Nokia N900

vibe666

well that's me gone form n900-land and off to HTC Desire HD land instead, sorry.

LoGiE

vibe666 wrote: »

well that's me gone form n900-land and off to HTC Desire HD land instead, sorry.

I've been thinking of doing the same. Whats the battery life etc like campared to the n900?

ChopShop

LoGiE wrote: »

I've been thinking of doing the same. Whats the battery life etc like campared to the n900?

A couple of days of moderate usage.

There's a couple of things i do miss about the N900.

Camera is finnicky, i think it's a step backwards.


There's also the fact that native browser automatically redirects you to the 'mobile' version of everything which The N900 does not.

Other browsers are available, obviously, but it's a little bit of a niggle.

vibe666

wernstrom! wrote: »

A couple of days of moderate usage.

i'm still trying to find a simple way to keep it offline until i want it online and then be able to quickly switch to online mode by my connection of choice, then automatically go offline again when i'm not using it like i could do with the n900, so i'm only getting a day out of it at the moment with moderate usage. i would get 48 hours out of my n900 with similar usage.

i'm sure its just a setting or app i need to find, but its a bit of a niggle.

wernstrom! wrote: »

Camera is finnicky, i think it's a step backwards.

i actually like the camera and HD video recording and the flash (and handy torch function) seems much more powerful than the n900 one, so it gets a solid thumbs up from me in everything except the lack of a hardware camera button. it does seem to be more snappy (pardon the pun) than the n900 too when its actually time to take some pics its much more responsive.

wernstrom! wrote: »

There's also the fact that native browser automatically redirects you to the 'mobile' version of everything which The N900 does not.

i'm not finding that at all, but no idea why or what i might have done to change something to fix that.

overall, i'm really loving it so far, just as much as i did the n900 when i first got it, if not more.

Explosive_Cornflake

wernstrom! wrote: »

There's also the fact that native browser automatically redirects you to the 'mobile' version of everything which The N900 does not.

Other browsers are available, obviously, but it's a little bit of a niggle.

That's the webserver doing that based on the user agent your phone reports.
You can change it, so, within the browser -> menu -> more ->settings -> user agent -> Desktop. That does the trick for me normally.

OneWayBet

What is it that keeps attracting iPhone and Android discussions on the N900 forum? If someone has bought a new phone and wants to say goodbye to the community that's fine but for active N900 users this thread is rapidly declining into spam with all the N900 "expats" discussing the finer details of their new handsets!

mcmoustache

I just came here to improve the tone a bit. The last page of posts is a bit depressing with everyone leaving.

I picked up my n900 about 2 months ago and am delighted with it. It's my first smart phone. I like tinkering with linux and this thing is perfect. It really feels like MY phone. I have the freedom to do anything with it even if that risks bricking it.

The only issue I had was with flash photography at night with the blue haze on the right hand side. That was easily fixed by painting the slider black.

I wouldn't recommend it to too many people as I think you need a bit of linux-fu to get the most out of it but for myself it's the perfect phone. I just hope the maemo community sticks around for a while longer to produce some more apps and games.

All in all it's a great device and hopefully I'll get a few years out of it.

OneWayBet

Welcome aboard! I'm still content with the N900 and expect it to take me into the summer at least, nothing out there tempting me yet.

Have you installed Power Kernel yet? If not check it out as it really gives a big increase in performance and extends battery life if using undervolting (e.g. with the 'ideal' setting).

Alanstrainor

I'm still happy with my N900. I dug out my N770 last night to compare the two! And the difference is incredible. On the n770, i loaded up the full boards web page in the browser, without images to give it the best chance. I then tried to open an image in the image viewer and got a "No free memory" error! And it took over a minute to load boards.ie. Just to compare, in the same time it took the n770 to load the site, i was able to connect to my wifi and load the following site on my n900:
Boards.ie
Reddit.com
Ebay.ie
Facebook.com
Gmail.com
Engadget.com

All the above sites were the full "desktop" versions, and loaded just as the N770 finished loading the one boards.ie page.

OneWayBet

Interesting times ahead for the N900.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Community_SSU

The Community SSU is a community controlled system for providing OS updates. This means that instead of a perfectly good device becoming obsolete due to the manufacturer moving on to newer devices the community fixes bugs and upgrades core apps keeping end users up to date and therefore extending the useful life of the handset.

I've installed the test version and the install went fine. Main differences I noticed is that the email client (modest) has been upgraded and seems faster. Also the status dialog when you tap the top-left seems to fill out the screen better and I no longer need to scroll to see everything. This is just the beginning, the N900 was a bit of an experiment by Nokia and it is not clear if there will be anything like it in the foreseeable future (from any manufacturer) so the N900 might be around for quite a while yet

LoGiE

Installed the community update. It's made a huge difference to email speedwise for me!

AlmightyCushion

Same here finding the email client quite zippy.

mcmoustache

OneWayBet wrote: »

Have you installed Power Kernel yet? If not check it out as it really gives a big increase in performance and extends battery life if using undervolting (e.g. with the 'ideal' setting).

Yeah, that was one of the first things I did with it. It was already on PR1.3 as well so I didn't need to do any OTA updates. The battery life has been pretty good for what is effectively a small laptop. I can get 2 days out of it unless I'm using wifi or playing games. Using it as a wifi-router with mobile hotspot really drains the battery as well but I only installed that to see it working. Games and flash are bad too.

