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#31
"Happy Sabbath." Same to you
 
Posts: 61 | Thanked: 7 times | Joined on Aug 2007 @ Kassel, Germany
#32
Originally Posted by Flandry View Post
Sunday edition:
Happy Sabbath.
regarding this point (hopefully not OT), what is your experience or feeling taking the N900 out during a church service, and start reading scripture(s) with katana?

for me it was kind of weird, and distracting when i suddenly worry if the old lady next to me will start thinking i am reading SMS or browsing the web...
 
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Posts: 1,559 | Thanked: 1,786 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ Boston
#33
Originally Posted by wahlau View Post
regarding this point (hopefully not OT), what is your experience or feeling taking the N900 out during a church service, and start reading scripture(s) with katana?

for me it was kind of weird, and distracting when i suddenly worry if the old lady next to me will start thinking i am reading SMS or browsing the web...
Sorry, i missed this. I have been using my PDA as my reference since my Visor Deluxe in 1999, so i guess i'm just used to it. Actually, i see a lot of Kindles, iPhones, and Android devices used now. So, at least in my neck of the woods, it's no longer much of a white elephant.
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Unofficial PR1.3/Meego 1.1 FAQ

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Classic example of arbitrary Nokia decision making. Couldn't just fallback to the no brainer of tagging with lat/lon if network isn't accessible, could you Nokia?
MAME: an arcade in your pocket
Accelemymote: make your accelerometer more joy-ful
 
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Posts: 1,559 | Thanked: 1,786 times | Joined on Oct 2009 @ Boston
#34
The bike tourer's delight

Since my last post, i have taken several multi-day bike tours with my N900 as Swiss Army gadget. I used it:
  • to keep a log of my trip (Conboy)
  • to take photos (built in camera app only, so far, but will be trying the Ovi Panorama app and also modified FCamera app with timer and mini tripod next trip to get myself in some photos)
  • to navigate (Navit, ModRana)
  • to log my course (GPS Recorder)
  • to communicate with friends/family/"support crew" (who could keep me informed on e.g. Hurricane Earl's progress when i was biking back from Manhattan via Long Island.) (SMS, occasional fMMS, phone)
  • to address postcards (Contacts)
  • to provide a daily scripture text (Katana, microB & modified screenscrape of Standard Works)
  • to give a quick light now and then (flashlight applet)

The unconsidered life

Nokia doesn't consider it typical to use an N900 without a data plan. This has led to several problems with my N900 that have been an annoyance. The difference between a data plan and no data plan for me is at least $40 a month, which is money i definitely have better uses for. Furthermore, when on tour, i actually find it helpful to put the phone in Offline Mode during the day to reduce power consumption.

This exposes some really annoying bugs in the closed-source apps which have been discounted by Nokia due to their vision of Maemo as an "always on" OS. The most obnoxious of these is that there is no way to get the camera app to tag photos with their latitude and longitude, even though that information is known, simply because the phone is unable to download the name of the location. I couldn't care less if the name of the location is tagged; i want to tag the actual coordinates on the photos you Neanderthals.

More power to you

As you might expect, battery life becomes pretty dear when using the N900 for so many tasks. I got in the habit of taking the charger in to every convenience store, restaurant, and library i patronized to top off the battery, and also made use of a BSA-branded "Be Prepared" 2xAA/USB solar charger that fits perfectly on the back rack during the last trip. The charger is pretty neat, but can't keep up with such intense usage on its own with only off-the-road charging, and is a bit cumbersome to use. The AAs are charged by the solar panel, and then can be used (e.g. at night) to charge the phone. If i wasn't afraid of my USB port coming out, i could keep it plugged in while traveling and the solar charger would probably suffice for power needs.

Love-hate

I read a post today that sums up my feelings about the N900 and Maemo at this point.

Originally Posted by cibyr View Post
I bought my N900 because I was under the impression the closest thing out there to a real open-source phone. Not from any misguided GNU-style ideas about "Freedom", but from first-hand experience that the combination of solid hardware (something Nokia is very good at) and open-source software results in excellent products (e.g., Logitech Squeezebox).

I know that the reason for this is that when anyone with the skills can hack on a piece of software and "scratch their itches", the small-but-highly-irritating bugs get quickly fixed (e.g. RSS widget using data all the time, email widget doesn't notice that emails are read, phone UI glitches in PR1.2) and simple features get quickly implemented (e.g. ReplayGain in media player, recurring tasks in calendar, info on lock screen, portrait VKB).

I feel like I've been hit by a bait-and-switch scam with the N900. It was sold as an open-source, Linux phone that doesn't hide it's Linux roots that's capable of doing anything a computer can do. Turns out, none of that is really true. Important parts are closed-source, and even for the open-source bits there's no good way to scratch your itches - there are only monolithic releases, and they're so far between that the feedback loop is just so long that there's almost no hope that a fix committed today will ever actually make it to your phone.

And it's not like the community isn't willing to put in the effort to fix bugs and write features. The Maemo community has added an amazing amount of value to the N900 - from headphoned to fMMS - but a lot of these efforts are stymied by Nokia at every step. A perfect example is Erminig-NG: lorelei has pretty much single-handedly implemented Google Calendar sync (a much-requested feature which has been essentially ignored by Nokia!), but it's useless for most people because Calandar doesn't really support recurring events and it's closed-source so we can't fix it. Or just think about how much better fMMS would be if we could actually fix the whole APN mess.

So a lot of people have bought N900s thinking that due to it's open-source nature, the community would be able to address these sorts of issues. And then Nokia says, "No, only we can make those sorts of changes". And now you're surprised that everybody's clamouring for Nokia to make changes?

Sorry, this probably isn't the best place for this rant. But I had to get it off my chest. Maybe I should start a blog.

[edit] Forgot to say: what really hurts, is that the N900 is still the closest thing to my idea of a perfect, open-source phone. Every advantage it had over the competition when I bought it a year ago it still has. It's still got the fastest CPU that Nokia has ever put in a phone, it's still got one of the best hardware keyboards and Maemo is still the least consumer-hostile mobile OS I've ever seen. What other phone can you download a completely unrestricted flashing tool for, straight from the manufacturer? Yet so many people want to make it better, and are continuously frustrated that they can't, and even more frustrated that there's no where else to go.

People aren't this angry (or at least not this kind of angry) with Apple, Palm or Microsoft: everyone knows that when you buy an iPhone, your user experience is dictated (for better or worse) by Steve Jobs. Customers who bought the N900 explicitly eschewed that option and made a different choice. But then they find they just choose a different dictator - perhaps a less totalitarian dictator, but still a dictator. So yeah, anger...
__________________

Unofficial PR1.3/Meego 1.1 FAQ

***
Classic example of arbitrary Nokia decision making. Couldn't just fallback to the no brainer of tagging with lat/lon if network isn't accessible, could you Nokia?
MAME: an arcade in your pocket
Accelemymote: make your accelerometer more joy-ful

Last edited by Flandry; 2010-10-19 at 15:21.
 
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