“I like it. Not as a phone, but as an adventure. This will be a fun ride. [more..]

The N900 has zero navigation buttons. The iPhone has one. While the iPhone is easy to understand, the N900 is not. A beginner will have a steep learning curve. The first thing you have to learn is that the Maemo 5 UI has four distinct layers you need to be aware of: [more..]”

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By the way, where is the next Nokia tablet hardware?

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1. The three hour limit must fall

   

   There is an unwritten rule when designing portable computers:

   The battery will last three hours.

   Once technological advances allow the next generation to run longer – be it thanks to more efficient hardware or more powerful battery technology – the manufacturers decide to shrink the battery, capping the device back to the three hour limit.

   Three is a nice psychological figure. “Lasts three hours? – not too short!” “Less than three kilogramms? – not too heavy!” After all these years, today’s 3 kg laptops usually still run for 3 hours or less.

   This must end.

   Three hours is not enough for a true mobile device (especially since the advertised three hours of battery time usually result to less than two in real use).

2. Batteries should be replaceable

   

   A rechargeable portable device that doesn’t allow the user to replace its battery is a disposable item, it was made to break.

   Enforcing planned obsolescence by making it hard to replace the device’s consumable parts is a design choice that should be opposed.

3. We need a standard battery for gadgets

   

   This is the hardest task for the future and it’s unlikely to happen soon. But we desperately need a new battery standard.

   Good luck when you try to find the battery type used in a laptop or cellphone at a reasonable price just few years after its release.

   The AA battery‘s format was standardized 60 years ago. Battery technology has improved since then, yet you can still use today’s AA in a 1980s walkman or a 1950s flashlight.

   There are several manufacturers. You can buy AAs anywhere in the world. Recycling is possible.

   It’s insane: Gadget manufacturers keep a stock of fast-aging device-specific batteries for a limited time and sell them at premium prices. There are no or few competing offers and formats change with every new device generation.

   We need standard battery formats just like AA for laptops, cameras, cell phones and other portable gadgets.

#1 is just my personal requirement. The technology exists to design sub-500-gramm computers that run for a whole day, but few customers buy them, so unless people decide that a three hour MID isn’t really such a mobile internet device, the industry has no reason to change.

But #2 and #3 are ecologically disastrous and I’d even welcome government regulation to enforce these if the industry doesn’t come up with solutions by itself.

Photos via flickr by AndyArmstrong, merfam, Eva the Weaver.

This article was written for umpcportal.com.

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Now there is an answer: According to Nokia, Ogg is “proprietary technology” and they fear that it is “encumbered”. The reasoning behind this appears to be “risk of submarine patents”.

Which is curious, since Nokia is one of the supporters of software patents in Europe. So do they like software patents or not? It’s not clear. This particular choice of OGG being risky is also curious, since Linux, Gnome and Mozilla and other software foundations of Maemo Internet Tablets are IMHO equally at risk of being plastered with submarine patents.

There are other companies happily selling OGG-capable hardware and software. Why is (e.g.) Samsung not afraid of the very risk that Apple and Nokia fear?

So, what is the problem with OGG? The whole explanation doesn’t add up. And the way we handle patents still sucks.

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The Nokia SU-8W keyboard has been here for several months now. It wasn’t much fun to use with the Nokia 770 internet tablet’s original operating system, which back then required inofficial drivers, but the Nokia N800’s OS supports this keyboard by default. Pairing is easy, yet a little confusing with the N800 sometimes, and typing in applications is straightforward. The keys have a very good feel and yes, you can comfortably touchtype with it. It has an integrated folding stand that is designed for cell phones which can hold the N800, as well.

The SU-8W runs forever on one set of 2 x AAA batteries and a reason other than its low power drain might be that I hardly ever use it. Let me explain why.

Originally I expected to use this keyboard for extensive typing while on the go. But Maemo isn’t made for keyboard use (if it is, this user didn’t see the clues needed to learn it), so the N800 needs to be in touch distance since you have to use the pen or a finger for GUI interaction every now and then.

The SU-8W folds in the middle. There is no lock, so if you try to quickly type a longer note while on the subway and just whip out the keyboard to write it down, this is the result:

It’s no fun to use the SU-8W on the subway in a hurry.

