I got my n810 about 1 year ago and spent a furious 6 months in the trenches working with the device only to fall off the radar last October.

What happened to me? I got busy. After returning from Berlin quite dumbstruck at, in my opinion, was the continued ignorance of Nokia to the development and marketing of the Internet Tablets, life happened. I had several work related conferences and presentations that consumed my time and energy. Each day that went by it became harder and hard to jump back into my old life and work on the n810. Adding to my already busy life was the fact that we are preparing for the arrival of our second child and there are always things that need to be done ( we are 41 weeks at this point ). As a communications device I decided to break out the n810 once again as a user so I could have access to post to Facebook and Livejournal while I was in the hospital without having to dig out my laptop. Hey, it's what the device was designed for, no?

Once again I picked up the device, started from 0, downloaded the latest firmware, applied any updates that were waiting enabled Maemo Extras and installed a few choice applications like Canola, Mplayer, Dial Central, and a few games. I setup my BT phone for internet, Modest access to gmail account, one WPA-PSK network, and one open wifi network. I synchronized my photos from Picasa and made a few tweaks to the web browser. Thankfully a few of the tweaks I offered up to Nokia did make it into this release so a few of my usual tricks I could skip. Nothing earth shattering and since then I have already run into many annoying bugs, bugs that were reported long ago.

1. Modest will just stop functioning for no apparent reason. You have to CLI kill modest or reboot the device to clear this error
2. Modest does not mark messages as read. How Nokia continues to screw up such basic functionality in an IMAP client astounds me
3. Networking gets "confused" in a low signal area and drains the battery. The WiFi signal indicator blinks and you can neither connect or disconnect and it drains the battery in an hour or two.


As I sit and stare at a, one again, battery drained n810 I figured I would put some of my thoughts down on paper. I really wanted this device to be as claimed, but time and time again, just as I start to feel comfortable with the device it stabs me in the back. In good conscious I don't know if I can even sell the device to someone else, lest the bad karma come back and haunt me. So right now it's an expensive paperweight until I can get back to my charger. I know I'm not the only one facing these issues as a quick check of ITt revealed the usual litany of complaints. The first two bugs are clearly in bugs.maemo.org as well, although I can't seem to find the last one even though I'm sure it's been brought up in the past. I don't care how much utility a device has, if it's prone to sudden and unexpected failure it's useless to me. I believe I can "work around" all of these bugs, I just need to turn off network auto-association and Modest auto-checking, but at that point I have lost a large amount of functionality that seems integral with the device.

Chinook was better about the not draining the battery, but the inability for the built in email to work with Gmail makes it a non-starter in my opinion.

Surveying the landscape I see that the n8x0 series is now EOL with even the WiMax devices discontinued as of January. So right now we have no Internet Tablet devices actively in production while the market literally is evolving at a breakneck speed around Nokia. Looking forward we have Fremantle, which appears to be taking the same recipe from earlier devices with updated libraries no doubt but a continued, and futile, attempt to "go it alone" on the firmware in order to try and secure their little maemo niche. Community development is the one bright star in all of this, always attempting to improve on what is broken or should have been possible in the first place. It's not to say that I haven't seen some amazing things that can be done with a IT by people who are bound and determined to their ends but, as a user, that doesn't help me much when the device won't turn on.

My personal opinion is that Nokia has taken a 4 year head start on the market and has managed to go nowhere with it.

Looking outwards we have now dozens of devices that are competing in the same market space as the IT. While everyone must decide what is right for them, it's hard to say with a straight face that Nokia has done anything significant to compete with these devices. In many ways these devices tend to be inferior to the n8x0 in on facet or another, but are, as a whole, seeing much better uptake in the marketplace. What we know of the new device from Nokia seems to indicate the fact that this will be the most expensive not-a-phone mobile device that you carry.

Looking inwards I see that the SDK is still as frustrating as ever. We have a pre-alpha Freemantle SDK still based on scratchbox1 and all of the legacy 32bit issues that go along with it. We still have a device that focuses on development of custom, basically one-off, ARM/Linux/GTK applications in order to fully utilize the system. I've said it before and I'll say it again, developers need a way to quickly get started developing and scratchbox1 is not it. It still appears as though ( I could be wrong here ) that Nokia is gating off parts of the build and we end up with things like sub #100 bugs still outstanding. Some of the most impressive changes in technology continue to elude maemo including gears/html5 offline support and the benefits that could bring to the platform.

Where does that leave me. Honestly I will probably release my unfinished, but functional, Picasa sync application. It works reasonably well with Canola at this point and maybe someone can turn it into a real application. I doubt I will do any other maemo development moving forward. I still have a number of ideas for Grand Central tools, but I will develop them in python and someone else can port them over if they wish. Everything I see says that the mythical n900 will be more of the same, a great idea that is perennially hamstrung by non-existent marketing and poor firmware. I love the community here and around the n810, but in the end if I'm not a user I'm not interested.

As a sucker for punishment I will probably pick up the n810 after a few more months have gone by to see if any of these issues have been fixed.

I am off to the hospital soon with my wife and my n810 will not be joining me.