Okay, Nokia officially sucks. On top of my $400 n810, I now have to spend $129 for 36 months of GPS navigation? Screw you, Nokia. No way in hell am I paying that. Heck, I can get a Garmin for that.
Too bad, because it’s pretty nice software. I guess it gets removed, and I figure out Maemo Mapper…
Well, the ink is dry on the paper, and the deal is done, so I can finally talk about it. I have a new job. I’m going to be working for Green Hills Software as part of their RTOS devision, working on routing software, and general networking. This makes me very happy. They seem to be an awesome company, and are doing lots of very interesting things. I consider this a step forward for me.
Because of the hardware. OS2008 isn’t that much of an imporovement over OS2006 (on my 770). Sure, it’s nice, and it’s pretty, but it’s not that much of an improvement.
The reasons are:
- Keyboard. Makes it actually useful as a tablet (it wasn’t before)
- Daylight-visible screen. Makes it useful outside (it wasn’t before)
GPS is nice, but not a killer feature. But those two are killer. Worth every penny of full price. No amount of software updates can make the n800 significantly more useful than the 770. The n810 already is.
Well, my n810 arrived on Wed. I’ve been using it now for 4 days, and I absolutely love it. It’s lightyears ahead of the 770 (and, presumably, the n800, although I’ve never used it outside of the store…)
My first thought, when I opened the package was “Wow, that’s small!” And it is. It’s noticably smaller than the 770. This makes it fit better, and feel better, in your hands. And, of course, it’s very very pretty. It just looks great.
Then, I opened it up, plugged it in, and turned it on. And I love it. (Have I said that before?) The UI looks much better, and is really easy to use with thumbs. The keyboard is exceptional; it’s simple to type, and the completion is great. Don’t listen to Ars, they don’t know what they’re talking about here. And the sunlight visable screen just rocks my world. Battery life is good; I haven’t run out yet, even with bluetooth and wifi in use. I just charge at night while I’m asleep, same as my phone.
All in all, it’s a huge huge improvement. It’s like a whole different device. Between connecting quicker (and autoconnecting when a known AP is in range), and the keyboard, I’ve used it for casual browsing more in the last 4 days than I used the 770 in the last 6 months. I actually use it for IM and IRC.
All is not roses, of course. I have 2 gripes, one of which may be fixed in the future. The biggest is the lock/unlock key. It’s a little slider, and it’s really hard to push. You have to use your thumbnail, and your have to slide it hard to get it to connect. Granted, it’s important that it doesn’t unlock in your pocket, but this is a bit excessive. It’s not necessary to use if you need to use the keyboard, because sliding the keyboard out unlocks; however, one of my primary use cases for the tablet is ebooks, which doesn’t use the keyboard. For this, the unlock key is necessary.
The second issue is GPS sync time. It’s ssllllooooooowwwwww….. It takes upwards of 5 mintues, under good conditions, to get a sync. This makes it useless for position based apps, and almost useless for driving. You don’t bother, unless you’re going somewhere a long ways away. Hopefully, this is a software issue, and can be fixed.
Of course, there’s the stupid map program… Way to go, Nokia. Let’s take your $479 tablet and force your users to buy the GPS software. That’s brilliant. Hopefully, maemo mapper (which I have not yet tried…) will work well enough. If not, I’ll have to try and dig deep enough to find out how much this Wayfinder thing actually costs. (Did I mention it’s not obvious? There’s no actual price on the website…) I can’t even use the trial version of it, because it won’t be available until “December”. Nokia: If you weren’t ready for people to have tablets, why did you start selling them? Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy you did; I love it. But come on. Get your retail act together…
Anyway, the few (small) negatives aside, this is a rocking awesome tablet. Go and buy one (assuming you can find one…) You won’t be dissappointed.
Ladies and Gentlemen, my n810 has left the building. Or, at least, it’s been shipped. Here’s hoping it gets here Wed, rather than Fri. (Can anyone imagine UPS delivering on Thursday?)
Woo hoo! I got my javascript working in epiphany again!
Turns out it was leftover crap in xulrunner. I had to remove this file:
/usr/lib64/xulrunner/components/compreg.dat
and restart epiphany. That’s it. Google reader and mugshot now work fine. Phew!
Obviously, if you’re not on amd64, that will be /usr/lib rather than /usr/lib64
Thanks, Ubuntu and Google for pointing the way…
Edit:
Oh, and RedHat? I totally appologize for this entry. It was completely not your fault.
(10:46:52 PM) dang: [22:45:58 athena] build> emerge -puvDN world (10:46:52 PM) dang: These are the packages that would be merged, in order: (10:46:52 PM) dang: Calculating world dependencies... done! (10:46:52 PM) dang: Total: 0 packages, Size of downloads: 0 kB (10:46:52 PM) dang: [22:46:35 athena] build> emerge -pv esound (10:46:52 PM) dang: These are the packages that would be merged, in order: (10:46:52 PM) dang: Calculating dependencies... done! (10:46:52 PM) dang: [ebuild N ] media-sound/esound-0.2.38 USE="alsa ipv6 tcpd -debug" 0 kB (10:46:52 PM) dang: Total: 1 package (1 new), Size of downloads: 0 kB (10:46:55 PM) dang: Woo hoo! (10:47:03 PM) dang: Suck it, esd
From here:
First of all, yes, button and entry mode are gone and won’t come back in the near future.
Okay, so no more deskbar-applet. Oh lazy-web, are there any alternatives to deskbar-applet that are actually usable? Or will I have to fork deskbar-applet and maintain my own from now until eternity? Or maybe just stop using either tracker or beagle…
I just discovered today that you can have variable length arrays in C99:
#include
#include
int main(int argc, char **argv) {
int len;
len = strlen(argv[0]);
char line[len+1];
printf("%d\n", sizeof(line));
}
Here’s what you get when compiling this:
[12:30:39 athena] tmp> gcc -pedantic -o test test.c
test.c: In function ‘main’:
test.c:9: warning: ISO C90 forbids variable-size array ‘line’
test.c:9: warning: ISO C90 forbids mixed declarations and code
[12:31:02 athena] tmp> gcc -std=c99 -pedantic -o test test.c
[12:34:44 athena] tmp> ./test
7
I’ve verified in the C99 spec that this is actually legal. This is rocking good news to me, and I’m going to start using it all over.