Obviously, you can’t use the N800 with the keyboard while walking or standing. An absurd situation resulted when I once needed to send an important long message by email while at the train station. So I sat down cross-legged on the concrete floor, put the N800 on the floor in front of me, put a book on my lap and the keyboard on the book. That worked, but definitely wasn’t comfortable.

Oh no, an FN-key, designed to drive me mad!

The keys have the near-perfect size for touchtyping, but the SU-8W has only three rows of keys, with the fourth row of numbers accessible through a green FN-key, which is inexplicably designed to act similar to caps-lock instead of shift.

You can pair the SU-8W with PCs (it works with the Everun). But the German SU-8W keyboard has non-standard label locations for some special characters such as @ or ß, so that you won’t easily find those while using XP. My wife called her attempt of writing a short email with that setup a “maddening experience” and I still haven’t gotten used to the the FN-key function, either.

That fourth row of keys is missing. There would have been enough space for a fourth row with non-square keys and the keys still would have been big enough. (Then again, having touchtyped on a Libretto 50ct, I may be more tolerant than others when it comes to key size.)

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So submit your bugs and enhancement requests, but please make sure that noone else already did! And vote for those you want fixed!

Here are my favourites. Vote for my bugs, please! 0 0 ]]> Hanno Zulla <sockpuppet@hanno.de> feed:6f8015c0c6c3f487047a2ede545652f0 Mon, 23 Apr 2007 11:04:26 +0000 http://maemo.org/midcom-permalink-889d9614f18d11dba8da3169876b9c7a9c7a http://www.hanno.de/blog/2007/x86-umpcs-are-getting-sexier-continued/ Didn’t expect that… What a surprise: Intel and a few hardware partners are betting on a hildonized Linux-UI for a new class of consumer devices very similar to Nokia’s Internet Tablet. Check out UMPCPortal’s coverage of the news from IDF. The first batch of these devices is slated for summer 2007, but they claim that even smaller devices will be possible with their new chipset in early 2008.

A PSP-sized x86 UMPC prototype, scheduled for 2008. Image via Golem.de.

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Problem is that other commuters on the subway notice that you are watching a film, especially if the player screen is as big as the N800. They’ll try to catch a glimpse of it.

Recently I recored John Carpenter’s Vampires from German TV and transcoded it for the N800 to watch it later. Didn’t know much about the film. Expecting a tongue-in-cheek B-movie, it turned out to feel uneasy to be on the subway, watching a film about a group of professional vampire hunters on a gory killing spree, using a bitten prostitute to lure the vampire master…

Never thought of that situation before.

The media player for the N800 works nice, but it needs a bit of polish, though. It doesn’t save the position to continue watching a film later, playback can get jerky or freezes, the player sometimes turns unresponsive for unknown reasons. And once again: Please, Nokia, with the next hardware revision, please make 800×480@30fps playback possible. That’d be wonderful!

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Two examples of abandoned hardware (subscription required, non-subscribers have to wait a week.)

“It’s tempting to say that, since the 770 is a Linux-based device, the community should be able to support it into the future. As long as people care about the platform, it should continue to work. The problem is that the 770 contains a fair amount of non-free software at all levels. [..]”

“That will severely limit the degree to which the community can support the platform; it’s a slow death sentence for the 770 tablet. [..]”

“There are hints that more components will be opened in the future as well, but no promises. The end result is that the 770 will, for many users, hit the end of its useful life much sooner than it should have, and that the N800, while hopefully lasting longer, may well encounter similar issues. This state of affairs is unfortunate, it makes a nice piece of hardware less valuable than it really should be.”

It’s a chicken and egg problem, though. Developers and users claim that they would like to work on the 770 sources to extend the hardware’s usefulness beyond Nokia’s support.

But do they? Nokia counters that even those driver sources they did release haven’t found much response from outside developers.

In the meantime, users enjoy insulting Ari Jaaksi in his blog because of this issue. Yeah, I’m sure that will help the community making friends at Nokia…

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“I saw the N800 and fell in love.. but then i saw the Sony UMPC… and wanted marriage… but saw the price tag and decided I was too young for marriage…” (from IRC)

The Origami project began with a lot of hype and the promise of a windows-XP-based mini computer for less than 500$ that will run for a full day on one battery. This hasn’t happened: Now in 2007, we have a number of bulky and heavy tablets with 7-inch-screens, usually priced around 1000 Euro.

