...stuff I do and things I like...

Sunday, February 17 2008

My N810 Review

I have a N810 since Wednesday so here is my micro review.

Good:
  • The Keyboard, I really love it. I noticed that I use it a lot (for everything possible).

  • Hardware buttons. Screen maximize/minimize moved to the left. New screen-lock button. This is really improves usability, excellent!

  • Look-and-feel, pretty awesome.

  • Speakers, they make NOISE!!1


Bad:
  • GPS fix time, almost unusable.

  • Mini SD slot. Is there really not enough space to put in a normal-sized SD/MMC slot?

  • Micro-USB, WTF?

  • The keyboard layout, missing symbols (pipe and tab). See solution below.


In order to make the device hacker compatible one needs to modify the keyboard layout and at least add a PIPE and a TAB key. This can be easily done by editing the X11 keyboard layout. Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility had some small discussion in his blog. For now I made TAB to be Fn-Space and PIPE to be Shift-Minus. This way I don't loose either Euro nor Sterling/Pound.

Some must haves:

Configuration:
    update-rc.d -f metalayer-crawler0 remove (this thing sucks!)

    gconftool -s -t string /system/osso/connectivity/IAP/DEFAULT/type DUMMY (you need this to play with the network)

Software:
    Statusbar Load-Applet (CPU and MEM usage)
    IpHome Home Applet (show IP address)
    Important command line utils: SSH, mtr, bluez-utils, nmap, socat, wireless-tools, dsniff, ...


New stuff I've been thinking about: Location Home-applet, shows current position (maybe with street name lookup). Temperature Home-applet (see internal-temp app). New hardware-keyboard-based version of xkbd-bthid, also I need to support Windows and MacOSX (this will take some time).

Any comments or ideas for applications?

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