[clue-talk] What I like and don't like about the N800

[David Rudder]

I haven't read the LJ article on the N800, but I figure it's probably a 
cheerleading piece.  I've had my N800 for about 6 months and I've found 
a whole buncha flaws that most reviews don't cover.

The Good Stuff:
*) Supports both Opera and Mozilla, so all pages render nicely 
(including AJAX, yay!)
*) Support VoIP with all of Skype, Gizmo and generic SIP.  Generic SIP 
has a little work to go, but it's good enough to make and answer calls.
*) A bunch of cool puzzle games, which I love.
*) Support for internet radio.  Both video and audio feeds.  I listen to 
Air America Radio (*ducks the inevitable flames*), the BBC, WBGO Jazz, 
etc.  My daughter loves the live video feeds from NASA.  Actually, I do, 
too.
*) Easy, quick IM
*) The touchscreen controls are very nicely done
*) Convenient, light, small, easy
*) In the end, the thing is pretty useful.  Even just having an 
ultra-portable web browser with the ability to take notes is very handy,

The Bad Stuff:
*) Video VoIP is a joke.  Only between N800s. 
*) I'm not liking any of the email readers.  I've been spoiled by 
Thunderbird, I guess.  It doesn't seem too tough to support multiple 
IMAP accounts and to lay out the folder tree nicely.
*) The case is weak.  It's just soft leather, so there's no protection 
from dropping the tablet and breaking the screen.
*) The package management is weak.  It uses Debian's APT, but there 
isn't a good centralized repository, so finding what you need is difficult.
*) The OS upgrade is also weak. It wipes out all your applications so 
you have to reinstall.  This is made much worse by the problem noted 
above...finding these apps is really tough.
*) Lack of cell access is kind of lame.  I am surprised at how 
infrequently I can find an open access point unless I plan ahead.

MythTV Integration:
One reason I bought the tablet was so I could watch the videos from my 
MythTV anywhere in the house.  Cooking shows in the kitchen, for 
instance, or StarGate reruns while on the can. 
The tablet doesn't have the oomph to display the SD-resolution files 
that my Myth stores, so I had to make a custom transcoder to write them 
to smaller files.  That works pretty well, actually, so I'm able to view 
most of the videos from my tablet.  It took a lot of work, though.
The MythTV UPNP server doesn't work with the tablet.  It's probably 
myth's fault. But, the end result is that I can't play my MP3s easily.  
The tablet doesn't have an easy way to mount NFS shares.  So, I end up 
SCPing them over and playing them off the memory card.
Accessing other content, like news, stored videos (I have gigabytes of 
videos of my kids and ripped DVDs), etc is a non-starter.
So, the MythTV integration is just barely good enough.

-Dave