Some smaller devices such as the Oqo or the Sony UX are closer to the originally promised device dimensions, but come at a price tag way beyond that.

So nothing revolutionary yet: Less-than-1kg Subnotebooks such as the Toshiba Libretto or the JVC XP were sold years before the Origami announcement.

The Nokia 770 and N800 came much closer: Just a bit more than 200 gramms, a full day or two on one battery for average mobile use. Thanks to the ARM-based chipset made for low-power systems and a Linux system that has been taught to conserve energy whenever it can.

But there are some interesting advances in x86-based UMPCs these days. Intel decided to make low power consumption a priority and wants to come up with a special UMPC CPU and chipset:

[..] Intel announced that they will make a dedicated CPU / Chipset platform for the UMPC that [..] will get the average power of a UMPC down to SUB 4-Watt. [..] The low-power screen component looks like it will come from Samsung who have developed, specifically for UMPCs, a 7″ screen that drains just 0.6Watt. That’s about 30% of what today’s screens typically take. [..] 4W average drain is amazing. It means that a 2006 UMPC that ran for 3 hours could potentially run for 9 hours. It also enables smaller devices to be built. It means that x86 architecture is becoming so efficient that RISC/ARM based tech loses a lot of its advantage.

The cynical result of these improvements might be smaller devices with smaller batteries that still last the magical 3 hours, only, but here’s hoping.

Intel is competing with AMD. Their Geode chipset is already used in PDA-sized windows XP computers such as the Raon Digital Vega or the upcoming Digital Cube G43 UMPC. A working prototype (it was functional and ran XP, but the case design will change) was on display at CeBIT: Twice the weight and a bit bigger than the N800, but still fascinating:

Of course, ARM CPUs will also continue to be improved. 2007 and 2008 will be interesting years for mobile computing, as ARM-based PDAs continue to become more like mobile PCs while x86-based PCs turn into PDAs.

In the meantime, Intel wants to push new UMPCs on the market. Here is an image and a video of a prototype of one of these upcoming devices, announced for this year.

According to Harald Welte, Intel has a company policy of releasing Linux drivers for all its chipsets. x86-based Linux will be an actual, well-supported alternative operating system.

A full Gnome desktop with Firefox on this? If it’s significantly less than a 1000$, count me in!

(Image via pocketables.net)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMsM8ku9CZ0]

(Youtube video from UMPCPortal)

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Steven from UMPCPortal reports that his N800 broke after accidently dropping it from just a few centimeters of height. Ouch! So to reiterate: This is a fragile device.

It is just slightly too long. Unlike the Palmpilot, which was designed for a shirt pocket, the N800 cannot be carried comfortably. If Nokia could just cut a few centimeters off the case… (Does the N800 really need stereo speakers?)

Thanks to its size, it’s hard to find a good case for it. This is the ugly thing I use right now. It’s too big for my coat:

Siarhei Siamashka, the developer of mplayer for Maemo, made some benchmarks and found out that the graphics bus bandwidth to the video framebuffer is 3 times slower than on the Nokia 770. So despite its better CPU, the N800 will most likely never be able to display full-resolution video at 800×480 @ 30 fps. Daniel Stone confirmed this and explained in related discussions that the N800 uses a different hardware architecture. Since the TI OMAP CPU’s system-on-a-chip LCD controller was not suitable for the N800’s screen size, the device required the use of an external LCD controller.

Frankly, this looks like a design mistake on behalf of Nokia: They have chosen hardware with closed drivers and apparently it’s still not the best fit for the targeted screen of the device. This is a major disappointment, since video on the go is my personal killer application.

Disclaimer: This was a personal review of some small issues that bother me, not a general “Nokia’s hardware sucks!” complaint. Actually, I like the N800 quite a lot.

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The device is indeed running Linux: After crashing the device by trying the GPS app, the bootup sequence showed the familiar penguin boot logo.

The H9 is much bigger than expected. See it next to the N800 in the photo above. On that photo, you also see their CE product below the glass display table.

The user interface is not Maemo, but it is obviously heavily inspired by it. The user interface doesn’t look very polished yet and the hardware as shown on CeBIT felt very much like a prototype. Note the WLAN card in the PCMCIA slot – but this might change for the finished product.

Next to the Maemo GUI being copied, Microsoft will also not be happy: Note the MSIE icon on the button and the Windows icons. The whole user interface is a mish-mash of existing ideas and artwork. Well, in China nobody cares, I guess.

