Considering N800, many questions
 

I've been eyeing the N800 recently as a replacement for my Palm LifeDrive. I got to see one in a store today for a few minutes, but I still have a number of questions that a few minutes of Googling didn't help.

1) How well does X11 forwarding work over a LAN or fast internet connection? Is it reasonable to expect to use OpenOffice? or Amarok?

2) How many programs can the device run at once? Could I use xterm, Pidgin, the web browser, and a music player all at once?

3) I've heard that the N800 isn't so hot with video if it's not optimized for the device. Has this been fixed with the up-clocking in OS2008? Do youtube videos play smoothly in either OS revision?

4) How well does the Mozilla browser handle AJAX sites (specifically Gmail, Google Reader, Google Calendar, and Google Maps)? How many tabs can I have open at once?

5) Is it easy to enable FLAC support on the N800?

6) Does the N800 have a proper standby mode? I could only figure out how to lock the buttons/screen or turn the device off in the store.

7) How is the N800 at keeping a WIFI connection across access points? My college is thoroughly blanketed with APs that all use the same name, and I'd like Pidgin to stay online in my pocket as I walk around campus.

8) How well does SSH work to/from the N800? Do you have easy access to things like CTRL-c? Does the OpenSSH program also enable an SSH server on the device?

9) If I plug the N800 into my computer via USB, does the computer see the SD cards that it holds? Can it use SDHC cards?

10) Does the device support bashpodder (mostly) out of the box (i.e.- wget and other required programs)

11) Why would someone install Wordpress on the N800???

Re: Considering N800, many questions
 

1.) Don't know linux well enough to answer part 1, but its an ARM processor, as far as I know there's no version of OpenOffice compiled for that. Abiword and Gnumeric do work though
2.) You should be fine with that, those some programs might slow up a little.
3.) 512x384 episodes of Family Guy that I have work great as is, haven't tried anything else yet.
4.) Handles AJAX pretty well in MicroB. However, it's not tab-based but window based. I've personally never had more than 4 or 5 windows open so I can't say.
5.) Not possible that I know of.
6.) You can put the device in offline mode, ie turn off the bluetooth and WLAN.
7.) Not sure if it'll work if they all have the same SSID, but I'd imagine you'd get disconnected at every switchoff.
8.) No idea
9.) Yes it sees the SD cards, and yes SDHC does work.
10.) Not sure what bashpodder is, but I doubt there's an ARM version.

Edit: To clarify 3, I should mention that I'm on OS2008, so its running at 400mhz instead of 300, and also that this is on a version of mplayer that I found on these forums.

Re: Considering N800, many questions
 

Regarding OpenOffice, I realize that there's no version for the Nxxx devices. I was referring to using it over SSH from another computer on my network.

Also, bashpodder is a simple bash script. While I expect it to work, I'd just like to confirm that the N800 has things like wget, which bashpodder needs for the podcast fetching.

Re: Considering N800, many questions
 

I'm using mplayer for FLAC, works fine, and uses very little CPU.

openssh client/server can be installed after enabling the extras repository in the package manager, and at least with one of the xterm ports you can set up a dedicated button for ctrl-c.

Too lazy to look up bashplodder, but I've got wget on my N800 with no problems.

I've had very little trouble compiling most command-line apps.

Re: Considering N800, many questions
 

I haven't had the opportunity to even test if X11 forwardng through SSH works. (I assume your meaning is ssh forwarding. The X11 socket (port 6000) is not exported, so you can't just set the $DISPLAY).
However, I would suggest to use a VNC instead of X11 forwarding, as VNC works quite well. Don't know how good it would work with OpenOffice.
Yes, in general. I regularly run upto 4 programs at the same time. It's not the number of programs, it's how much memory each one uses. But those four, sure. No problem. You won't even need to enable extended VM (swap space). But watch out for the browser, that's where you can eat memory because it depends on what page you're loading.
You've heard right. As for youtube, there were improvements in one of the OS2007 upgrades, and some says it's even better in OS2008 - but that's second hand, I'm waiting for the official OS2008 release myself.
Quite well. The opera browser in OS2007 does Gmail perfectly, but the others maybe not as well (and not at all with google docs). MicroB is good here. But as already mentioned by jhoff80: No tabs. But you can open as many windows as you want, and switch between them. I had 15 open in Opera just to test. If it works or not depends entirely on how much memory the content in each window takes. Lots of pictures? Don't try to keep more than two or three up.
dblank already answered that one: Mplayer.
Buttons and screen locked is very much the same as when you "turn off" a PDA: It'll last some ten days before the battery gets a bit too low. That's about the same as my Palm PDA when I leave it in the drawer. But unlike a PDA you can actually turn off the N800 for real, then it doesn't use any power (or very very little, but you could even remove the battery..). And unlike a PDA the N800 won't lose its content when you power it completely off.
For normal use you don't turn it off though, you just lock the screen and buttons. And unlike a PDA you can choose if you want the wi-fi and/or the bluetooth to be kept on (with wi-fi connected and active it can still be running for up to two-three days, depending on the wi-fi access point to some degree).
If your campus is set up with proper wi-fi bridging, then no problem. That's how it's set up here at work, I can walk to any building and it stays seamlessly connected.
The osso-xterm has a list of shortcuts you can tap, in a little always-visible menu. It has 'ctrl' which lets you tap 'ctrl' followed by 'c' on the virtual keyboard. Other ctrl sequences have their own default entries, e.g. ctrl-p ctrl-n. But you can program this menu as you want it.
I run both an ssh server and client on my N800. There are two versions: dropbear, which is lightweight but doesn't have scp etc., and openssh which has what you would expect. Both works just fine in my experience. It is extremely satisfying to ssh into the N800 from your workstation..!
Yes and yes. But as long as the cable is in you don't see the cards from the N800 itself.
Not familiar with 'bashpodder', but certainly wget, curl, these applications are available. Just install them from a repository.
No idea, but then I have only a vague idea of what it even is.. :D

Re: Considering N800, many questions
 

It works, but I couldn't find a way to enter text (the on screen keyboard doesn't appear automatically and I don't know if is it possible to force it), so all I could do was starting thunderbird then stare at the login box.

Re: Considering N800, many questions
 

Non-optimized stuff is hit-or-miss, but optimized stuff plays smooth and looks great. You should set up a server for on-the-fly transcoding with aflegg's excellent mediaserv, or one of the commercial solutions (if you're on Windows) for when you're at home (or if you have a decently sized upstream, even) and just pre–re-encode stuff for watching on the go.

YouTube plays fine under OS2008.

There's a soft poweroff mode (sleep, basically, but you can decide whether you want the radios to stay on or off) that you can activate with a long press on the powerkey or a double-click on the power key (depending on the settings in /etc/mce/mce.ini). It's very effective to quickly stow the device and saves power very nicely.

Re: Considering N800, many questions
 

Yes it does. There is even a very nice GUI for it called PodSync.

Re: Considering N800, many questions
 

So far, you seem to need an external keyboard for it, but with bluetooth keyboard, both X11 forwarding and VNC work very well, provided you stay within the LAN or on a very fast network connection.

You'd need a pristine UMTS connection to do serious work on a cellphone forwarded session, though, and even then, you will frequently encounter screen update delays of several seconds. On EDGE (with its poor round-trip time), plain GPRS (with similar RTT and no bandwidth to start with) or on a congested network, it is beyond being merely painful - you risk damage to your data when blind typing with response delays up a minute or more...

Sevo

Re: Considering N800, many questions
 

Have you tried xkbd?

http://pupnik.de/xkbd.html

I use it for links (web browser), since the normal keyboard doesn't pop up.