I finally dove in yesterday evening and upgraded my N800 to the latest firmware. My major motivation was the alleged improved video performance and in that respect I wasn't entirely disappointed.

Video performance is indeed dramatically improved, albeit not without hickups. For starters, DivX files encoded with the excellent Media Converter in the 400x240 format in full framerate play absolutely smoothly. At last I have a portable video player with a (slightly) better resolution than my PMA430! I also discovered that the updated media player now plays at least one file that I previously only could play with Mplayer (it's a DivX encoding of a DVD with a TV show home recording on it). However...

All is not bright and pink in video land: Several (Media Converter encoded) files insisted on being played now in 4:3 format, although originally encoded in widescreen. I have yet to see if a re-encoding will fix that.

I also found that the transgression from "windowed" format (with toolbars on) to fullscreen mode was a lot less smooth than with the old videoplayer, with slow magnification and lots of green artifacts. If that's the price to pay for perfect video, so be it; it's not a biggie.

Moving away from video, I have to say that I really don't experience any higher "snappiness" or speed improvement of the O/S as some have reported, but then again, I found the N800 nippy enough from day one. So in that respect, the upgrade didn't "do" much for me.

A (for me) bigger problem is the alleged improved sleep feature: Previously, I had tweaked mce.ini to invoke softpoweroff with a long keypress on the power button. Both for softpowering down and up, the long keypress worked fine. After the update, I experienced that now (after re-tweaking mce.ini) softpoweroff would keep screen and keys active, unless I specifically ticked the "lock screen and keys" box in Control Panel (this was not ticked with the old firmware!), resulting in the fact that to softpower the device back up I have to first longpress power, then shortpress and hit the D-key. Needless to say that this is serious crap and has peeved me off to no extent. There seems to be no way to link "lock screen and keys" to longpowerkeypress, as it is not listed as one of the valid selections in mce.ini. I'm still trying to figure out why Nokia chose to fsck up a perfectly good hack, but they seem to make a habit of those braindead decisions, so applying logic to Nokia might not be the way to go.

Another "new" problem is that now Application Manager on exiting occasionally decides to blank out the background of my desktop and that (probably related to the same) the menu option to change the desktop background results in a permanent loop. I'd be angry about this, if I had any interest in desktop backgrounds (it's usually the foreground I'm mostly interested in) and if I already wasn't convinced that Application Manager is the biggest piece of dreck ever to leave a programmer's syphilis-infested brain.

Last problem: the infamous "Python 2.5 runtime" demon. Yes, you guessed it: the bugger won't install -- again. My previous trick (search for it) didn't work this time, as Application Mangler decides that now it cannot fnd a different library, libbluetooth1(>=2.19), in the list of repositories. There is a libbluetooth2.x in the bora extras rep, but apparently that one isn't good enough for Application Psycho. Hence, no more Egg Timer (pity, 'twas a nice appy).

So there you have it: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of my upgrade. How much of it is common grief and how much is due to my incompetence, I'll leave that to the reader's discretion.

Updating myself -- again! -- , the libbluetooth issue can be solved by installing this
http://repository.maemo.org/pool/mae...0428_armel.deb
package. I first downloaded it and installed it from memory card (no background blanking from Application ***** this time!), but I suppose online installtion should go as well.

The library should not give conflicts with a previously installed libbluetooth2, but don't sue me if it does.

At least the white-background-after-application-manager-work seems to be related to the simple-launcher applet, if you have that one installed. In another thread I reported about this.

One thing I noticed after a few days is that the battery lifetime indeed seems to have improved. I thought it was good before, but now it's even better. Others reported this already, but now that I properly noticed it I feel I can join in..

A definite PLUS for me is much easier text select/double-click functionality.

I didn't have any issues installing Python 2.5, which is weird, because most people have. So, I wish I could repeat my process, but I can't remember exactly what I did.

There are still a number of apps that I can't install, though... But, I don't really _need_ them either.

Has anyone had any luck installing libcap.0.8, though? I can't, for the life of me get it to work... It downloads and goes through the installation process, but at the end, it tells me that it can't install.

Lastly -- and I've been pretty vocal about this all over the place already -- I sure wish there was an easy way to backup third-party apps/settings... Couldn't someone create a little utility for this? (Or, better yet, couldn't Nokia roll this into their backup tool?)

Thankfully, although my apps weren't backed-up, most of my settings were. That's a good thing. But, other things -- like all of the feeds I had entered into gPodder for instance -- were not backed-up.

Likewise, it's a little bit annoying that I've had to re-enter all of my username/password info into every site that had those stored before the upgrade.

Overall, I'm happy I upgraded, though... It just took a couple of days to get everything back the way I had it before!

-T.

I have the same problem but instead when I use surten applications like UK MP... Any fixes?

Edit: I see is related to the simple launcher...

Thanks.

Re background blanking due to Simple Launcher:

This is rather weird, because my background did that before Simple Laucher was installed. I'm pretty certain about that, because I took notes (talk about anal, huh?). It happened on the second iteration of Application Maniac and repeated on the sixth, which was still before I re-installed SL.

And it still only happens after a SM session with Application Mistress.

Help a novice here: I've got Media Converter 1.3 installed on my PC. What specific steps do I need to do to convert a DVD sitting in my PC's drive to a file that will play on my N800? Thanks!

What I do is first convert the DVD into a DivX (maybe xvid works as well? can someone confirm this?) file with FairUseWizard http://fairusewizard.com/lang_en/fai...t_edition.html. I then drop the newly created file in Media Converter, select the settings I want (the 30 sec preview is your friend!) and make some tea while Media Converter does its thing.

AFAIK Media Converter doesn't work directly on DVDs.

Thanks so much for the help. I downloaded and ran FairUse Wizard (not sure what settings to use on the 2 screens of options it presented me with before it began converting a dvd to DivX!)--but I persevered. It said it then needed 2 h 30 min to convert a single 50 min TV episode on the DVD to DivX. Is that possible, or did I make some wrong option choices??

That seems rather long. The only thing I changed (as the FairUse file was only intended as an intermediary), was to make sure DivX was used as codec. Perhaps you could set the maximum length to less than 700MB; I suspect FU (talk about an abbreviation, eh!) will always use the maximum allotted length. Playing with the encoding speed might also help, but I don't know how much it will (visibly) affect the quality.