Rants of a nerd
Posts tagged n900
Greatest news on the N900 front
0The wonderfully talented KDE man Aaron Seigo has an N900 now. Which means it is only a matter of a little while before we have plasma on the device. How wonderful would that be! With Nokia firmly behind the Qt bandwagon thanks to their acquisition of Trolltech, the entire Qt / KDE experience should come along now if not on an official upgrade, a community provided firmware.
Remote control software
2Tried to install Irreco / Qtirreco for the N900 a couple of times in the past few days. I was aiming for the ultimate cool factor – being able to trigger my Canon 450d with the N900. That would have been amazing. Note the tense in the previous sentence. It did not work.
For some reason, the only thing I could trigger was the power switch on my Philips TV. Even that was erratic. For the Canon, no luck at all. There is also an interesting app called simply shutter, which seems to be designed for Nikon DSLRs. The author has promised to make a more flexible version. Hope that happens! Still the fact that such apps are possible makes this the ultimate phone / computer.
In other news, Nokia released the alpha version of Freoffice, a KOffice based viewer for documents (compatible with MS Office and ODF). This is brilliant. Now it will be perfectly possible to make presentations with the phone and a TV Out cable. If they could just find a way of avoiding that wire! Perhaps a DLNA server that does a screencast? The possibilities seem endless.
Geneva: Two
0This is going to be a quick one. Posting from Geneva airport on the way out to Paris and Madrid. The weather is terrible across northern Europe incl. Paris, so I tried to get out of this route into a direct to Madrid. But Air France refused to let me cancel or even “no show” my way out of this. Crazy.
Geneva airport had a lot of luggage lying around when I landed. Now I know why: there has been a baggage handlers’ strike going on! They are trying to break the strike by bringing in handlers from Zurich.
The other crazy thing here is that the airport serves France and Switzerland and is located at the border (question to self: is this near CERN?). So to get into this flight, I had to go through French customs and check-in on the French side of the airport. When I landed also I noticed the split, but this was really interesting since they have two sets of check-in counters and all…
Today was indoors completely, but for the hotel to office and office to airport. Cold yes, but not exposed to it.
My flight boards in 6 minutes, so I will sign off here.
Blogging on the road
1Let’s see how the N900 handles blogging. I downloaded MaStory, a blogging software for maemo and it supports wordpress. Or I will know that it does if this post comes up on the site. Surprisingly the keyboard is not too bad for writing so much text. The placement of he space bar is fantastic. Only word completion is a problem since to accept the suggestion one has to press the right arrow which is not very accessible. Anyhow today is 8 days since I got it and so far the experience has been very nice indeed.
PS is it just me or does the phone think “-ing” is a good ending for every word?
A-tisket a-tasket a glorious gadget
0I finally got myself a gadget I’ve been salivating over since it was announced back in August of 2009: the Nokia N900. What’s the N900? It is a mobile computer with a phone tacked on. This is what Nokia should have done at the time of the N810 and stopped so many others running away with the smartphone / touchphone honours.
The operating system is Maemo, a Debian derivative. So far, I have found it very intuitive and user-friendly, while being the powerful system underneath. There are many (generally very positive) reviews out there and I am quite sure I will do one myself, but suffice to say that it has met all my expectations so far – except for the irritating problem with syncing with gmail!
What’s good?
- Eye Candy – lots of it
- Speed – this thing is quick and responsive always
- Bounce Evolution – ’nuff said
- Dashboard – four virtual desktops, just like the way I like it
- Skype Integration – when a Skype IM lands in the conversation window, it is a moment of Zen
- 32 GB of space
What’s Bad?
- The aforementioned lack of google sync.
That’s all for now. Pictures and more later.