The applications’ artwork is very Asian. The representative couldn’t answer many questions about the operating system and the development of the apps, he also couldn’t tell us which browser the device uses.

The software is written in China by Insistech, a company I never heard about. Despite the rough edges and the feeling of using incomplete beta versions, the software appears to be functional and useful. Surprisingly, the video player seems to be much better than on the N800, apparently playing full-screen DivX at high resolutions. (I couldn’t test this with own files and didn’t see the specs of the test videos, so this wasn’t an actual test.)

Is it a competitor to Maemo? No idea. Probably not, since the whole system felt a bit crude and incomplete. It would be interesting to see the actual programming interfaces. It’s doubtful that third-party development is possible or desired by Insistech and that they even know about the GPL’s requirements.

Googling about Insistech, there is little to be found about them. No idea what the company does, no idea who their developers are, no idea if their system is used on more devices than the H9. Their developers have discussed about Konq/e and the Helix Media Player, so one can assume that these are used in the H9.

This brings me to the bigger picture of Linux outside the “Western” world. I know there are a lot Linux developers in Europe and the Americas, but have you heard of major Linux applications coming out of India and Asia? Now here is a mystery company building a complete set of applications and a GUI and the result is not too shabby, either. Surprising. What other Linux developments are going on out there that the English-speaking world never hears about?

Update: There is a video and some pricing info at pocketables. Steve posted his impressions at UMPCPortal plus a gallery and video.

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The ARM-based device comes with any feature you could wish for, including a harddisk, GPS receiver, WLAN, Bluetooth, USB, PCMCIA, SD and a kitchensink. Looking at the device’s screenshots, it appears to be running Maemo, yet the company or its Chinese developers haven’t appeared publicly on the Maemo mailing lists. The software package announced for it is also unheard of on maemo.org.

Quite a mystery device. Do you know more? Do you have suggestions what I should ask them at CeBIT? Do you have information about it? Let me know!

Update: I’ve seen the device at CeBIT. It’s running Linux, it’s not Maemo but obviously inspired by it, it’s a lot bigger than I expected, it’s quite fascinating, it’s not a real competitor to the Nokia devices. The full report with pictures will follow tomorrow.

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Looking at the specs, photos and James Kendrick’s informative video, the product doesn’t look too promising, though. Pretty ugly design, no touchscreen, quite heavy and a rather high pricetag. What a disappointment.

The Raon Vega, the Sony UX, the Oqo and the upcoming Arima UMPC (to be sold in Europe by Medion and Gigabyte) all look far more advanced and better engineered.

All of these devices share a major problem, though: They are small bricks. Compare that with the Nokia N800, which weighs just a bit more than 200 gramms and runs for days on a tiny battery. The above-mentioned UMPCs need a big battery and still run a few hours, only.

Update: “Days?” Read Karel Jansens’ clarification below.

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I’m using the N800 to learn Vocal Percussion with Wes Carroll’s DVD: Too bad it looks stupid to practice beatboxing while watching it on the subway.

For the N800, the pre-installed video player has improved a lot and can handle larger files, although some new nasty bugs have shown up. mplayer on the N800 is still quite unstable compared to the 770 version. Thus right now, watching video has become a bit less enjoyable on the new device, but these bugs will most likely be fixed within short time.

It’s a bit disappointing that the video still needs to be transcoded to be suitable for the device, though. The following is a rather unfair comparison, but it shows the quality tradeoff between a transcoded video and the original DVD:

Click the preview to compare the transcoded video’s quality.

While I know little about embedded devices and may be naive about the hardware of the N800, the specs suggest that it might be able to decode DVD content at fullscreen resolution, and with SDHC coming up, it also brings the storage space to carry a full movie or two with you.

A very similar video format is used for DVB broadcasts. (Germany is switching to digital-only broadcast TV right now.) It is surprisingly easy to watch DVB TV through a multicast on a local TCP/IP network (we did that during the games of the last soccer world cup) and the N800 would be a perfect little portable receiver for digital TV or DVD streams.

But the software can’t handle DVD or DVB, yet. I hope that Nokia or 3rd party developers can overcome this limitation some time in the future.

Update (08/2007): Since I wrote this article a few months ago, Nokia has improved the video codec and the device can now play much higher bitrates than shown in the DVD comparison above. However, you still have to transcode video to a lower resolution and bitrate and you still cannot play a raw DVD-rip in fullscreen.

