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

[Nate Duehr]

David,

Thanks for sharing your experiences.

Reading LJ, I thought there'd be something like your analysis here, and 
instead I found myself wasting 30-45 minutes reading Doc Searls teach me 
crap about GPS software that I already knew.

Then he babbles about how his setup in-flight is legal, which he forgot 
he was linked to the GPS receiver via Bluetooth, thus... a receiver and 
transmitter, and completely illegal in-flight... on pretty much any U.S. 
flagged carrier.

LJ's articles continue their slow slide into uselessness... this month, 
an old guy playing with his GPS, while the cover promised a review of 
the device he was using.  (Nice review... fly all over the place, never 
even talk about the specs of the thing...)

Next month, some other old guy tells us some more about his world travel 
to exotic foreign lands to evangelize Linux, while completely ignoring 
that his readership will never go there, nor is interested.  (Yeah, 
Maddog... that was for you.)

And then for "entertainment" they'll throw in another of Marcel Gagne's 
articles where 1/3 of his word count and page space is taken up with his 
mythical restraunteur and wine cellar slave.  He actually writes about 
interesting things, but he'd have more room to do a good job of it if he 
dropped the whole fake-restaurant thing.

LJ has become a serious snoozer of a publication lately.  The cover's 
pretty, but the guts are lacking.

Nate

David Rudder wrote:
> 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
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