Karel Jansens
2007-03-29, 13:23
I finally dove in yesterday evening and upgraded my N800 to the latest firmware. My major motivation was the alleged improved video performance and in that respect I wasn't entirely disappointed.
Video performance is indeed dramatically improved, albeit not without hickups. For starters, DivX files encoded with the excellent Media Converter in the 400x240 format in full framerate play absolutely smoothly. At last I have a portable video player with a (slightly) better resolution than my PMA430! I also discovered that the updated media player now plays at least one file that I previously only could play with Mplayer (it's a DivX encoding of a DVD with a TV show home recording on it). However...
All is not bright and pink in video land: Several (Media Converter encoded) files insisted on being played now in 4:3 format, although originally encoded in widescreen. I have yet to see if a re-encoding will fix that.
I also found that the transgression from "windowed" format (with toolbars on) to fullscreen mode was a lot less smooth than with the old videoplayer, with slow magnification and lots of green artifacts. If that's the price to pay for perfect video, so be it; it's not a biggie.
Moving away from video, I have to say that I really don't experience any higher "snappiness" or speed improvement of the O/S as some have reported, but then again, I found the N800 nippy enough from day one. So in that respect, the upgrade didn't "do" much for me.
A (for me) bigger problem is the alleged improved sleep feature: Previously, I had tweaked mce.ini to invoke softpoweroff with a long keypress on the power button. Both for softpowering down and up, the long keypress worked fine. After the update, I experienced that now (after re-tweaking mce.ini) softpoweroff would keep screen and keys active, unless I specifically ticked the "lock screen and keys" box in Control Panel (this was not ticked with the old firmware!), resulting in the fact that to softpower the device back up I have to first longpress power, then shortpress and hit the D-key. Needless to say that this is serious crap and has peeved me off to no extent. There seems to be no way to link "lock screen and keys" to longpowerkeypress, as it is not listed as one of the valid selections in mce.ini. I'm still trying to figure out why Nokia chose to fsck up a perfectly good hack, but they seem to make a habit of those braindead decisions, so applying logic to Nokia might not be the way to go.
Another "new" problem is that now Application Manager on exiting occasionally decides to blank out the background of my desktop and that (probably related to the same) the menu option to change the desktop background results in a permanent loop. I'd be angry about this, if I had any interest in desktop backgrounds (it's usually the foreground I'm mostly interested in) and if I already wasn't convinced that Application Manager is the biggest piece of dreck ever to leave a programmer's syphilis-infested brain.
Last problem: the infamous "Python 2.5 runtime" demon. Yes, you guessed it: the bugger won't install -- again. My previous trick (search for it) didn't work this time, as Application Mangler decides that now it cannot fnd a different library, libbluetooth1(>=2.19), in the list of repositories. There is a libbluetooth2.x in the bora extras rep, but apparently that one isn't good enough for Application Psycho. Hence, no more Egg Timer (pity, 'twas a nice appy).
So there you have it: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of my upgrade. How much of it is common grief and how much is due to my incompetence, I'll leave that to the reader's discretion.
Video performance is indeed dramatically improved, albeit not without hickups. For starters, DivX files encoded with the excellent Media Converter in the 400x240 format in full framerate play absolutely smoothly. At last I have a portable video player with a (slightly) better resolution than my PMA430! I also discovered that the updated media player now plays at least one file that I previously only could play with Mplayer (it's a DivX encoding of a DVD with a TV show home recording on it). However...
All is not bright and pink in video land: Several (Media Converter encoded) files insisted on being played now in 4:3 format, although originally encoded in widescreen. I have yet to see if a re-encoding will fix that.
I also found that the transgression from "windowed" format (with toolbars on) to fullscreen mode was a lot less smooth than with the old videoplayer, with slow magnification and lots of green artifacts. If that's the price to pay for perfect video, so be it; it's not a biggie.
Moving away from video, I have to say that I really don't experience any higher "snappiness" or speed improvement of the O/S as some have reported, but then again, I found the N800 nippy enough from day one. So in that respect, the upgrade didn't "do" much for me.
A (for me) bigger problem is the alleged improved sleep feature: Previously, I had tweaked mce.ini to invoke softpoweroff with a long keypress on the power button. Both for softpowering down and up, the long keypress worked fine. After the update, I experienced that now (after re-tweaking mce.ini) softpoweroff would keep screen and keys active, unless I specifically ticked the "lock screen and keys" box in Control Panel (this was not ticked with the old firmware!), resulting in the fact that to softpower the device back up I have to first longpress power, then shortpress and hit the D-key. Needless to say that this is serious crap and has peeved me off to no extent. There seems to be no way to link "lock screen and keys" to longpowerkeypress, as it is not listed as one of the valid selections in mce.ini. I'm still trying to figure out why Nokia chose to fsck up a perfectly good hack, but they seem to make a habit of those braindead decisions, so applying logic to Nokia might not be the way to go.
Another "new" problem is that now Application Manager on exiting occasionally decides to blank out the background of my desktop and that (probably related to the same) the menu option to change the desktop background results in a permanent loop. I'd be angry about this, if I had any interest in desktop backgrounds (it's usually the foreground I'm mostly interested in) and if I already wasn't convinced that Application Manager is the biggest piece of dreck ever to leave a programmer's syphilis-infested brain.
Last problem: the infamous "Python 2.5 runtime" demon. Yes, you guessed it: the bugger won't install -- again. My previous trick (search for it) didn't work this time, as Application Mangler decides that now it cannot fnd a different library, libbluetooth1(>=2.19), in the list of repositories. There is a libbluetooth2.x in the bora extras rep, but apparently that one isn't good enough for Application Psycho. Hence, no more Egg Timer (pity, 'twas a nice appy).
So there you have it: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of my upgrade. How much of it is common grief and how much is due to my incompetence, I'll leave that to the reader's discretion.