I have some computer smarts, but sometimes I’m baffled by the Nokia Internet Tablet.
There are some things I just don’t understand about the tablets (or their OS or the pre-installed apps):
Why I can’t construct a playlist in the Media player?
You’d think this would be a no-brainer. I just want to grab 5 or 6 of the 80 songs on my N810 and play them together, even though they’re by different artists on different albums.
Why isn’t connecting to my PC via Bluetooth really easy?
Sometimes I’m at my office, where WiFi is verboten. I want the tablet to use my PC’s direct connection to the internet — I’ve done it plenty of times laptop-to-laptop in meetings where only one person was plugged into the wired network. Why isn’t this a snap with the NIT?
Why is Linux made so hard?
OK, it’s clear that Nokia doesn’t want to support unsophisticated users with all the things that can trip them up in Linux.
But why doesn’t File Manager have a simple switch (Show hidden) that lets me see the whole contents of my drive? Even with the trick of adding a symbolic link to root (or any directory), I still can’t see hidden directories (eg, whose name begins with a dot).
Which leads me to my next question:
Why can’t I easily add fonts to my tablet and use them in the browser?
Right. I had to make a /home/user/.fonts/ directory and mail myself a font and then jump through command-line hoops to put a simple font on my tablet. And go through contortions to tell the browser to use it. (Except I haven’t succeeded in that yet. Emoticon with amazed look of disbelief here.)
Might as well ask the real puzzler here:
Why can’t OS2008 et al just let you be root when you need to?
If us unsophisticates need so much protection against our careless actions, shouldn’t we be wearing goalie gloves when we handle scissors? Why isn’t there just a switch that says, “It’s OK. I’ll take the consequences. Just please let me make a directory or use apt-get without having to acquire developer-class knowledge.”
Heck. That’s the deep side. But what about the glam cam that arrived with the N800?
Why isn’t there a face-to-face cam call capability yet?
It’s only the most amazing possible use of this walkaround-web device — unlimited cam calling via WiFi without having to sit in front of an anchored webcam.
It’s visual IM — just leave the call connected and talk when you want to talk. It’s IM taken to the next dimension.
Btw, don’t tell me this is here. My wife has the N810 and I have an N800 loaner from Nokia, and we can’t manage it. It needs to be click-simple and using Skype.
Why does upgrading the OS obliterate every manually installed app I’ve put on my tablet?
I know, if I go from Windows XP to Vista (and I haven’t), I’d have to re-install my apps. But every upgrade and patch in WinXP is managed without that requirement. Shouldn’t it be possible in this marvelous Linux world?
Why can’t the application memory be extended to one of the memory cards?
Is swap the extent of this? You know, I’m willing to risk the possibility that my flash card will get the same spot written to 100,000 times and fail.
Yeah, there are more things I don’t understand about my tablet’s design. Just getting the answers to Why not a model with a keyboard? and How can you call it an internet tablet without handling Flash and YouTube? have really lowered my orneriness. I won’t pick and pick and pick.
On the other hand, it’s your turn. What behavior or aspect of the Internet Tablet makes no sense at all to you?
Added later:
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* Tablet-to-tablet cam calls via Gizmo apparently arrived during my recent period of submersion. I’m happy, even if it isn’t Skype. (I mean: even if the five friends I know with VOIP all use Skype instead of Gizmo.) Me-to-wife cam-IM is plenty great
My good pal, Matt Miller, The Moble Gadgeteer blogger over at ZDNet, gives a good demo and detailed instructions on how to tether the Nokia N95’s integrated GPS and modem with the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, all via Bluetooth.
Basically, you need the Symarctic ExtGPS (beta) app installed on the N95 which will allow other devices (mac, pc, linux included) to use its GPS, a data plan to have the N95 connect to the internet, and Maemo Mapper. What is interesting is that both the GPS and modem are working together via one (or maybe two) Bluetooth connection(s) to the N800.
For the second time in recent months, I changed trains at the Newark Broad Street station on my way to New York City and ended up sitting next to another Nokia N800 owner on the 15-minute ride into the city.
