So a few months ago I started a dastardly experiment. I took my Nokia N800 out of my closet, put two 32GB SDHC cards in it, and tried it out as a 64GB flash-storage mp3 player. Results? Slow, sluggish, and to top it off there were no mp3 player apps I was happy with. I cannibalized the project, using one of the 32GB cards as an easily swappable storage drive for work files, and the other card became a backup of the first that I carry on my person.
The N800, however, still hasn’t made it back into my closet. This is due, more than anything else, to the amazing speakers on this device. I used to wear headphones while I cooked or washed dishes. Now I bring my N800, which has a 4GB card full of music, prop it up, and let it’s speakers fill the kitchen. It’s not extremely loud, but it’s loud enough and still sounds really good considering how tiny the device is.
I also keep it in my shirt pocket as I’m playing video games, such as Uncharted 2 on crushing mode. I can’t wear headphones, as I need to hear if someone shooting at me, plus I still like to watch the cutscenes, but I can keep the game volume low and play music on the N800 during.
I have an eeePC 901 (netbook), and its speakers sound terrible. That’s the only way to describe them, terrible. I can watch some videos on it, movies or tv shows, but listening to music is out of the question. Keep in mind this is a 9″ netbook being compared to a 6″ internet tablet. In addition to the N800 sounding better than the 901, it’s actually louder. How did this happen?
This is, of course, another reason I’m anxious to get my hands on a N900, because I’ve heard the speakers aren’t quite as loud but they’re still fairly loud and sound pretty good. So maybe when I get my hands on an N900 I’ll be able to finally put my N800 back in the closet. Until then, I don’t see it going anywhere.
I had a N800, the first or one of the first mobile devices to use the Mozilla web rendering engine. I really didn’t notice any difference between Mozilla’s engine and the N800′s stock engine, so it wasn’t a big deal to me.
In addition, it wasn’t a big deal to me when I heard that Firefox for Mobile would be used on the N900, either. Until I heard that it supports Mozilla Weave.
Weave is an addon for Firefox that syncs bookmarks and passwords like Xmarks, but in addition it also syncs history and tabs that are open on your other devices. I just started using it today (on my desktop and netbook, I don’t own an N900 yet), so I’ll have a more in-depth Weave post in a few days. Watch this short video to see Firefox’s mobile browser in action on the N900 (Weave is only touched upon briefly), I’ll talk about more after.
Imagine you’re at your desktop, reading an article online, waiting for a friend to come pick you up. You get a text, your friend is outside. You go to a restaurant where there’s a 30-minute wait. You can now pull out your phone and resume reading the article you were reading at home. After that, you can continue your browsing in full on the N900, because it supports the full web.
In my N800 post earlier, I said this about Windows Mobile:
WinMo is an OS that has yet to acknowledge that most smart phones are now touch screen devices. That’s why every manufacturer of WinMo phones has their own interface, like HTC’s TouchFlo 3d–there are also third party UIs like SPB Mobile Shell (which I use).
I said this in comparison to Maemo OS 2007, which came out, well, in 2007, 2 years and 9 months ago. I still prefer that interface to any other today. It’s built around browsing and multi-tasking, and you could easily do nearly anything in that OS with a stylus or a finger.
John Herrman at Gizmodo has put up a review of Windows Mobile 6.5, which says the same thing about Windows Mobile, but more intelligently. After talking about HTC’s superior TouchFlo interface, he says:
Handset manufacturers have done more in the last two years to improve Windows Mobile than Microsoft has, which borders on pathetic. In the time since Windows Mobile 6.0 came out in February of 2007, Apple has released the iPhone—three times. Palm has created the Pre, with its totally new webOS. Android has come into being, and grown into something wonderful. RIM has created a touch phone and a revamped BlackBerry OS.
I just wanted to link to that review. I’ve been trying developer builds of WinMo 6.5 for a while now, and it’s surprising how little’s changed. How can the same company that’s working on the potentially revolutionary Courier ‘booklet’ be the same company that just crapped out WinMo 6.5? How many Vistas do customers have to suffer through before we finally get a 7?