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ScummVM is an emulator of the Lucasarts engine and it turns the Nokia into a great casual gaming device. I finished Monkey Island 1 on the 770 and now I’m playing part 2 on the N800.

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Maemo comes with a central account settings controlpanel, but it’s not that central, actually: It only contains the Jabber settings. The Mail client has its own account settings menu. Both account settings are found through completely different menu paths on the device and it’s not very obvious where to look when you want to create or change one of your accounts.

It would be nicer if accounts for all online applications such as Jabber and Mail were stored in the control panel.

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While it’s wonderful that the N800 now supports BT keyboards out of the box, the BT settings are odd. You can easily make the BT icon disappear, and you have to dig deep into the control panel to make it reappear.

It would be nicer if the BT icon didn’t disappear, but just turned inactive/gray when bluetooth is off.

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Introduction

I used to own a Nokia 770, the predecessor to the N800, and was very happy with it. Of course, this review will compare the two devices every now and then, but I will try to keep it interesting for those who don’t already know either of the two devices.

Hardware

The 770 had a very robust appearance, almost like a piece of industrial hardware, and I never lost a thought on that I might break it. The N800 looks far more fragile and delicate and I am quite afraid to snap it.

Sure enough, the N800’s case is made of high-quality material. This is not a toy, this is a high-end product. But will it survive when dropped on a floor? I wouldn’t want to try.

This time, the stand comes attached to the device. And it’s very practical, too!

Worse, the N800 comes with a soft fabric sleeve that offers no protection to the screen. While this sleeve looks a lot better than the ugly sock that was supplied with the 770, I miss an equivalent to the 770’s slide-on hard cover. Let’s hope that PDAir will come up with another bag that will take care of that, since my 770 PDAir bag was a perfect fit that offered good protection to the device.

This is meant to protect a 400 € device?

You may have read elsewhere that the 770 and N800 screen is gorgeous and I can confirm that it is. High resolution of 800×480, small size – perfect to read a normal web page or a PDF document. This is the best screen on a portable device of this size I have seen so far, and I can’t understand why other PDAs, phones or video iPods still use the typical 320×240 QVGA format.

The 770 and the N800 both use bluetooth and wireless lan to connect to the internet. So you either need a bluetooth-enabled phone or an access point. The N800 comes with full BT keyboard support and it works excellent (much better than the third party BT plugin for the 770).

Much better than with the 770: Bluetooth keyboard support comes pre-installed for the N800. Perfect!

The N800 comes with a lot of very welcome upgrades. The 770 was fast enough for my browsing needs, yet the N800 comes with more CPU power and twice the RAM (128 MB plus an optional swap area of the same size on the internal memory card). The 770 used to have only one memory card slot for the not-so-common RS-MMC format, the N800 upgraded this to two slots for standard-format SD-cards.

These are the most common memory cards on the market right now, so you can buy a lot of memory cheap. My N800 now runs on 2 x 2 GB of additional memory.

At the moment, the N800 is bound to the SD size limit of 2 GB per slot, but some people are reporting that a non-SDHC 4 GB card works already and that SDHC cards larger than 2 GB might work in the near future.

The external SD slot cover feels more fragile than the 770. I hope I won’t snap it one day.

The N800 uses the same charger and battery as the 770, which Nokia also uses for many of their phones.

This pragmatic approach is what I like most about this device: Nokia uses a standard USB cable, standard batteries and chargers, standard memory cards, standard headphone plugs and I guess that the headset microphone connector is non-proprietary enough, as well. (Ok, so the batteries are Nokia’s own standard, but still:) You can buy parts very cheaply once you need to replace them. And you have a choice among third party suppliers. (Don’t get me started on laptop battery formats, and pricing. Or non-replaceable iPod and Palm batteries soldered into the gadget!)

Three Nokia devices, three different charger plugs. Why can’t they agree to use just one within the company?

The most obvious change is that it now comes with a small webcam for video conferencing. I would have preferred a built-in GPS receiver over the camera.

It’s a pity that the USB connector still cannot be used to charge the N800 (while more and more gadgets allow this).

USB: Too bad it doesn’t charge.

