I’m enjoying the Nokia N900 more and more. The replacment of my original unit has demonstrated what the N900 is all about, and vindicates my choice of this system over Android or iPhone. I know that there are plenty of great smartphones out there, this one is mine.
Sounds like a Saga doesn’t it? Well it might be, if for no other reason than one of learning.
My Nokia has finally returned, thrice actually. My original
If you’ve been reading this Blog, the fiasco which resulted with the N900 being returned without being fixed my Nokia directly. But upon contacting Expansys where I purchased it, and they directed me to sent it to them. And I did, 5 weeks ago! I had contacted them after 3 weeks of no news, and they indicated that its was being ‘quality’ checked and would be sent in a few days. Another week elapsed, and I contacted them again, and again they indicated that they would sent it, 4 days later (on a monday) I was surprised to see the delivery of my N900, the same N900, WITH THE SAME PROBLEM! They even sent me back the document I included to explain how to test and identify the problem. A problem so simple, that just turning it on would identify it’s functionality. They never even tried to fix it. They simply expected me to accept it broken! Which I didn’t! Contacting them the very afternoon that it had been returned resulted in another return, on their account, to their facility. With the promise of a ‘Replacement’ Finally! And now it arrived, Yesterday, and the problem (that would appear a boot time) was gone, so I thought great. Done!
But this is Expansys The first indication of trouble, the camera, right after I opened the camera door, it indicated that it could not open the application, as there was NO MEMORY to open it, which I checked, and sure enough the user memory, some 32GB of ram was ‘corrupted’ and unusable. Broken, except to the geek, Me, who while trying to diagnose the issue with the first N900, had become an expert in ‘flashing’ the phone. So I flashed the eMMC with the ‘VANILLA_PR_EMMC’ image. And surprise, the camera worked, along with the sample videos stored there, which further proved that the old error was gone. Happy right! Not! While I was doing this testing/fixing/ I did not have my SIM installed, so having celebrated my Geek victory, I proceeded to complete my move back into my new device.
Deliberate Pause
The N900 didn’t recognize my SIM, any SIM. Not a useful thing for a Phone not to do. But I didn’t throw it across the room, or jump up and down crushing it into dust. I rallied the Geek, and did a System Flash with the latest Maemo Image. And without further adieu, it worked, I had a phone, and it works. Having inserted my micro SD card I restored my backup from the previous N900, and Bingo, it works. I did not restore the applications that I had installed previously, but enough to know that it mostly works. I did not install some of the communications extensions that knew were causing performance issues with the battery. It’s been 7 hours and I’m only down one bar, the battery works!
The bottom line, Expansys is a pain to work with! They took ages to return my ‘repaired’ phone, that wasn’t repaired, nor did they do ANY QUALITY CHECKS to see if it had been repaired. Then after being forced to do the ‘right’ thing, they replaced it with another (non-working) phone that was Obviously NOT NEW. I can only assume that it was another used N900 that someone had returned. To anyone else this replacement was more broken than the one I had sent in, and only by my own hand does it work at all. Not a good place to do business. The experience has taught me never to purchase an item like this via the internet. Better to spend the extra money to have a place to return it to, and this one has cost me plenty in time and shipping costs to resolve.
One last point, both the first N900, the one with the broken DSP, it still worked, with the only real impact being shortened battery life. The replacement, broken also, has been corrected, as far a I can see, via software alone. Making the N900 and very reliable, although quirky device. One I can still recommend. Try doing those things with your iPhone, OOPS, sorry, no can do.
While Apple is claiming to be the number one provider of wireless devices, this chart show a different story. Apple might have 49.5% of the mobile internet traffic in the U.S., it only has 12% of the world wide smart phone market.
While reading this article 5 Reasons Why Online Freedom of Speech Does Not Exist I was encouraged that a person of Arabic decent wrote it. And is spot on about the real lack of freedom on the internet.
And a thought came to mind that what Irelands ‘Smart Economy’ ought to be, is to create a genuine open internet connection to the world. An Internet free of ALL censorship, blocking, filtering and snooping both into and out to the rest of the internet. Even so much as establishing free VPN connections into the country for people living in internet ‘oppressed’ world areas thus giving an open gateway into a free, and (as) open as anyone could make, Internet. It would not prevent countries from blocking export of banned information into Ireland, but Ireland would not add any blockages. And it would not prevent information from Ireland into censored countries. but it would create a cloud of truly free internet.