My unnamed seatmate said his Internet Tablet enabled him to read blogs and other websites on the train without having to carry a laptop. We were long separated before I wondered whether he was connecting live via his cellphone or reading pages he’d grabbed before his commute.
Nokia once lent me a cellphone and wireless account and I surfed on my train ride into the city and even while walking from the train station to work. That was simply great. Surfing while literally on the go — and not just parked at a Starbucks while “away from my usual access point” — felt tremendously liberating. Alas, the outrageous pricing of every telecom has kept me from further on-the-go use of my NIT.
When our broadband provider had a several-hour-long service interruption a couple weeks ago, I could hardly use my computer. Even when working on local documents there were things I needed to check on the internet. I couldn’t read the paper (washingtonpost.com), respond to my mail (that is, email), translate (online dictionary at sealang.net/khmer/, omegawiki) or ask questions of my colleagues (Vonage and voip was out too). The major work I was engaged in entailed collecting geographic information from various websites (CIA World Factbook, statoids.com, Wikipedia) and integrating it with our local content; I couldn’t make any headway on that.
In fact, without the internet, I was flailing around helplessly.
This morning, I was in fact able to work on my laptop on the train ride, converting various files I’d downloaded earlier. I only had to deal with 35 internet-less minutes. But work or regeneration time, laptop or internet tablet, I can see I’m getting closer to the point of needing that Bluetooth-cellphone connection for the commute.
iNdT is at it again and this time releases Carman - an On Board Diagnostics (OBD-II) analyzer application for the Maemo platform. Carman lets you monitor and detect problems on your automobile by accessing the data stored on your car’s on-board computer, the same data that service technicians use. If you have an OBD-II compliant automobile (most cars after 1996 are), you can use a Scan Tool device (about $116+) and connect Carman to it via USB (ElmScan 5) or wirelessly via Bluetooth (using a Firefly or Elm 327).
You need Python 2.5 for Maemo to run Carman and a Nokia 770 (with 16MB of free virtual memory), or a Nokia N800. More information as well as the application download link can be found at the Carman garage.
One of the first questions I had about Bluetooth connections was whether that meant I could surf the web on the train commute to and from work.
So this morning I tested it. Hopping on the train in Montclair, NJ, my borrowed Nokia 6682 Bluetooth cellphone in my hip bag (never took it out), I immediately connected and began surfing 770-interest and general news sites. The experience of surfing while traveling was so engrossing that I got off at the wrong station (and got right back on of course).
Part of my commute this morning involved changing trains at Newark Broad Street Station — never a glitch in the connection. In fact the only “problem” I encountered was when the train entered the tunnel under the Hudson River: no reception there and hence I couldn’t connect to receive my page (above, from the New York Times). There are dead spots on the commuting lines, distinctly noticeable when engaged in conversation, but either these occurred while I was reading a page and not connecting to a site, or I attributed it to the slower speed of Bluetooth and thought nothing of it.
I kept the connection active on the twenty-minute walk to my office. New York being heavily cellularized, I wasn’t expecting any connection difficulties. My first concern was holding onto the 770. Holding a PocketPC or Palm firmly while walking is no problem. But the horizontal orientation of the 770 meant I was gripping it from top and bottom, not left and right. I was very conscious of not dropping the device the whole way down Seventh Avenue.
After a few blocks of stopping here and there to click on a link or scroll, I tried using the 770 one-handed. I pressed the down side of the scroll key. On the link-heavy front page of the Washington Post (above), I discovered this didn’t take me down the page one screen’s worth, but instead highlighted the next link on the page each time I pressed it. Pressing the scroll key’s center button activated the link and brought me to the news story. Continue reading ‘Surfing on the go: on the road with the Nokia 770 and a Bluetooth phone’
I was lent a Bluetooth phone this last weekend and, being stuck for two days in a spot without Wi-Fi, I thought I would use the phone to connect to the internet. I also thought I was smart enough to figure this out on my own, and in one respect I was completely wrong there. I never did connect this weekend.
Earlier this afternoon, however, as evidenced by the screen capture above, I did. You can see the connection icon shows a “P” for phone, instead of “W” for WLAN.
We’ll be adding a “How to connect to the internet for the first time with a Bluetooth phone” section to our itT FAQ, where the phone pairing will be detailed. That wasn’t what derailed me.
