Tablet-Guru On Hiatus Until Further Notice
I realize that all 4 14 of my current readers will be sad at this announcement, but Tablet-Guru is going on haitus, until further notice. The site will remain, along with all content, but I can’t say when I’ll be able to – or want to – update it again in the future.
Don’t get me wrong – I love my N810, and I use it on a daily basis. However, I think that the platform itself is in serious need of some attention, and from where I’m sitting, it’s not getting any. The internet browser, in my opinion, is a joke, and nowhere near what I would expect to get from an ‘Internet Tablet.’ It’s slow to load pages, clunky in scrolling through them, and a pain to use with your fingers – despite the generously sized display. Coming from OS2007 to OS2008, and onto Diablo, I’ve not seen much improvement in this arena.
When compared to my S60 phones from Nokia, such as the E71 or N82, there just isn’t much that sets the N810 apart, other than size. The browsers are roughly equal, and the S60 platform simply has more support, both from Nokia and through 3rd party developers. There really isn’t much that I can’t do with my phone that my Tablet is up to, and with the resources that the N810 has, that shouldn’t be the case.
In addition, I have other projects which are consuming more and more time, and I simply am not passionate about the Maemo platform in its current state. I will certainly be keeping a pulse on it (I still own one, afterall), but simply can’t really see enough to maintain an active blog about.
Thanks so much to our few readers, and hopefully I can revisit the Maemo scene in 6 months or a year and there will be alot more compelling things to do with these fantastic little machines.
Popularity: 64% [?]
You know something; I totally feel you and was feeling a lot in the same wise today. There’s a good deal of untapped potentia-l with the ITs that’s for one reason or another not pushed or seen.
That being said, one of the reasons that I finally, signed up for the Maemo conference in Germany that’s going on in Sept is that I want the chance to hear from Nokia why I should keep the IT as a relevant piece of mobile computing. Like youurself, I made an investment here, and I’d like to see it pan out sooner rather than later.
Such is the case though when jumping in with tech that is not only a diferent paradigm in reference to its placement, but also in reference to how the company pushing it will need to respond. The IT was a huge sign of what is to change at Nokia, and possibly the rest of the mobile tech world. Its early and unpolished though, and for some we can only stand pat with something unpolished for so long before we just want the feeling of something more refined.
Take the break; and stay tuned. Hopefully, there will be a reason for TG to come back, or at least be folded into SG as something worth more than a passing glance.
You bastard – what did you do with Ricky?
I hate to say it, but I know exactly what you mean. I basically use my N810 as a remote desktop client back to my Windows machine. It works great for that. The browser is ok if I need it, and I could live off of just the tablet for a while, but it’s frustratingly slow at times. It’s definitely a shame to see such potential wasted.
I guess I’m the 4th reader…
Sad to see this announcement but its completely understandable. I’ve been without my N800 all summer as I let a friend borrow it while he’s on his internship and he is using it in place of a laptop. He loves it and will be purchasing one (maybe mine even as I want an N810) soon. While its been gone I’ve certainly missed my tablet but honestly there hasn’t been much in the way of new software that I’ve even had reason to get excited about. Nokia seems to be ignoring the platform right at the time when so called “netbooks” are rising in popularity. I just hope I am able to get Ubuntu’s new netbook UI on it when its all polished up.
Oh well, hopefully you’ll have reason to return soon. Who knows what Nokia has up their sleeves… (yes this is 100% wishful thinking)
hey this is reader #5 lol i actually picked up my n810 cause of this site. but u do wat u gotta do man. still got the symbian-guru side where i can get my sg fix.
Its always calm before the storm… :) https://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2008
Sorry to hear it. I’m in total agreement. This means I’m down to internet tablet talk only for my tablet news :(.
Would this be the case if Nokia had improved the original Opera based browser, instead of short-cutting to a Mozilla based one?
Firefox on the desktop is great, but I think that Opera has a long lead on “mobile” devices.
Another regular reader that’s sorry to see you go (for now). How many do we have to hit to change your mind ? :)
I know what you mean though. I can’t help thinking that if Nokia had got their act together and thrown a reasonable amount of resource at it rather than just saying we are leaving it to the community, tings would be different.
And I don’t care what they say, you need a good PIM suite that integrates with MS Outlook as well (via Google will do as a compromise though).
RE:
“Its always calm before the storm… :) https://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo_Summit_2008”
I hope you are right. Nokia need to take a more proactive role…
Love the hardware, the platform is fin. But some real development effort and commitment Nokia PLEASE.
Zuber
@matt: Opera wasn’t a case for Nokia to improve, but locking down the hardware and some of the OS underpinnings didn’t help any. I agree that Opera Mobile 9.5 would be a great additional browser to choose from.
Mozilla (and Nokia) are working on Fennic which should support the current N800 and N810 tablets when its near done. That being said, it might be too little to late for some people.
@trk: I only hope that the Maemo Summit does more than just be a slew of great info covered behind NDAs (though that will be the case for some things I am sure). It should be really good nevertheless.
