N810: first impressions
Two weeks ago I bought my N810 with the discount code kindly offered by Nokia for the Maemo development program. The device is really nice, the OS2008 provides a totally new user experience (compared to the version I used on my N770). So here are few remarks I have after few weeks of usage:
- the padlock slider is too easy to activate.
- the keyboard is coool but I sometimes have difficulties with the keys of the first row in the keyboard. To me they are slightly too near from the screen.
- I dislike the kinda "micro" USB plug, it looks like some Nokia specific plug, a mini-usb plug would have been more handy so that I could use the same USB wire as for my camera.
So far I used the IM a bit with Frank for a video chat and with Mom for an audio-only GoogleTalk chat. Sound is good but video quality was bad, I need to make more tests I guess :)
Played a bit with MediaStreamer and Coherence, everything works fine, excepted seeking that's lacking because Coherence HTTP server doesn't yet support HTTP range requests.
I also did some media transcoding so that I can watch videos on the device. Videos need to be encoded in MP4 at some specific resolutions. Fortunately there's an handy script at maemo.org to do the whole job for me :)
Last weekend I gave a try to geottagging using the documentation on Maemo wiki. I ended up with a nice KML file that can be displayed on Google Earth and Google Maps (see below too). I'll directly integrate these features in my gallery soon, geotagging is an interesting thing, especially for my next holidays... :)
Agrandir le plan
In the coming weeks I'll start developing user-interfaces using the Python EFL libraries. I'll most likely play a bit with the Coherence MediaRenderer called Compere, so far implemented using PyGame and try to rework it with the EFL libs... More to come later :)
edit: Frank the Coherence guru reminds me that Coherence de facto supports HTTP range requests but MediaStreamer HTTP client doesn't implement the seek requests correctly... :)
#. fonts on Wed Feb 13 12:30:19 2008
great gadget! nokia rule the mobile world! :-)
#. phil on Wed Feb 13 13:49:01 2008
Yes.. One point people are questionning me about when they see the device for the first time is why isn't it a mobile phone too? ;)
It would totally make sense but Nokia has probably good reasons for not providing that...
#. johnny on Wed Feb 13 09:15:00 2008
As an N800 owner, I wish that Nokia had used a micro plug in this model too. What you have is a micro AB plug, meaning you can use either micro A (when the tablet is the master) cables or micro B (when the tablet is the slave) cables. This is nice, because the USB OTG spec specifies a micro A cable, so they're commonly available with the otg wiring (pin 5 grounded). So you can just buy an OTG micro A->standard female A cable/dongle, and have a standard USB port on your tablet, with it automatically switching to USB host mode as soon as the cable is plugged in. Just don't try to run a bus-powered hd off the port since it doesn't supply the full 500 mA (but keyboards, flash drives or a powered USB hub should be ok).
On the N800, they only put in a mini B (not AB, just B) port. An old version of the otg spec used mini instead of micro, so it's still possible to find some otg cables with mini plugs, but they're all A-style plugs like the spec required, not the B-style plugs the N800 accepts. So any otg cable for the N800 is going to have to be custom made, and only useful for the N800.