Greetings:

The one feature that would be a game changer for the Tablet Industry is:

- a portable LCD projection lens built into the N900.
Which means now you can project your video on a wall.

Also I would love to see a high quality webcam on the N900.
It must be able to capture video in low light conditions.

Regards Robert

Apart from:

• Unoptimised codecs relying on speedy computers
• x86 rather than ARM optimised codecs
• Codecs relying on floating point, rather than VFP or fixed point, calculations
• Crippled video bandwidth

With a suitable amount of very hard work, mplayer (based on the two libraries above) can now play DivX/MP3 files much better than the built-in gstreamer implementation, but the benefits on one codec's optimisations don't necessarily apply to another.

Cheers,

Andrew

@aflegg

Good point!

Being exclusively a developer on x86, I often forget that x86 code that heavily uses assembly for optimization isn't a straight port for non-x86 CPUs. You're 100% correct. Well structured C programs and other high-language programs would be much more easy to simply compile for the arm environment. High performance libraries (like libavcodec that I mentioned above) would likely rely on many low-level optimizations, that would take modification in key areas to run efficiently on the Nxxx series.

Assembly dialect translation should be a trivial matter for support's sake. I believe that the GNU assembler can already parse Intel/AT&T syntax and compile for different target architectures [GAS info here]. Granted, code performance wouldn't be the same, but at least the programs would be compilable and later can be tuned for performance.

By 'video bandwidth' are you referring to the cpu/memory/bus bottleneck limiting video output?


}:^)~
YARR!!

Yes, there's a well known design flaw by which the N8xx can't get video from the main memory to the display as quickly as the 770 can.

See the N800 & Video playback thread on maemo-developers for more details.

As for using assembler-translation, I'm not sure that's necessary: I haven't tried, but I'm sure libavcodec will compile and run on Maemo, it just won't decode anywhere near realtime; except for where ssvb's already gone to the effort of optimising DivX/Xvid.

I'm sure he'd appreciate a hand, though ;-)

Given this news item from engadget today, I can take "video out" off of my list of wants/needs, as long as it's replaced by "driver support for this attachment":

http://www.engadget.com/2007/10/31/s...-uxga-support/

(it even has support for DVI-A )

LOL johnkzin... I love the negative comments there.

Yup. I was just tickled that John Titor is one of the commentators. A review from the future! We should get him to tell us how the N8x0 series turns out :-)

Thanks for the link, it was a very informative read.

It's a shame that the performance issues are hardware related.

Heh. Yeah, it certainly sounds like it, but the prospect of 'low-level' optimizing on top of a system that has throttled performance due to incomplete drivers and a poorly designed system bus, isn't the least bit appealing to me. Apparently, he feels the same way.

The gates are open for the competition to walk all over Nokia. Let's hope that future hardware revisions correct this ridiculous cock-up.


}:^)~
YARR!!

wlan drivers that support injection... that will be good!

-ioan

I have a question. Why is WiMAX support not on the top of everyone's list?

I would think WiMAX would be an obvious choice: an *ALWAYS* connected N900 extends its functionality and usefulness tremendously. A poll at tabletblog.com suggests that an video-out is desired at least as much as WiMAX. To me, that's like wanting the unit to be coloured black over having longer running life.

So, is WiMAX your top feature? Why? Why not?



}:^)~
YARR!!

Capt'n Corrupt