I was really trying to get into this whole 'I am one with the greater Linux commune, can you please pass me a cup of kool-aid' movement. But I failed. Miserably.
The Maemo.org website is perplexing, and the members of this community seem to have a problem communicating in English. Please don't post a question to the users of this site. You will get nonsense about how you are a horrible person for not understanding Linux, you will get acronyms you don't understand, and you will be humiliated and berated, and you won't even know why. I was berated for not knowing what 'su' and 'df' command was, apparently i was wasting the Linux community's time. Also, I was educated to the fact that the N900 is not a phone, its really a computer. Its a really... small... slow... featureless... computer... for Liliputians, I guess.
Of the pitiful handful of "applications" actually available, only a small percentage of them are even understandable to non-linux users. Seriously, here are actual 'descriptions' of application on this site that you can download. Do you know what the hell this means?
Pidgin and Telepathy Extra Protocols (Bonjour and Sametime) Adds Bonjour and Sametime support to Pidgin and Telepathy (via Haze)
Here is another one:
Scripts to mount and chroot into images/partitionsThese are the actual and entire description of these apps. I have no clue what these words mean, and I have absolutely no idea what this app even does. The screenshots show a bunch of text in a terminal window. Apparently these are Linux things.
Fremantle version; (This does NOT use the 'turbo-charged' dm-loop for mounting image files.)
Other applications don't even install. I tried to install an app called "easy-deb-chroot". The great name aside, this was supposed to run another version of Linux on my Linux PDA cell phone. I guess you can't get enough of a good thing. I just wanted to actually run office applications, and apparently there are office applications, just in another type of Linux, not the one installed on the PDA. Which makes we wonder why this other version of Linux wasn't installed in the first place. Of course, this program didn't work, it took 40 minutes to install 2.5 GB of data on my machine, just to pop up an obscure 'error unknown' message. This is par for the course with the N900.
Of the applications that install, most don't work well, or crash. The FM radio, the camera, for goodness sake even the clock application crashed on me, or wouldn't function.
I tried to go to the Maemo.org website to post a bug report. Now Maemo.org is not the slowest site on the web, but it is doing its best to be darn darn close. Forget about trying to search through the forums, it takes too long to respond. And this site itself seems to be 'in development'. If you click on any link to 'submit bug report', you get an error message that Firefox does not know how to handle the link, so I guess bug reporting is not a feature yet implemented. Today I went to the Maemo.org site, and the page is filled up with error messages about flipping arrays. That really figures, Nokia can't even get the website right?
I can't imagine I am the only person who find this phone and infrastructure lacking and almost comically tragic. Maybe I have a lemon phone? It seems like everyone on the forum spends hours and hours getting their N900 to work. And its not hours and hours of fun. Its hours and hours of 'compiling' and 'developer mode' and trying to type on that tiny keyboard into that tiny terminal window i guess. I did learn what apt-get means. Good times.
Actually quite funny post. I was initially a bit worried reading your review, since I just ordered N900 (in Sweden) moving away from the 'local' telephonecompany in Stockholm (SonyEricsson), to the competitor a few miles to the east (Finland a lost part of old Sweden). I think you have done a good job doing the review and you completely killed N900, still you have convinced me that I chosed the right phone. Iphone dont appeal to me, since Apple acts the way they do. SonyEricsson produce telephones with very good quality and technology, but cant really find a way to benefit from that, still a preferred choice for me and now Nokia appears with a powerful tablet-phone in 'beta' version....Perfect, since it gives me the possibility to use a phone and a 'small' computer to do things with, especially since I need the possibility to access 'tricky' networks et cetera, I also like the possibility to view/listen to different both on internet, other mediaformats......
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I think you have done your homework, the result from my standpoint looks a bit biased and 'americanised' (simplified), but lets see what I think after a month or two, I might have the same view as you...
Cheers
This really sums up my worst fears with the N900. I currently use an iPhone, but I'm really sick of the jailbreak-release-jailbreak attack and counter attack cycle. As an admin and coder, I'd rather have a phone I know I can write random scripts on. Because of that, I've been pondering switching to a phone running Android, the Palm Pre, or the Nokia N900. I've a lot of Linux experience, so the idea of being able to do the Linux-ey stuff is a plus.
ReplyDeleteI *like* playing around with the Linux innards of the Linux PDAs I've owned... But there's no way in hell I should have to. Any phone or PDA that requires me to dick around with the command line just to get the basics to work are instantly out of the running.
I had a lot of hope for this device- from the videos, it looked like Nokia had finally spent some time and money and done some R&D themselves, rather than designing the hardware and hoping that the open source community would write all the code for them.
So far that hasn't worked for them: the usability of the Nokia tablets as small computers or web tablets has gotten worse and the operating systems have gotten slower for every release I've used so far- in a lot of ways, my Nokia 770 out of the box made for a better web browsing tablet than my Nokia N800 with the newest OS installed. Things have just gotten slower and flakier, it seems.
That said, I've had a really crappy experience with the Nokia N800. Everything I've been reading so far, especially on this and the "Applications" pages are spot on descriptions of my experience with the N800.
To some extent, I don't mind having to poke around, add repos... but I demand my smartphone do at least the following well:
1. Browse the web at least as well as Pocket IE on my Jornada 720 running Handheld PC 2000 (!) WinCE
2. Be able to make phone calls and send SMSes in a trouble-free way
It isn't asking much... but it sounds like the N900 just couldn't deal with requirements that steep, not at this point.
Hee hee! Funny, Dude. As well as not playing D&D, you obviously don't use Google. All those words that you don't understand can be found by doing searches.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen you around on the talk.maemo.org forums, but your tone in this blog tells me why you weren't liked very much there. What's with the "Its a really... small... slow... featureless... computer... for Liliputians, I guess."
And if you don't understand the description of an application, there's a good chance that you probably don't need to worry about the package being "for you".
Go download Angry Birds from Ovi. That's a fun game, and it doesn't use any big words that you haven't heard before.