Planet maemo: category "feed:c375eca130e9b3972cb48d0355b2980a"

Nearly two years passed since I started to use my current cellphone: Sony Ericsson k750i. It is great device but I feel more and more limited during using it. For example PIM is very simple (no recurrent events, no attenders) and none of my PDA devices has something more extended.

Over year ago I wrote post about USB — connected most of my devices/gadgets into desktop USB ports and checked how system reacts to it. As Kees Jongenburger gave me USB AF/AF adapter during this year LinuxTag I decided to do the same with N810 tablet.

Few days ago Nokia N800 tablet emulation was released into public. Richard integrated it into Poky so now we have QEMU which can be used not only to test ARM images on ARM Versatile or Sharp Zaurus but also to run on Nokia N800 tablet. Of course it is not limited to Poky images — Maemo boots very nicely on it :)

Three months ago I wrote post about situation of my Nokia 770 tablet. Today I looked how situation looks with non-Maemo systems.

Thanks to work done by Jiri Benc in his “ukeyboard” alternative control panel for language and regional settings I am able to present Polish layout for N810 hardware keyboard.

Polish chars are on Chr+ (where is one of “acelnosxz”).

Also few other combinations are added:

Fn+Space = |
Chr+Space = Tab
Chr+j = [
Chr+k = ]

Original functions of “Chr” key were dropped — there is no small on screen keyboard after single press of “Chr” and no option to enter other national chars (like “öïüõôōő” etc).

Click here to simple install.

One of my home computers exports lot of music over Samba (everything as one share). In next room I have HiFi system where I like to play some of them. So I decided that N810 (or even 770) should be enough for it.

Today I bought my first car. It is Opel Astra combi from 1997 year.

It drives very nicely and have lot of space for all things which we will want to take with us (pram/pushchair for Mira and other luggage).

As N810 came with some kind of car holder I unpacked it today and looked at it. There is no way to mount it in the car… From fast googling it looks like provided holder require another Nokia accessory — HH-12 Easy Mount ;(

So using N810 for navigation has to wait a bit… I need to buy HH-12 to mount it (or use other holder), then buy car charger DC-4 (or rather 3rd party replacement) and then get better GPRS plan to be able to use Maemo Mapper on the road. Map application which comes with device has very poor maps of Poland and routing functionality require additional payment.

There are many N800 and N810 tablets with so called ‘Power on drama’. It appear as device which does not want to power on after shutting down or takes lot of time to switch on.

My N810 runs OS2008 still. Today during normal telephone call with friend I was asked about Skype account. After call I grabbed tablet and looked at available applications.

Few minutes later I was logged into Skype account. But to get notifications application has to work… Same problem also exists with Gizmo… Both are available by default (as links to installation) in OS2008 but not integrated into system at all…

I wonder why that situation exists — user can add Google Talk, normal Jabber accounts and SIP ones and those are handled by Maemo Contacts application. Why Nokia did not made such integration possible for external IM/telephony applications…

Probably same reason as with i18n: lack of thinking on design phase…

First was Nokia 770. Then Nokia N800 was born. Both were keyboardless so ‘virtual’ on-screen keyboard was used. But then N810 came and it stopped being such easy…

On N810 there are 3 keyboards:

• on-screen one
• hardware one
• on-screen one which is displayed when ‘Chr’ key is pressed on hardware one

How to modify all those keyboards to add new language? Few ways exists but all have common part — on-screen layout needs to be present to allow to change hardware layout.

Simple way is to choose one which you do not plan to use and adapt it for own use. Bad part is that user has to remember that ‘Italian’ means ‘Polish’ (for example).

But there is other way — Jiří Benc wrote alternative control panel for keyboards. This one allows to select any layout available in system. User still needs to have layout for on-screen and hardware keyboards but at least is not limited to those few ones which are available with OS2008.

Too bad that both Shift keys on hardware keyboard works as Left Shift :( Otherwise one of them could be mapped as AltGr and be used for Polish keys… For now I will probably make Polish keymap as copy of English one + national chars on ‘Chr’ virtual keyboard…