Nokia Internet Tablets Past and Present - Half baked post.

If you've read this blog before you'll be familiar with half written thoughts not being posted. This was one of them. The only reason I held back was because I realised that the point I was trying to make got lost in a more general commentary. Fix it..? can't be arsed, but i'll post it as it is.

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Complaints about Nokia not supporting Internet Tablets beyond a couple of years don't seem well founded to me. I was an avid user of the N800 with Maemo (2008 Diablo) until I bought an iPhone 6 weeks ago. The only thing i've done with the tablet since the day I bought the iPhone is install Mer to see what it's like because I no longer fear it might screw up the thing, meaning I no longer care *if* it screws up the thing.

Mer, for what it's worth, looks like a good early effort with a fair way to go, and didn't in any way screw up my existing Maemo setup. I don't really see how it's money (time) well spent for developers at this point, but I feel like an arsehole for saying it because until 6 weeks ago I certainly wanted it to continue for my benefit.

Therein lies the harsh reality. I was jazzed about it until something better came along.

Call me selfish if you want but we all paid a premium price for a Nokia Internet Tablet at some point, and i'm not going to be told that I don't deserve a say because I don't contribute to the OSS efforts. I'm not sure I have the skill and I don't want to spend the time. It's still a commerical product and note though that I said "wanted it to continue" a few moments ago. I have no sense of entitlement, which is entirely the point here.

These tablets, the N800/810 (forget the older one, seriously) simply don't have the processing power to come anywhere near to competing in the current market. It's painfully wonderful to see how effortlessly Safari renders a complicated site on a 3GS as I zoom in and out. On an N8x0 i'd have already waited 2 seconds to see anything, then be trying to drag to scroll, getting no response and getting pissed off as my effort eventually got interpreted as a tap on a link I didn't want to tap and the browser moved on to rendering that page before deciding to abort itself with no verbose reasoning leaving me staring at the weather applet which for some reason hasn't updated even though i'm frequently connected to a network.

The N8x0 tablets were great until something better came along. Good things can be made poor when they're replaced with better things. They're no worse in themselves, but the universe has moved on. Too simple? No - simple is the point.

Some people support a refresh of the N8x0 range. This actually could be interesting, but it absolutely won't happen. Not a chance in hell. I believe they're not even making the WiMax N810 anymore. The latest version of the device became obselete before the original.

How about the N900/RX-51/Rover? It's a whole new angle by the look of it. New OS to take advantage of faster hardware, and more importantly the feature that finally changes the answer to the question "is it a phone" to "yes"... But it looks like a phone now anyway...

It's often said there was no market for the Internet Tablet range. This new model doesn't really look much like one. It looks more likely to compete with Android devices. This also seems like the most logical step for Nokia to take.

At this point there's a clear lack of conflict in my thinking, and that again is the point. The old devices were handled correctly and the new one probably will be too. There's very little sense in Nokia spending time maintaining the OS support for the N8x0 range, because already few are going to want to continue using a device with this little power.

Take a step back and look at how long you can use a new PC before it becomes too slow to continue with and these mobile devices perhaps look a little less resiliant over time, but that's not a good enough reason to hang back with laggy devices. There's probably no conspiracy here.

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Afterthoughts... this was written before the N900 was properly unveiled. I'm a lot more positive about the N900 than I was when I wrote this, which just further reinforces my disinterest in trying to make continued use of my N800. It's not going to happen.

I said before that I eventually see myself with an Android phone some time after this iPhone period. Now it could just as easily be a Maemo phone. Not yet though. For now i'm with the brainwashed masses. Sorry.

Friday Focus: Windows 7, BT and Ubuntu

Damn it. It's saturday!

As soon as Windows 7 was no longer available for £44 I wished i'd bought two copies. As soon as it stops being £69 i'll probably wish I bought a second copy at that price. Either way it's going to be depressing to wipe the Ultimate RC1 and replace it with the Home Premium version (the one that doesn't cost £200 or £100), but overall the OS seems to be able to drive this laptop quite nicely compared to Vista which after a year or so was finally beginning to show it's bad side that I was so convinced everybody else was just making up. I'll meet you half way Vista haters - it's not without it's issues, but most of the things you guys hit on are the wrong things, such as having to hit "Continue" occasionally or *gasp* changing the settings so you don't need to. Losers.

7 is less impressive on my leftover machine with one component dating back to the last millenium. For some reason I never let go of the idea that the Soundblaster Live was a high end card even though it's three generations old and part of a line that audio professionals have hated all along. Still, the chipmunk voice altering thing was fun for a few weeks way back and it's managed some fairly decent band related recordings over time. It just seems that the device has no driver support in 7 and using the KX Project drivers is throwing up blue screens fairly randomly now, usually it seems in the middle of video playback, which is incredibly frustrating given that this machine acts as a TV for my 30 minute constant cross trainer workout, and if it blue screens, or worse hangs on a repeating slice of audio I have to interrupt the workout or live without the entertainment, which makes the whole thing seem to take a lot longer.

On another topic, I finally called BT on my broadband speeds tonight. Longest hold in a really long time - probably in excess of 30 minutes with an almost constantly ringing phone and one standard message.

They seem to think I do have a fault on the line, but that being the case, where does that fault go at 6am when I wake up and download podcasts each morning at a fairly consistent 585KiB/s? It seems far more likely i'm being subjected to some shaping here. I've seen other files download slowly too, but I wonder if i'm being punished for downloading large MP3 files, most of which (and I must emphasise most here) don't contain any copyrighted material. My only hope is that when I finally get away from BT on to a better all rounder I don't find that their service is somehow also impacted by BT due to their overall involvement in the underlying system.

Final thought - I love that when all seems lost with Ubuntu a quick drop into recovery and a dpkg always seems to manage to fix everything. It's like a colonic for the OS. I have no idea what I did to cause what seems like hundreds of half installed packages resulting in X stalling at the login screen, but I know it knows how to sort itself out if I just let it. As far as being ready for the desktop - forget it. It barely seems to understand how to communicate using the most common wireless security protocol, WPA, and i'm NOT the only person that thinks so. Just do a search for Ubuntu WPA, or if you really want nightmares, WPA2.