Instead it was the missing connection. A reminder from Karoliina Salminen that I should use the “cellular connection wizard” and a simple, “Oh, that’s on page 26 of the user manual” from itT’s Reggie got me going in the right direction.
When a 770 user wants to get onto the internet, the connection manager shows all the possible connections. It scans for and lists the nearby wireless networks, but a phone, even a paired phone won’t show up there until it’s been added manually.
And the 770 user won’t find a way to do that in the Connection Manager, or the Select Connections dialog, or the Connectivity control panel. I looked in those places repeatedly over the weekend, as well as every nook and cranny in the beautiful Nokia 6682 I was carrying. Nothing, nowhere.
Instead, as shown below, the correct procedure is to open the Control panel window, go to the Control panel menu, and choose Mobile operator setup wizard from the Tools menu. It’s easy to follow, and seconds after completing it, I was surfing using the phone to connect to the web.
But I never would have thought to look there on my own (or in the manual either, I admit). Hope no one else gets stuck the way I did.
Reports are coming in from the first batch of Internet Tablet users (other than pre-release exceptions like Nokians, developers and reviewers). A smattering of first impressions (updated throughout the day; two updates so far today):
The Real player and mpeg support of is the ‘hidden gem’. Real video streams perfectly at about 220kbps and using it as a portable radio is something that I hadn’t thought I would do but I’ve done a lot already
It is still a little sluggish. Especially when you have more than about 2 apps in memory, the keyboard takes a little time to appear and switching reminds me of Windows CE v1.1 on a Philips Velo. I am sure that this will improve with updates… and it’s not too bad (don’t want to sound like it is a real problem).
Browsing on it is brilliant. It is the first ever handheld device that I have used for ’surfing’ rather than ‘looking at websites’…. to explain - it is not a restriction to follow interesting links or explore stories… something I have never done with a PocketPC / Clie or Palm
screen is fantastic, download some digital photos that I resized to 800 x 480, they look great
very simple to setup wireless internet connection, took longer to reconfigure my router to allow another device than it did to configure the 770
simple connection to PC, appears as a storage device and hence easy to copy to/from
the chess game plays at a good level, too good for me
• • •
dsmudger has sent back-to-back reports on the much-remarked-upon display of the 770. Here are some excerpts, not in the order he presented them:
As for viewing angles — you can still make out the image looking almost end-on (i.e. there is no issue with viewing angle — you could certainly have several people crowded rounsd looking at the same image). This is in the horizontal direction….
[F]rom looking at it head-on, you can tilt the top of the device away until it’s pretty much horizontal (screen facing up) and still see the screen ok. Tilting the top towards you from head-on it starts to go dark/unreadable fairly quickly.
Looks to me like it’s optimised in the vertical direction for all angles ranging from head-on to the device lying flat on the desk in front of you, and in the horizontal, it’s viewable at pretty much all angles.
Seems like whoever designed this screen had exactly this application in mind….
[O]ne thing IMO lets [the screen] down a little (I’d like to know if other people have noticed this…)
I think it’s the layer that does the touch-sensitivity, it looks as though it’s adding some sort of odd polarisation or moire pattern over the screen — in simple terms this means that as you tilt the screen, you get an apparent ‘grain’ of rainbow-colours — particularly in bright/white areas. It has the overall effect of making photos look like they’re a lower resolution that the fantastic 800×480 screen underneath…
One of the first things I have done when the n770 arrived was set it up to work with my Samsung D500 mobile. The pairing worked OK, but in contrast to every other bluetooth device I have paired with the phone, the phone will not let me authorise the tablet …. {This] means that every time the tablet tries to connect, I have to manually confirm on the phone that it is OK to do so. This is real pain, because in use this happens over and over again, and there is a limited time window in which the confirmation has to happen.
… [Samsung support’s email] is lot of non-sense; there is an authorise/unauthorise menu entry for every paired device except the tablet, ….
… (I know that the problem is likely with the tablet, but it is the Samsung people who can tell me what the problem is; the tablet has a different icon associated with it on the phone than all the other devices, with a little red exclamation mark, I just do not know what it means.)