I think this could foster an internet ‘Switzerland’ much like Switzerland is to banking. Businesses like Google, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Skype would find this an attractive country to expand and centralize in. It would make Ireland an Internet sanctuary for complete and open exchange of ideas and communications.
While I love my Nokia N900 I’ve often been disappointed with the battery life. Recently I’ve been only getting 6 hours between charges and while I’ve had better runs in the past, I could never narrow down what the major drain was, but I think I have it. It looks like the ‘extra-devel’ Pidgin Protocols may be spending too much CPU keeping in contact with Yahoo IM. When I have that disabled from the ‘Availability’ panel, my battery life doubles.
So for now I’ll have to content with just GSM/SMS Skype and Skype IM for my connections.
What can say Nokia support is indescribable, as in not available. I have an New Nokia N900 purchased through Expansys U.K. Which shipped it to me, from london (as in U.K.) but it turns out it was acquired by them from the U.S. and Nokia Europe does NOT service (as in repair) Nokia handsets that are sold by Nokia U.S. in the U.S.
Ok, What? Nokia will NOT service Nokia handsets because it’s a U.S. Nokia warrantee and not a E.U. Nokia warrantee. It’s a Nokia, and it’s a their warrantee!
Now I have to ship my phone to the U.S. to find warrantee service on my NOKIA Phone!
I was ask to tell someone about my Nokia N900 and I replied:
I blogged about the N900 here, Expansys which turned out to a U.S. N900 with a U.S. Power supply.
However the system, and I have to call it a system as it not just a phone, was bought with the purpose of replacing my then Nokia phone and my Palm T/X. I wanted a computer with a phone. And that is exactly what the N900 is. I have to agree, if you are a power Phone user this is not going to cut it, as an example it does not do MMS, (I’ve never sent an MMS, ever) with the exception that there is a third party developer who had deployed a MMS app that fills this gap. And I guess that is the point, all the gaps, and extensions to the operating system are coming on hot and heavy. It’s really quite surprising. What’s more surprising it the integration of the apps in the communicator. I have to check my inbound call to know if it’s a Skype or a GSM/3G call, as you can not tell via call quality or ringtone. IM from any and all IM systems are combined into a single ‘conversations’ stream sorted by the user you are talking with, reply’s can be via any communication path detailed for the contact you are talking with. The same with shareing, your notes, photos, anything can be shared to any of the ‘social media’ site you have logins to.
I find the most interesting thing is that I can SSH into and out of the system as easily as with any laptop. OpenVPN which is available, but I haven’t tried, is loadable as both server and client. The 2G/3G network connections are treated just like WiFi with no restrictions that I can detect. (dataplan not withstanding) I am even on pay-as-you-go with Vodafone and they either have not throttled me yet, or don’t care, isn’t an issue, it works seamlessly.
The only drawback is power, as you might expect, but I doubt that you would fault any laptop for not running 12 hours on batteries, and this is no difference. I can useably get 14 to 16 hours from it with ‘normal’ use, but playing with lots of widgets on the desktop, and too many beta apps from the development catalog will shorten this. I use a car charger while on GPS traveling, and I’m sure most would. but really, I have all the IM connections running below, 7/24 when on my WiFi connection and it works a treat. I blog, I tweet, I surf, frankly it’s another pocket sized palmtop… with a phone app.
I downloaded and tried out Firefox Mobile a few days ago and while it seems to be very useful (and actually fun to use), I discovered yesterday I was having serious battery drain issues. I had thought that I had gotten passed this, it was disturbing that the problem had returned. I was afraid that I was finally going to be required to reflash my phone. Then while Googling the issue, I stumbled upon a discussion about the Mozilla JVM runtime that gets installed as part of Firefox and it turns out that it’s not exactly perfected on the Nokia N900 yet, Functional, but it spins up the CPU in the background, using up the battery. So I un-installed it with the App Manager and I’m back to the regular Nokia browser only, which is just fine.
One of the enduring myths of the internet is the one involving privacy. This article on CNN titled U.S. enables Chinese hacking of Google takes umbrage at the notion that everyones email is secret and private. And while this myth might comfort many, the truth is that email was NEVER private. Every email host, every email relay was able, and in fact, completely open to reading, scanning and snooping, by man-in-the-middle processes and furthermore always has been since the beginning of the internet. And even if everyone was using https or ssh with their email clients while connected to their mail server, it did not encrypt the contents of the email. It may have minimized the likelihood of it being read in the data stream, but unless you were in the habit of encrypting your email with PGP or some other cypher your email and hence your ‘Privacy’ is negligible, hence, the privacy myth.