I still love my N810, and use it daily, but I just don’t think it’s a platform that I can blog about at the moment. It’s nowhere near ready for consumers, aside from the hardware.
To be honest, and I’ll likely get flamed for saying so, but I think the Tablet community is part of the reason that it’s not becoming more consumer-friendly, and is destined to be a niche geek toy. Krisse at TabletSchool and more recently, TabletScene is doing an excellent job of bringing the tablets down to the consumer, but when you look at the applications being developed, very few are anything that a consumer would want to use a pocketable web browser for.
You have things (which have been covered here) such as hacking together various OS onto the tablets, or some other geeky function or feature.
Given the Nseries moniker that was applied to the Internet Tablets ENTIRELY too early, I would expect a much better video experience, A2DP, multiple IM, and that sort of thing – out of the box. A consumer who purchases an Nseries device expects it to be a multimedia monster, or to excel at either music, imaging, or video, without needing to be hacked and installed and tweaked.
Over the past while that I’ve gotten my N800 and then the N810, I’ve not seen any substantial effort go into making the Tablets more user-friendly at all. On the contrary, it’s still been more and more of a geekfest, aside from standouts such as Canola.
There’s nothing wrong with geeking about, don’t get me wrong. Afterall, I’ve done my fair share, even on this site. However, doing so yourself, and blogging about it to consumers are two entirely different things, the latter of which I’m simply not able to feel good about doing at the time.
Stay with us until Maemo Summit. Judge then. Peter from Maemo Software Marketing @ Nokia
Don’t go! I’m one of those 4 readers that you have. But apparently we are more than that!
I think it comes down to speed. That’s the most important deficiency encountered by the average consumer. I say this as an “average consumer”.
I had no experience with linux or command lines, etc. I recieved the N810 as a gift and have used ITT, Neocherry’s tablet school, and other blogs such as yours in an attempt to get up to speed. Learning how to use the technology has been fun, but waiting for pages to load on the browser reminds me of the bad old days of dial-up. I probably won’t be using command lines in the future but I still find the tablet to be very useful.
Perhaps the IT with the fastest browser is the IT for me. Thank you for the blog while it lasted. Hope you will return soon. – JQ
I guess i’m one of those anonymous readers.
My n800 is going into the drawer and it’s going to take alot to get me excited about it again. I bought it not long after launch and have only ever been excited about one aspect of it – skype. beyond that its been a disappointment and with netbooks coming online in greater quantities I’m going there for my needs. Granted I still loved the form factor but as a geeky consumer (not a programmer) I’m very disappointed with how Nokia has managed the product. But I do want tot thank you for the time and effort you put into this resource – its been fun.
I gave up trying to surf the web on the n800. I installed pyRdesktop, told it to play sound on the remote computer, and connect to a 800×480 vmware virtual xp built to do everything. Everything I want to do, works now (as long as I have a decent speed connection). In reality, rdesktop is almost faster in every way than the actual usage of the applications on the n800 (other than Canola, which is great).
On the VM PC, give it 512mb or 768mb of ram if you can,
•No background, simple theme if you like.
•Right click properties on the desktop, and change the appearance/advanced to make everything as small as you feel comfortable with.
•SoftRightClick 1.8 from Jerry Kindall (Tap/hold rightclick)
•Uboard.exe (translucent on screen keyboard in a file called cfx_tools.zip)
Minimalist theme for firefox + these addons
•Adblock Plus
•ColorfulTabs
•FireGestures
•Grab and Drag (pan and drag webpages like an iphone or opera mini)
•No Squint (use to to global zoom in and out)
•Open IT Online (use open source/online apps to open docs)
•WOT
To get sound working, since rdesktop has crap sound support at least for me, I use VLC to stream the stereo mix, and open the stream in the background on the n800. Mp3 or Mpeg, with no video (but ASF encapsulation) seems to work well at 64 or 128kbs, using mplayer on the nit. Reduce the buffer to 50 ms instead of 300, you might have to play with it a little to sync the lips on youtube video’s and other flash.
But there you go, all the software you could want on the nit, is now accessible. You basically have a wireless terminal/thin client, that happens to be able to do some similar stuff (slowly) on it’s own when it can’t get to your home network.
I realize now, that I still think “Do I really want to click on this link on the nit, and wait for the page to load”? Banish that thought, click away, it’s almost as fast as your desktop after this. I suppose you could do this with Linux and x11 or x11vnc to get that more “authentic feel” or even Mac OS X, but vnc is slower than rdesktop. Choosing 15bit or 16bit color makes no difference in speed, in fact, 16bit might be faster, since that’s what the vm is set to.
PS: The n800 screen rotate kernel is also helpful, in case you have to connect in portrait mode for certain applications.
May 23rd, 2009 at 1:01 am
[...] not the least bit excited about anything Maemo is working on. You may recall that I started Tablet-Guru.com a while back, and eventually put it on permanent hiatus, due to several things that I found wrong [...]