Software

The N800 runs its own flavour of Linux called Maemo Internet Tablet OS 2007, which is based on Debian. Being a Debian/Ubuntu Linux user, I felt right at home and was happy to find many third party applications written by other developers, ready to install using the tools I was familiar with. The User Interface based on the popular Gnome desktop is called Hildon, and Nokia claims that porting existing Gnome applications to Hildon is relatively straightforward.

I found the Hildon user interface a bit clunky. Anyone familiar to the typical Windows-desktop user interface will have no problem using it. But still it is a weird mixture of icons, buttons and nested menus where UI design choices are inconsistent even within the applications pre-installed by Nokia. (Am I just nostalgic or is the Palm UI still the most straightforward pen-based user interface so far?) I never really liked the 770 UI graphic design, yet the N800 looks even stranger: Of the four pre-installed N800 UI themes, two are rather wacky, using babyblue or bright purple widgets. I guess that’s a matter of taste, but it didn’t meet mine.

The original firmware comes with a browser based on Opera and several internet applications such as an RSS reader, a mail client, a streaming MP3 player etc.

I find myself mostly using the browser. People have complained that the browser supports “only Flash 7”, but I disabled the Flash player, anyway, as I don’t do a lot of Youtube browsing. To me, it’s surprising that a non-Intel Linux device has such good Flash player support, at all.

The mail client should be nice enough if you get few messages, but my business email address gets way too many messages to handle them with Maemo’s mail client, so I use webmail on the N800’s browser, again.

The camera. I wonder how to use it with desktop Jabber clients? Hopefully, the Skype client will support video – once it is released.

Another nice application is the Jabber client while on the road. Its addressbook is not very practical if you have many people in your contact list, though. (Or is there a way to hide offline users? I didn’t find that.) I don’t know what to think about the camera and its use for video conferencing, since I didn’t find out how to connect to a desktop client with video, yet.

Ich glotz TV: Watching TV recordings on the go.

The wonderful hi-res screen should make the device a killer mobile video player, so it’s a pity that the device cannot play video in full 800×480 at 30 fps. The pre-installed video player software is rather limited and while mplayer was able to play higher resolutions and bitrates on the 770 (mplayer is not yet available for N800), it didn’t reach the full resolution of the screen, either. While I wish it would support better video playing, it’s certainly enough to watch a TV recording on the go.

Conclusion

Nokia again and again explained that the 770 and the N800 are not phones, but internet tablets. I have tried and used several PDAs and their pen-based operating systems in the past years, among them Palm, WinCE, Qtopia, Windows XP Tablet. Compared to those, despite Maemo’s occasional clunkiness, the 770 and N800 offer a great combination of brilliant hardware and a promising, hacker-friendly operating system.

The device is perfect for reading on- and offline and very nice for watching lo-res video while traveling. Thanks to cheap memory cards, it can handle a lot of data to carry around. I use it a lot and I am very happy with it. It’s a great all-purpose tool. It’s a full Linux computer with far more RAM and storage than the computer I used to run Windows 95 on just a few years ago! It is far cheaper and lighter than a laptop or a UMPC, uses cheap standard replacement parts, has a better UI than a UMPC, is less limited than a typical PDA or phone.

But it is meant as an internet tablet and so it’s too bad that internet via cellphone is quite expensive here in Germany. Also, more and more WLAN access points are secured, so that I don’t find access to the internet as often as I wish I could. (An Ogo may be a better choice in Germany and elsewhere if you need a cheap, totally mobile, yet limited gadget.)

I guess it’s not quite yet suitable for an end-user once you wish to add third-party applications to it. Third party software installation on Maemo is rather difficult and despite Nokia’s efforts, I miss a user-friendly “distribution” site that combines all tested applications at a central .deb-repository, similar to Debian’s and Ubuntu’s central package servers offering stable and bleeding-edge distributions for easy access.

Right now, one has to hunt several different sites for .deb-Packages, edit the sources.list, use a hidden “Red Pill” mode, sometimes switch to “R&D mode”… And yet, upgrades to the system, as far as I understood, are not distributed as incremental package updates through the official repository, but via full firmware blob releases. Quite impractical. Maemo needs a Release Manager!

Should you buy it? If you understood the previous two paragraphs, definitely. If you didn’t, probably not yet. While you might like the N800 it if you’re not familiar with Linux, you will like it a lot if you are.

Update: Here are some more thoughts on the N800 after a few weeks of using it.

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