Great comment Texrat!

I don't know what others think but perhaps the simplest thing that could be done that would have an immediate impact on usability and configurability would be a single repository. I know that is what I have spent (invested, wasted!, learnt) most time trying to figure out. How to get the right repositories to install the great bit of software I have just read about on here!

In terms of getting "our" dads, mums, grans using internet tablets and to give them with something that the out of the box feel then a single place where you can see and install all the software would be great!

On another note! as a user I would like to thank everyone who has spent time and effort porting or writing applications for the n770/n800. There are some very talented and generous people out there making alot of other people's tablets better!

I'd also like to see consolidated repositories. I hope there are some people in the Maemo community who have experience with managing debian repositories, and the technical and political issues that go along with them.

Also, the recent firmware update solved a lot of the stability issues that I was having. I love this device.

Seperate repositories are necessary to differentiate between classes of apps. Nokia vs 3rd party, tightly integrated vs add-ons.

Hey thanks for the response Milhouse,

I spent some time reviewing your oevre of posts to these forums, so I now have some background on your considerable user experience.

I don't spend much time with those apps, so I confess that my question was born out of ignorance. My apologies. Exposure to bugs depends on usage patterns, and ours clearly differ.

a. Email clients are a waste of time for me; I use web-mail.
b. RSS is newsspam. No thanks.
c. Media Player is decent, for a bundled app, but uninteresting to me because
i. mplayer is highly mature, powerful and now uses dsp acceleration
ii. PDAs/Tablets aren't hi-fi and music libraries are a waste of mmc space.

I found it informative to discover a 2005 post of yours claiming that your 640x480 Windows PDA was left gathering dust since your acquisition of the 770. So a brand-new niche OS and application suite beat the world leading portable OS? Why did you prefer it if "The quality of the applications on Internet Tablets is very, very poor"?

Ok. I see now that those apps are frequently criticised by others.

I'll grant you these as well, with the reservation that I've had less problems with Nokias Opera than with the majority of browsers i've ever used.

Modern browsers have to contend with a cancerously bloated set of technologies served-up in part by broken or evil websites. Flash is monstrously inefficient technology and nobody who understands it should expect it to run well on ARM.
(edit) so... Your web browsing experience is largely determined by what kind of sites you visit.


Thanks for the hint. http://www.cs.gmu.edu/~sean/stuff/n800/
That's a very educational read, and he makes several valid points. But a good deal of his critique is based on the fact that maemo isn't designed from the ground-up as a PDA OS. I could make a similar comparison between my Psion Netbook and the 770, but that would be ignoring the fact that maemo is built on linux - a desktop OS.

I'm not a heavy user of the Nokia applications. I bought it because it was great hardware with the best ever display, ran linux and could run ports of my favorite geeky apps.

I read the reviews and learned what i was buying before I plunked down my money. Nearly every reviewer pointed out that the device did not compete with PDAs out-of-the box. This is kind of unfortunate, because a higly sophisticated PIM suite could have opened up new markets for these devices. But to be fair and realistic, the 770/800 are dirt cheap compared to tablet competitors, and for Nokia to develop best-of-breed apps in-house, from the ground up, at this price point would have required a heavy financial committment for an OS that only runs on their product. I expect they took a serious look at Apple's Newton and Psion's market failures before setting their level of investment and exposure on this venture.

Fair enough, but no thanks.

Fair enough. If they promised a case they should deliver one.

I search bugzilla when I encounter a bug, and that's been a pleasantly rare experience. I admit to being generally uninformed about what others are saying here, but that's probably because i've spent too many years reading other forums dominated by user whining.

And that class of users will buy a non-free, tightly controlled and integrated tablet from Apple, when they get around to releasing one.

Wow, where have I heard these similar discussion points about platforms, OS, and software?

I know, this very forum. http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ead.php?t=4953

Not to open old wounds or issue out: "I told you so's", the current status can use a bit of improvement that will appeal to the mass market. By taking the advice of a few here, I realized that I was expecting too much from the N800 and was maybe trying to get it to do things it was not designed to do right now. By adding some available software, the new GAIM as an example, and Canola, I have a pretty good mobility device that meets most of my needs. Do I need more? Of course. Hopefully between Nokia and the various communities involved, new and exciting applications will be developed that will appeal to the masses, and pure user base.

Glad to see this thread getting over the ruffled feathers and back onto productive discourse... for the most part anyway. I hate to see 2 of my favorite posters in a pissing contest.

So... has anyone else started spamming other linux venues yet? I've hit a couple. And anyone have Mr. Torvald's email address? We need some big time champions to elevate the awareness (and hence support) of the tablets! Hmmm... wonder if Larry Ellision needs another quixotic quest...

EDIT: back to my original subject-- new 770 user opportunity occurs tomorrow or Wednesday, depending on a certain ops manager. Brace for impact!

How many units are we talking about?

(edit) I talk to everybody I know about the 770 and I take it with me. Everybody assumes it's a phone cause of the Nokia name :|

As far as publicity goes, what about giving out leftover 770s to well known people in exchange for a 'celebrity endorsement'?

Offhand I know of at least 35, because I prepped those myself. Maybe more. And of course there's always the possibility few or none are sold...

I prefer the Internet Tablet to my iPAQ because I prefer to browse the web on an 800x480 screen - having browsed on the iPAQ 640x480 screen I quickly realised it was unsatisfactory (even using Minimo) due to the feeling of being cramped. These days I would never recommend a screen size less than 800x4800 for any device with serious web surfing aspirations.

The Windows Mobile devices are more polished in look & feel than the Internet Tablets - the apps that Microsoft ships with the devices generally work quite well, within their limitations. Some of the Nokia apps simply don't work, which is not acceptable. The Nokia software QA is simply not up to scratch. Email doesn't work, and certain new features on the N800 RSS news reader have rendered it worthless, and that's before we get onto the other serious bugs in that app (such as deleting entire feed settings for no apparent reason).

"Rough edges" is what I'm talking about, the Internet Tablet software offering has too many of them.

I do find it perplexing that Nokia have gone with a closed source browser when Nokia already offer their own browser on Symbian (S60 browser based on WebKit, apparently very good) and have financially funded the development of Minimo to the tune of several million dollars. The focus of the Internet Tablets is web browsing, yet Nokia have given responsibility for this critical application to a third party and Nokia seem to have no direct control over the browser and it's flaws due to licensing issues. This seems a risky and bizarre approach given the alternatives they could have pursued (maybe they will in future - lets hope so).

I agree about Flash, maybe the situation will improve with Flash 9 but OSS alternatives to Flash aren't quite as advanced as the browsers so there is no real choice but to go with a Adobe implementation. Maybe in a couple more years OSS will be in better shape.

I'm not sure if Linux has anything to do with the UI discrepencaies that Sean Luke is highlighting - the UI is based on Hildon which Nokia have developed, admittedly on top of Linux but it could just as easily have been on top of any other OS, it's just the UI layer. With tighter control and better UI guidelines the UI could/should be more consistent across applications (certainly the Nokia provided applications). It's not as consistent as it could be, and can be improved.

But there's no reason why they shouldn't consider a Nokia Internet Tablet when they want something that "just works, and works well". With some effort spent smoothing out the rough edges, the Internet Tablets can be made to be just as user friendly as an Apple tablet would be without sacrificing the geek factor for those who still want it. We know Apple have achieved this already for Unix on the desktop and if Apple turn their attention to tablets with a similar form factor to the Nokia, my complaints about poor software quality won't simply have been a user whining, they will have been a user prophecising!

Tada: http://www.axiotron.com/

The ModBook or TableMac