Microsoft has the benefit of producing the most popular OS. When Windows Vista came out, how many people considered moving to Mac? A few, but I’d bet that most, like me, stayed with XP and waited out something better. Who’d give Windows Mobile a second thought versus the iPhone? And don’t BS me, I know the iPhone isn’t advertised as a business phone, but it is very business capable. Isn’t Microsoft worried that AT&T will one day lose exclusivity, resulting in the iPhone breaking even more records? Shouldn’t Microsoft be innovating their asses off instead of just putting a bag on the side of WinMo 6.1?
This was originally a digression within a really long post about using my N800 as a 64GB mp3 player. That post was long enough so I’ve ripped this bit out and placed it here.
I posted some tweets about this over the past week, but it bears repeating and explaining, so here goes:
I bought my N800 used. The guy who sold it to me wanted the money to buy a then brand-new first generation iPhone. I bought it because I was away from home for work and I had no portable computer. My laptop was on it’s last legs and wouldn’t work outside of it’s dock.
At the time I was crashing with a friend that didn’t have internet, so I needed something small and portable I could take anywhere I could get online. The eeePC 701 was yet to be released for another few months.
So my 120GB Zune broke. I admit it, I dropped it a lot. I went back to using my 80GB Archos 504, which has a few problems, but it served to remind me of all the ways it is better than the Zune. The only things I ever had against the Archos 504 were the large physical size and occasional freezes (freezes they’ve since fixed). The Zune requires Windows to transfer music, it requires it’s own software which by default overwrites all your id3 tags and cover art (it seriously, seriously fucked up my collection and I will never forget it). I didn’t like being forced to navigate music by id3 tag. I didn’t like how big of a pain in the ass it was to put one album on my Zune–something I can do in half a minute from any PC (running any OS) with my 504. This 504, by the way, is the mp3 player I used to take with me to construction sites. It’s been dropped a hundred more times than the Zune and is still going strong. Maybe that’s because it uses a 2.5″ laptop drive instead of whatever tiny custom drive the Zune has.
A few weeks ago I posted about 64GB flash players, wondering why there’s only one on the US market and why it’s an iPod. There are dozens of companies that only make flash mp3 players. Why has none of them released a 64GB model?
What you see before you is the Nokia N900 portable internet device and phone. Looks similar to the Nokia N810 internet tablet, but pictures are deceiving. The N900 is much smaller, about the size of my HTC Touch Pro.
The N900 has the same processor as the iPhone, a comparable graphics processor (slightly less powerful, I think), more RAM, 32GB internal memory and a microSDHC slot (expandable up to 16GB). It has a full 3.5″ jack for audio and video, it has an accelerometer, and it has a ridiculous capacity for multitasking. By “ridiculous,” I mean you have 4 separate desktops, you can have a handful of apps running, have multiple web pages open, be streaming music, etc. It also has Flash 9.4 support. Yeah, get ready for a lot more Flash capable phones in the future, it’s a deal-maker.
It’s battery life is rated for a ‘full day’ of of streaming music, surfing the net, watching movies, etc–what they call ‘full use’. The term ‘full day’ can be misleading, it usually means a full work day. People are reporting 12-13 hours with ‘full use’–using internet, GPS, and watching movies. Hey, with laptops ‘full day’ only means 8 hours.
A bigger selling point for the N900 is Maemo, Nokia’s open source mobile OS. Android is a cell-phone (and tablet?) OS based on Linux that may some day be expanded to work on netbooks and desktop PCs. Maemo is a tablet/cell phone OS built on Linux, and it’s essentially desktop Linux scaled down to work with lower resolutions and less powerful hardware. Both are open source, but Maemo is the more open of the two, and I’m told much easier to port to. I’ve never tried Android, though I’m anxious to. I have used Maemo (not version 5), and found it very satisfying. Here is a demo video of Maemo 5:
(PSST–The device used to demo Maemo 5 in that video is the N900) There’s a video of the N900 actually in use way down at the bottom of this post.
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