I fooled around a little bit with the mapping application built into the N810, but wasn’t too impressed. Sure, it could be useful for when I get lost and need to find out where the hell I’ve ended up. A situation which I admit isn’t all too uncommon. But it did seem pretty much like a teaser application, bare bones functionality with the desire being to upsell me on some navigation package so that I could get access to the rest of the features. No thanks.

A weird quirk I’ve run into while fooling around with doing a little development on the N810, there doesn’t seem to be a way to enter redirection characters (great than or less than signs, or angle brackets, whatever you want to call them) using the hardware keyboard. They’re not on the keyboard itself. And there’s a “Chr” key that brings up a character picker onscreen for odd characters, but the greater than and less than signs aren’t there.

Escape and page up/page down are on the toolbar. So I figured maybe I could use the onscreen keyboard to add the characters I wanted to the toolbar, but also no dice. Making an entry on the toolbar with a name of ‘gt’ and value of ‘>’ just seems to generate nothing at all when I tap it.

I don’t see any general remapping tools for the hardware keyboard (though there are for a bluetooth keyboard). Any way to get these characters easily accessible? Right now I have to just use the onscreen keyboard (or use the hardware keyboard and physically close the slider, bring up the onscreen keyboard, type my characters, and switch back). There’s gotta be an easy way to get those characters available though.

I was playing around a bit more with the N810 this morning. What I’m aiming to do is not need a laptop when I leave the house. The N810 should be perfect for that. What I was trying to get going was syncing the calendar that I keep on my desktop and N95 to the N810 as well. Seems like it should be easy. I use iSync on my Mac to sync up the laptop and the N95, I was expecting to find something that would allow me to relatively simply pull in some software that would allow the N810 to participate in that. I did find some interesting bits of software that would lead in that direction, but didn’t get it working. Then I was trying to get a read-only version of my calendar on the N810 using the GPE Calendar program. But even though I have ical exports up on my server, the calendar app was failing to subscribe to them. Finally I had to settle for using Google Calendar subscribed to my ical feeds to view them on the device. Google Calendar, also, is not syncable using iSync. There’s some commercial software that provides it… but no thanks. Why is it that calendar and contact management still blow after all these years? Wasn’t the standardization on Bluetooth as the transport supposed to fix this whole data problem?

While playing around with Google Calendar I was also poking at the new Mozilla based browser. Check out the info about it here. I’m happy to see that it supports extensions, which in some case can be simple repackages of desktop extensions. No UI elements for the browsers though, which is kinda restricting. Something I wanted to poke at was support for bookmarklets. Do they work? How do they compare to their desktop equivalents? Questions for another time, need to go run about for a while… with my laptop unfortunately.

Trying out a posting from MaemoWordPy on the N810. The keyboard certainly is nice. Still a lot of work to be done in porting apps over from previous versions though. I miss my home screen apps.

Calendar and contacts support still doesn’t seem to cross to the phone at all. There is no calendar app built into OS2008 still. Contacts don’t sync from my N95 to the N810 either. In an ideal world I would be able to use the N810 for everything, even voice calls and sending and receiving SMS messages, without having to take my handset out of my backpack.

The folks at AdMob got me an N810 as a going away present:

Russ pointed out a different version of Ruby for Maemo than I had tried before. This one has a hildon library and GTK support, w00t! I tried out a few of the examples but haven’t dug into it too much. Requiring the hildon module throws a bunch of warnings, but the module works perfectly once it’s in.

Apparently the N810 is on shelves somewhere. I’m not going to frusterate myself by trying to order it from NokiaUSA however, that would just be stupid. But it’s supposed to be in Best Buy and CompUSA. Neither of the online systems for those stores know what an N810 is. No one I’ve managed to reach in the corporate office or at any of the branch locations in the Bay Area for either of those stores know what an N810 is, and when asked to check everyone comes back saying it’s not in stock. They don’t know when it will be in stock. Call back later. Anyone sighted the thing in the wild? I really want one now, like right-now-this-very-second now!

Apparently the N810 is on shelves somewhere. I’m not going to frusterate myself by trying to order it from NokiaUSA however, that would just be stupid. But it’s supposed to be in Best Buy and CompUSA. Neither of the online systems for those stores know what an N810 is. No one I’ve managed to reach in the corporate office or at any of the branch locations in the Bay Area for either of those stores know what an N810 is, and when asked to check everyone comes back saying it’s not in stock. They don’t know when it will be in stock. Call back later. Anyone sighted the thing in the wild? I really want one now, like right-now-this-very-second now!

The N800 is a fantastic device for web and IM, but I’ve been poking around with how to make it more useful as a production device. Or something more like a personal dashboard. I would like to have the device sync with my server and other services out on the net when it goes online and pull in a bunch of info. Pull down stats from the web server, comments and links from the weblogs, a few slices of info from my inbox, stats from AdMob and Adsense, juicy stuff from the newsreader.

The way I’ve been dealing with that stuff in general is with an IM bot, which works out pretty well from the device. The IM support in Maemo is pretty sweet. However I’m having some information density and interaction issues. So I’ve started fooling around with the Python port to see if I can make something useful. Just need a few independently updating ‘windows’ and some nice small buttons to change views. Should work till I can get data glasses.

The N800 comes with a package called docpurge that deletes files which for most users are just cruft. I end up installing some packages that install stuff I actually want in places like /usr/share/doc. I want to keep them around, but I also don’t want them sucking up core memory either. Fortunately the script that cleans up the files is just a shell script that gets called by the package manager, its located at /usr/sbin/docpurge. I modified mine to check if the internal MMC card is present, and if so copy the files from /usr/share/doc out to the card before removing them. Good enough for what I want.