After having spent last three days with OS2008 on Godot (my N800:-) ) it’s time to draw some conclusions.

Speed

For sure OS2008 is hella fast! Using it on N800 is a pleasure. CPU speed management’s improvements are there, and you can feel it. Opening menus and launching apps is a pleasure, well even more thant what it was before!

Menus

Talking about menus, first time I saw new larger OS2008 menus I wasn’t sure I was going to like them but after getting used to the new look I have to confess that, after all, they are not as bad as I thought. Perhaps it would have been a little better being able to freely choice your size, you know: size matters!

Application Manager

In one word (and a half): it works! On OS2007 it was a pain using it. Everyone remembers having continuously to scroll application list after every install/remove action. I mean, that sort of things that make you ask if people really use the program they write.

Now, at last once an application has been installed/removed, AppMan will remember our position. Ins’t it great?

And again: speed! Browsing applications is very easy and comfortable. (more…)

 Updated Dec 01 2007: good news, seems like Skype installation is now working straight from Application Installer.

Just got Skype running on my N800, after flashing latest OS2008 (it was supposed to work on N810 only).

I tried installing it from Application Manager but it failed (”Download failed” message).

So I decided to give a try to apt-get

First of all you need to become root on your N800. Apparently the ssh way is not working anymore (password used to be “rootme”, but I wasn’t able to login, I’ll try to investigate a little bit) so you will have to use the gainroot script. Use flasher-3.0 to enable R&D mode, open a xterm session and write: “sudo gainroot”. At this point I also suggest you to create a new password for root account (using passwd), so that in the future you will be able to use ssh to login onto your device. While root write:

apt-get install skype

Apparently worked fine, but when installing Skype package I got an error, complaining about not using latest N810 software (are you kidding me?! )

What now? Simple enough. I had the package, only need to have it expanded:

dpkg -x /var/cache/apt/archives/skype_1.7.62.48.2_armel.deb /

beside not being canonical it worked and I was able to make and receive calls!

Please remember that beside everything seems to be working fine, this is a hack. Do it at your own risk So, basically, don’t blame me if something goes wrong!

At last! ITOS2008 landed on N800!

Actual release is a beta specifically aimed to developers. Announcement here. This release basically answers all my questions in previous posts.

So, perhaps, I’m not going to get an N810 in the next few weeks but, at least, now it will be possible to start working on a “stable” OS2008 device, avoiding using any trick

Some remarks:

1) OS2008 upgrade for N800 and N810 releases were originally planned to be done simultaneously.

2) OS2008 upgrade for N810 was released last week.

3) Discount codes *should* be fully functional Dec 15th.

Then: N810 release aproaching!

Anyway, and that’s what really counts, now developers can use a “stable” device for development purposes filling the gap I was highlighting in my previous posts.

Quick post: a new firmware (OS 2008 version 1.2007.42-19) upgrade has been released today, it should address some stability problems.

Could it be a prelude to N810 long awaited release? We will see.

Just got a comment from Quim Gil on my previous post about Nokia strategy. I think it’s worth giving more space to what he says.

Zerojay’s just found that N810’s release date was pushed back to Dec 19th, at least on NokiaUSA. Not a good news for me, and the other 499 dev/users who received the discount code. To be honest, N810 doesn’t even show a release date on www.nokia.it, and shop.nokia.it doesn’t even know about it. In the meantime [...]

As may times I said somewhere else, one of the advantages of Nokia’s Internet Tablets, on the old 770 as well on the young N810, is the extreme openess, being able to experiment and expand them, basicaly the opposite of what happens on the iPhone ;). And this is a good point for Nokia.

In the wait for my N810, and the release of N800’s firmware upgrade to IS2008 I decide do to some tests. One of the criticisms against to IT graphic interface is that it’s kinda too “constricted” and limited (you cannot move windows around, you cannot have more windows shown at once, etc.). I have to admit that’s (partly, at least) true, but the overall usability is overall more than acceptable (IMHO). (more…)

I’ve always been a PalmOS entusiast, I decided to leave it only when Nokia 770 was released. So, it’s easy to understand how happy I was when I read about GVM. Being able to use Palm’s apps on my Maemo IT could fill the gap for PIM applications.
Installing GVM was pretty smooth, and using Addressbook on my N800 gave me a shiver of pleasure along my back, bringing me back in time ;).

At that point I decided to install Iambic Agendus, perhaps the application I miss the most from the Palm times. Well, that wasn’t a good choice, GVM crashed and refusing to start anymore.

I’m goint to remove the whole stuff and try a fresh install. We’ll se.

Italian at: http://www.eth0.it/2007/11/13/garnetvm-iniziamo-male/