Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

I've been absent from the forums lately and I apologize. I owe (and dedicate) my blog to this community, after all.

CES press junkets have been swarming my inbox for a month and it's all I can do to keep my head above water especially with a new job, the holidays, and the upcoming trip. I know there are things I have massively overlooked. I'm asking for two things if you will be so generous:

- What's happened that really deserves more attention on the blog?
- What do you want me to ask Nokia at CES?

I already have my questions ready but if there are any outstanding community concerns, I'd like to bring them up too.

Hope 2008 is great for everyone.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

All and any information on the upcoming MID’s

When are they going to start devoting adequate resources to the Internet Tablet project and give the community the support and respect it deserves.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Ha! You must not work for a large corporate beast, then... The support/freedom that Nokia allows the maemo team is simply unparalleled!

Tim

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Pse. just tell them if can take a look at these forums posts. Ah, also remember them to get the gold watches ready for some forum users! (not for me, of course) :)
Happy 2008 and enjoy CES (lucky of you!)

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

+ 1,000,000...

With extra emphasis on the recent repository debacle and the last two OS upgrades being released a day before Nokia went on holiday. :)

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

I'm sure it's already on your list, but I'd love some more details about the IT/Maemo roadmap, specifically the five stages. Assuming the N810 is stage 2b, does this mean that each stage will include several devices (tailored to different users), or is it a strict 1-device-per-stage approach?

Some slightly more solid numbers about IT sales would also be great.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Will they offer another browser.

Any plans on the software side to improve the use/output for the camera?

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Thoughtfix, thank you for asking for our input. It is you who is being generous!

Q: Is A2DP profile included in the next firmware?

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

The N810 is stage 3.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Nokia could address a couple of nuisances.

1/ Upgrade the OS without needing a software re-install afterwards.

2/ Install/embed Calendar/ Contact/ To Do software with similar capabilities to the Palm - especially to run the same software suite on Windows/ Mac/ Linux for simple sync.

3/ Ditto a port of Thunderbird to sync with PC/ Mac/ Linux.

Other than that, for me the thing's damn near perfect.

Palm would have died long ago without its PIM facility so even if the IT is not meant to be a Palm, it'd do no harm to incorporate such a suite.

It was what killed the Psions for me, too. I wrote to them asking for a matching software suite for PC and they said I was wrong and it was not necessary. Yet in my office, as soon as Palm came along with its sync facilities, the journalists turned over it it. national newspaper journos are noted technophobes - but they could see this as a simple solution to never losing their contacts book again!

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

You're right, in that half-arsed, two-steps-forward-one-step-back support is better than completely ignoring a community even exists.

But that by no means implies there should be rejoycing, dancing in the streets and offerings of first-borns to the kind and benevolent gods of N'Ohkyaah.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Not easy to do, given that the OS can't know the dependencies of postinstalled software, unless they prohibit third-party software. Windows, OSX and Linux distros merely replacing the OS underneath the existing software either fail miserably on it or grow huge amounts of backward-compatibility layering. Sorting out that kind of thing in a clean way means recursively backtracking the full tree and refreshing every affected bit of it, and may take up many gigs of disk space and update durations in the order of days (ok, Gentoo as the prime example of a live upgrading distro is further hampered by doing everything by way of recompiles, but even binary Gentoo meta packages are sloow at upgrading).

The current way of saving the state and reinstalling is not that bad - but of course it causes friction in the case of major upgrades, where many to-be-reinstalled packages aren't there yet.


Nice to have, but I have my doubts that anybody will succeed at someting where Palm ultimately failed - the whole conduit/sync thing got more and more vulnerable as the Palms grew more complex.

Mail client database syncing was the worst invention ever, it is in utter ignorance of what servers are supposed to be good for. And Thunderbird is hardly the mail app of choice for a small screen/memory device - even Claws, which needs much less screen estate, is already somewhat hard to use on the IT.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Must refrain from commenting... must refrain from commenting...

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

It looks like Nokia is headed in the right direction with the new IM and SIP integration. I would be curious to know if they have any plans to add integration with social networks like Facebook or MySpace.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

I was asking for syncing of email databases of my choice. Why would that be the worst invention ever? That makes me ignorant?

I take your point about the OS upgrade, I just hope that there don't have to be critical upgrades very often.

With the Palm conduits, I've used the Palm TX and previous models for years with no sync problems whatsoever. This with office apps, and all kinds of 3rd party software as well. I can accept that Nokia don't want to do it or don't know how to do it. I don't accept that people don't want it.

I took into account that the Nokia was for techies when I bought it and it does enough things well and easily for me to not be unhappy about that. But as a small computer, it's capable of many things. I just happen to think that it would be nicer if the addition of a simple PIM suite with simple syncing was easier for a customer to accomplish.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Most modern OS's allow upgrades without forcing reinstallation of existing applications; it's called patching. Windows, Solaris, Linux, MacOS; all allow upgrades to the OS without a forced reinstall of all applications and their data.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

"Palm ultimately failed - the whole conduit/sync thing got more and more vulnerable as the Palms grew more complex."
Obviously you haven't used a Palm. The sync works great. It allows you to change things on your desktop and then sync them to the Palm, and vice versa - very very convenient, and useful. You have no idea how much easier it is to use a Palm than an N800 for PIM tasks.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Happy New Years Dan, and welcome back. I'd like to see you pry info out of them about stage 4 and stage 5. My wallet is itching and it looks like I might figure out how to get an N810 shipped to my subarctic Canadian lumber village. (We're just a city of 3 million with a metro LAN, we're not a viable market anyway.) :) But yeah, I'd like to know where they're going with all of this.

Though they didn't affect me one bit (aside from it taking 6 hours to DL OS2007HE), I'd like to know if they have plans to get maemo.org and the repositories up to snuff.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Dan, I'm almost sure you have already thought about this but, in case you forget, please ask about: Possible google software integration (maybe even native?)

PS: BTW you are the reason why I'm a total and happy tableteer since November... thanks!!

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

Maybe ask them at what point there will be enough Mac users to warrant installers for them? Looking around for third party and command-line stuff isn't really a good answer for us 'less technically inclined' types.

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

What he^ said. :)

Re: Apologies for absence - and CES questions
 

I would like to to know how is Nokia going to further user friendliness issues in particular the repository performance problems and the lack of an official / supported PIM solution.

Personally, I don't mind going through hoops to get something to work especially if I am expecting issues. However for the average user who expects that everything "just works," the repository performance issues are unacceptable.

Due to the Palm, it is an expectation to have PIM support with the ability to synchronize with outlook. Shoot, my VX8300 phone has more PIM support than a Nx00 out of the box. I know a tablet is not meant to be a PDA but average users are not going to see it that way. They see the lack of a key feature and move to the next product.