 dedicated phone.
No camera, no big screen, no fancy application. Everything runs on the N800 when paired (SMS, contact management, even calls). When not paired, it is only a phone. A modem with a keyboard And the high end one is also a GPS.