nion's blog

Two weeks ago I got myself a nokia n900 phone which is running maemo 5. So far I am quite happy with it, given that my previous phone was a sony erricsson p1i which is pretty crappy.
I've taken some notes about my experiences:

• under normal use the battery lasts for ~ 2 days, if I'm using 3G the whole day I need to recharge it daily though


• the terminal has a bug which results in the enter key not working under some conditions, ctrl-m works as a workaround though


• playing normal dvdrips in mplayer is absolutely no problem without downscaling, 720p doesn't perform though


• I somehow managed that my screen flipped and I wasn't able to flip it back, only a reboot solved that


• It is not clear to me which tools you will find in the list of installable packages and which are only visible with apt-cache search. I also managed to end up with a doubled launch icon in my application list for some application


• the termininal is not usable anymore after an ncurses program crashed, "reset" doesnt help either


• wireless uses less battery than umts, way less


• the back button in the browser is per default opening a fancy eyecandy browse history which is slow, so I mostly use backspace to browse back


• there is lots of useful tools in the extras-devel repository, e.g. I can control my mpd via mmpc from the phone which is great



• importing contacts works flawlessly, also merging existing contacts works as expected


• jabber (including xmpp calls) are integrated in the contacts information (you can merge a jabber uid into an existing contact)


• i've no idea yet what the internal video player is, but i wasn't able to play a non downscaled XviD file with it, mplayer does play it fine


• freely placeable widgets are awesome


• it's is really userfriendly and no geeky linux user phone


• i would prefer not having busybox per default, i can install bash but the libc is still from busybox which implies world readable password hashes in /etc/passwd, so no other user accounts on my mobile


• is there disk encryption available?


• n900fly can't cause any good


• gps with nokia maps is ok and I find it pretty usable even if a google maps client would be nice as well


• the mp3 mplayer sucks unless you have tagged your music properly, you can't just play some folder without having a playlist for it


• mplayer as an alternative from the console is no real alternative either, if you don't redirect its output to /dev/null it gets stuck in a loop when the display blanks,


• app manager locks dpkg lock even if you just list available programs, no idea why this is needed and no idea how aptitude and synaptic are doing this


• is there a good todo manager which comes with a widget listing todos?


• is it possible to install armel debian packages without having a debian chroot?


• sms are nicely organized per contact in an instant messaging fashion


• the builtin accelerator works nice and you can automatically flip the screen when you want to dial a number, sometimes happens by accident though


• the multiuser support works awesome and you get a nice overview of open applications in a composé fashion, it may be wise to have not 40 applications open though


• the list of processes is already huge (like 160 processes running in the background)


• i haven't checked out the sdk yet but I will do that soon as I need e.g. newsbeuter for RSS


• hardware feels robust, arm cortex a8 is imho a very good processor, RAM could be more (the phone is heavily swapping)


• you can not yet use the phone as a wireless access point without building your own kernel images, some people seem to be working on this


• you can manipulate all kinds of stuff through the sysfs, including the phone led and the vibration


• wireless certificates are sometimes shown to be invalid but there there is no details button, you can click only "done"

Those are the things I came up with while using the phone. The calling functionality and everything which is only phone related really works fine and the sound quality while talking to someone on the phone is also really good. So far I am really happy with the phone and I can only recommend it. I hope I'll have some time to port some applications to maemo soon.