I don't think that's what I wrote. But ignoring that, here's what my N800's box says:
and
That's it for "specs" on the box. Would you please explain which of those have gone unfulfilled thus far, but could be enabled by improved firmware?

Maybe "box" was too literal.

http://www.nseries.com/nseries/v3/me...810_en_R1.html

• Easy install for new applications, applets, and personalization - No, out of the box it's broken since "Map" updates will not install.
• Supported video formats: 3GP, AVI, WMV, MP4, H263, H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, RV (RealVideo) - None of my catalog of a few hundred MP4 and h.264 videos will play, my selection of avi files are slideshows on either the built in media player OR canola2b7 if they play at all.
• E-mail application for personal e-mail usage with IMAP, STMP, and POP3 support - Crahes and becomes unusable under basic situations.
• Effortless and automated presence and contacts application for centralizing communication tasks - No, addresbook broken and IM is hardly capable of centralizing communication without the beta rtcomm.
• It's not listed here, but the unit will *SELF CORRUPT* because of the partitioning bug and I can't find support for the fix anywhere but here. Nokia's answer is to swap the unit out and hope the new one doesn't have the same problem.

Those are the items on the spec page that are objectively false, and there are dozens more that could be argued are also false.

I've not had any trouble installing any Map updates. Obviously, that does nothing to help you though.

Does maemo bug #2622 sound like the problem you're having? If so, please vote on it and add any additional information you can as a comment. If others are experiencing the same problem you are, then we need to try to get them to vote on that bug so Nokia's developers know it's affecting users and therefore, is a priority.

I don't use AVI, and I've not had difficulty getting MPEG-4 video files to play on my tablet, but I don't have the expansive media collection you have, nor again, does my lack of trouble help you. I do know that with the wide range of profiles and options within MPEG-4, it can be frustrating to find media that works with one player fails with another. QuickTime Player, for instance, has some irksome limitations, some of which relate to a much more strict adherence to the MPEG-4 specs than other players. The MPEG-4 playback functions of the Internet tablets may be similar in that regard.

Do you know the encoding options used in the creation of the files in your MPEG-4 library? If so, and if those options aren't out of spec, then perhaps we can update/open bug reports to try to improve playback of those files.

In the end though, support for a format, but not all variations of it, is a problem intrinsic to modern digital media. For better or for worse, we've moved beyond such niceties as Red Book. Even the DVD standard is open to interpretation enough to cause massive headaches for creators.

Powerful, flexible, and expanding standards such as MPEG-4 make compatibility issues easier. No one has made a player that implements the full MPEG-4 standard. On top of that, there are a range of encoders available--and commonly used--that violate the standard in various ways.

I didn't use the original email client on my Internet tablet for long, but that wasn't due to instability. It worked well with all four of my POP3 accounts, it just didn't offer many features. Again, that's not helpful to you.

Do you use IMAP, perhaps? I believe I've read complaints about the email program's IMAP handling before. I'd look for relevant issues in maemo bugzilla, but with Modest on the horizon, I doubt the developers are working on the old email program any longer.

Have you tried Modest? Does it work better for you?

I find the Contacts application limited, but not broken. Could you explain the breakage you're seeing?

Centralizing instant messaging beyond Jabber and Google Talk, while possible without RTCOMM or Pidgin, certainly wasn't effortless. (Thanks again to Zerojay for laboring to realize that promise!) Non-beta RTCOMM is coming soon, but without that, yes, I can see potential buyers not foreseeing the limitations of the current chat system.

This is a bad bug, and I can see why Nokia is simply RMAing affected units. The number of affected N810s likely doesn't justify investing the development and testing time to build a easy-to-use repair tool for end users, especially since that tool would need to wipe all data on the internal card. No matter how many times you warn users something like that is going to happen, some blindly bounce on the "OK" button anyway and scream bloody murder when their data goes poof.

Specifically, there's nothing wrong with the OS regarding map updates. That was/is an issue with the update package (which you already know if you clicked through jgadsby's link to Bugzilla). There's no way to make a package manager that works with bad packages; the best that can be done is to reject them cleanly without causing any problems.

Next up: Contestants from team Apple will peruse the N8x0 online manual for typo and grammatical errors!

Don't miss it!!!

PS: Jk, I love my iphone.

Ooh, I've already found typos on the technical specification pages of both the N810 and the N810 WiMAX Edition. Can I play?

Just for future reference, 'bugs' against the documentation and website can, and should, be filed in bugzilla.

Thanks for the well thought-out reply sjgadsby, saved me some time and effort. I'd just like to expand on media playback issue to state that Nokia's method for listing format support isn't any different from any other manufacturer's method. They have a table somewhere on their website (I can't be bothered to open up google to find it) that lists much more specific compatibility.

I don't disagree that the tablets are still a work-in-progress, and their issues are certainly nothing to sneeze at, but this sort of whiney, sensationalist, nit-picky attitude isn't really all that helpful to anybody in the long run (and mostly seems to just raise everybody's heart-attack risk in the short).

Huh? Work-in-progress with big issues.

Sounds like beta to me, which is exactly what I stated at the start of this thread and was attacked.

I haven't gotten there yet, but will.

Well, you can't respond to every post in the fora yourself. They have to bring third stringers like me in occasionally.

I'm not seeing the "big" in GeneralAntilles' post. That one word may be the central point of disagreement between you and the General.

Ok, would anyone here consider the QA job that Nokia has done on os2008 acceptable?