Nokia N810

Posted by George Wright Tue, 11 Dec 2007 19:35:00 GMT

Now that they’ve released the Nokia N810 in the UK, I ordered one yesterday and it arrived this morning; hurrah for prompt delivery!

My initial impressions are mixed.

Good things:

  • the screen is fantastic
  • it came with maps for the GPS for free
  • it has a keyboard
  • it’s responsive
  • it’s nice and small

Not so good things:

  • the battery cover is incredibly hard to take off
  • the battery doesn’t clip in - it just sits there and is held in place by the cover
  • the GPS takes ages to lock
  • the keyboard feels a bit mushy, and the top row is hard to type on

Anyway, I’ve now installed Maemo Mapper which works like a charm (a bit of hackery is needed to get the internal GPS to work with it though), and ssh from xterm is very usable with the new keyboard. Haven’t installed our WebKit stuff on it yet, but the Gecko-based MicroB engine isn’t too bad.

Overall a very nice piece of kit, and I’m very pleased with it.

Posted in ,  | 6 comments

Comments

Leave a response

  1. Alex said about 2 hours later:

    Could you elaborate a bit on the “bit of hackery” necessary to get the GPS working? I’ve failed so far.

  2. rossi said about 2 hours later:

    How is the status of the nx client on maemo? ;)

  3. George Wright said 5 days later:

    Alex: Start up Maemo Mapper, tell it to look for a Bluetooth GPS then fire up Nokia Maps and it’ll turn on the GPS and Maemo Mapper will be able to find it.

    rossi: Same as it was in my last blog post. However, I’m excited about Seb James’ work as he’s got a working backend and I’ve written a UI which should just need some (fairly trivial) hooking up to the backend. He’s also getting an N810.

  4. dan said 2 months later:

    the link to webkit-eal is broken. where’s the code?

  5. George Wright said 2 months later:

    It’s been pulled for unknown reasons. I no longer work at Collabora so I can’t say for sure.

  6. Denny said 3 months later:

    I’ve left my GPS hunting for 10 minutes or so and no luck… how long does it take to get a lock? It’s making my TomTom look reliable. :(

    If I look at the GPS details when I’m trying to get a lock, I usually see ‘satellites found - 1, satellites used - 0’, or something like that.

    Is it just the first lock that takes this long, or is it this bad every single time you fire up the GPS?

RSS feed for this post

(leave url/email »)

   Comment Markup Help Preview comment