I do like the interface and the multiple desktops as well. At the moment I only really use two but it's nice to have some to spare. The browser is very good for a mobile one. It's a full browser although there are some missing settings. Still, you can always go to about:config if you want since it's based on firefox.

One thing that I'm looking for at the moment is something like "prey project". It's a simple anti-theft system which, when the laptop is marked as stolen, takes pictures with the inbuilt webcam, logs the wlan/IP (and gps I think) info, and sends them to a server. You can then log in and see what the thief has been up to. Prey project is open source and the main body of code is python so it might be possible to port it. If a thief connected via gprs/3g, you could probably ssh into your phone as well once you have the ip and ssh is running. I'll keep an eye on maemo.org in case something useful (non-sim based) comes up. The fact that it's even possible is great though.

OneWayBet

Have you looked at SMSCON? http://wiki.maemo.org/SMSCON

Alanstrainor

LoGiE wrote: »

Installed the community update. It's made a huge difference to email speedwise for me!

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

Same here finding the email client quite zippy.

Have you guys noticed any other improvements? I don't actually use the email client at all. So if that's the only big improvement I might just leave it until something interesting is included!

mcmoustache

OneWayBet wrote: »

Have you looked at SMSCON? http://wiki.maemo.org/SMSCON

I have but it seems to depend on the sim card being present and I don't think any thief would leave the sim in the phone for very long. The way that prey-project works is that it tries to connect via free wifi or uses whatever internet connection is available to receive instructions from a server at certain intervals.

Chances are that the thief will connect to the internet at some point with the phone, whereas in my opinion he's not as likely to leave the sim card in the phone for long enough to be useful. SMSCON looks good but the sim card seems to be a very weak link.

Of course, having both methods of communication with the phone would be a good idea.

OneWayBet

Yes but it will detect the sim change and it will SMS you the new number which means you can still control it remotely!

mcmoustache

OneWayBet wrote: »

Yes but it will detect the sim change and it will SMS you the new number which means you can still control it remotely!

I should have read up on it properly instead of just skimming over it. I'll give it another look.

Thanks for that.

OneWayBet

If you try it let me know if you can get the email alerts working, doesnt work for me for some reason.

Owwmykneecap

Got my phone back after the usb issue.

Everything is gone! sure they give me my crappy screen back but not my photos and data! arrrgh. did this happen to you lot?

OneWayBet

I think in general with any phone manufacturer if you hand your phone in for repair you should back up the data with the expectation that it will be wiped. Usually they state this in the disclaimer that they make you sign.

So they fixed the USB socket?

Owwmykneecap

but how can i back up data or even power my phone with no usb port.

yeah, new internals apparently. same externals and camera.

I would have assumed with such a simple and common fault, it would have been a repair job not a cut n shunt.

muboop1

Owwmykneecap wrote: »

but how can i back up data or even power my phone with no usb port.

yeah, new internals apparently. same externals and camera.

I would have assumed with such a simple and common fault, it would have been a repair job not a cut n shunt.

Nah its unfortunate, but all repair companies upgrade software or reset phones when they receive them. Its just a standard procedure.

You should have signed a disclaimer?

As for how could you have backed it up... memory card, bluetooth etc... they arent going to spend time backing up etc for you... they want to do the bare minimum work. Its a business, time is money!

OneWayBet

You could have powered the battery from a compatible Nokia or else pick up a desktop charger. BTW I'm not trying to smart, just answering the question! Just put it down to experience and be happy that your phone is fixed

jenizzle

Ack, my phone will only display mobile versions of sites, and the ovi store keeps saying that my phone is not compatible.

What have I done?!

Alanstrainor

jenizzle wrote: »

Ack, my phone will only display mobile versions of sites, and the ovi store keeps saying that my phone is not compatible.

What have I done?!

Do you have the hide user agent app installed?

jenizzle

Nope. Had a look through my installed apps and I'm not seeing anything obvious. It has been bugging me for weeks :rolleyes:

ETA: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=38600&page=2 I did what it says here - fixed it! Second time I've done that here!

Bluefrog

Up until a few weeks ago (not sure when) my browser was prompting for permission to share my location when I hit a page with script using the geolocation API - like http://www.google.com/maps/m.

Just tried it yesterday and it no longer works. At some point I seem to remember having to install an extension in MicroB to get this working so I looked in the extensions and nothing there so I checked the repositories and sure enough, maemo geolocation was there to install.

Installed and removed it twice now with phone restarts in between but still no joy - the maemo geolocation extension does not show in my list of extensions and the geolocation aware pages do not prompt for permission to share my location.

The location widget, Maep and Ovi Maps have no problem finding my location and geolocation also works as expected in Firefox. Checked maemo.org and only found one pretty old thread with no solution so I'm out of ideas.

Has anyone else come across this - any fixes?

Running PR 1.3 by the way.

Bluefrog

Nevermind - apparantly in PR 1.3 you don't need the extension - fixed this by uninstalling the extension and then getting rid of my MicroB configuration by doing

rm -rf ~/.mozilla/microb

in xterm

No need to dual boot into Android anymore as the n900 can now run Android apps through Alien Dalvik!
Havent tried it yet but looks good

http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/08/myriad-alien-dalvik-runs-android-apps-on-any-phone-starting/