And while on the CNN article the discussions brought up the same old saw that governments HAD to have backdoors to snoop on email communications to prevent crime and terrorism without the concern that at no time has it proved itself in practice. Anyone wishing to sent communication, and have it stay private can do so, even in the face of a dedicated snoop. Anyone who had even browsed an encryption textbook can create a completely uncrackable code, and I mean uncrackable by anyone, by any means and present their messages in plain text in emails. Hacking them by any government is merely security theater and fundamentally has NO value.
If you seek ‘privacy’ stop sending anything through the internet unless it is encrypted by at least PGP (if not something more substantial). The only thing Google has lost in this privacy issue is the trust of their users to protect their email ‘publications’ on the internet. Now everyone will know that they have another recipient to all their emails, in other words, all the other governments, hackers, scammers and spammers in the internet.
Is it me, or my sites, that the www.baidu.com spider is no longer scanning? I have normally been scanned several times a day by that Chinese Search engine, but they all stopped yesterday? Perhaps a crackdown? Who knows, but there is a missing element now in the internet.
The first time I tried this I was getting better than 1.2Mbs but I forgot how to do a print screen, this is what I got the second time, too bad that it showed so much inconsistency, but typical from what I’ve heard from other Vodafone users. It’s interesting that the upload speed is faster that my Eircom DSL line by almost 2X while the Eircom downlink was rated a 2.7Mbs.
As you can see in the photo (on top of a MacBook), the Nokia N900 is not that big, smaller vertically and horizontally than a Palm T/X but larger than a Nokia 6300 or a Motorola F3. And much smaller than a Apple Newton.
This is what my Nokia N900 desktop looked like until I cleaned it up to save battery power. And while I couldn’t get the pre-installed Media Player to play any video, including the pre-installed ones, I did get Mplayer to install and it works just fine, if not as fancy as the media player.
I’ve had my Nokia N900 for almost 48 hours, and while I’ve have a few frustrations, I’m equally satisfied with the product. And so to keep it geeky and simple:
However there is another list, of frustrations;
I am currently using a Vodafone Pay-as-you-Go SIM and it does indicate that I am connected with 3G. I have NOT tested it for dataroaming, or performance. The MaxRoam SIM did indicate that I was connected to a 3.5G O2 network But like I mentioned, I couldn’t call anyone, only SMS. I assume that it was my ignorance of setting for the MaxRoam SIM.
As for the phone itself, I like it, it’s a bit heaver than I thought, but a great deal smaller, it is not really any wider or taller than a Samsung Tocco Lite, but it’s almost twice as thick.
The keyboard is very small and not really thumb friendly, I started out using my fingernails to type. Now I can feel the contours of the keys, it sped up my typing a bit. I have a clear snap on case I bought from Amazon a month ago, but the screen section obscures the upper row on the keyboard, so I don’t have it on, so just the back is attached.
The resistive touchscreen is very sensitive. I have a Palm T/X and I know! It is nothing like the resistive screens of the past. There is virtual NO give to the surface, and while you can tell that it is ‘softer’ than a capacitive touchscreen, it has a great deal more precision. Just try and draw something in the ‘sketch’ app or better yet, the XJournal application.
Overall I could say that it’s a keeper, a Geeky keeper, and looks like it will be a learned love. It does do what I need it to do, be a computed device, with a phone in it.
I’m sure there will be other revelations, but I may be too busy playing with my new toy.
UPDATE : I’ve managed to get the missing FaceBook App to install and Mauku and OMWeather are working after I changed some of the connection setting on device to fixed ip addresses on my WiFi router.
It looks like all the previous vendors (eXpansys, Amazon UK and other suppliers) of the Unlocked Nokia N900 have been consistently denied product to sell by Nokia. Now the word is, that the N900 will be exclusively the product of The Carphone Warehouse (with a Vodafone ontract) and Vodafone UK.
This means only one thing, there will be NO SIM Unlocked Nokia N900’s. They will all be locked to Vodafone SIMs and further OTA updates will be to Vodafone specifications. With the advent of Vodafone 360 they will be more and more tied to this service. You really can reach no other conclusion, so much for Nokia’s commitment to Open Source and Open Source developers.
