Lucid Nonsense


Something I'd like to see

Saturday, 11 April 2009

I’ve recently received a Nokia N800 internet tablet that I’m setting up for my brother-in-law who is currently stuck in hospital after a kidney transplant (he’s doing well). It’s got a decent sized screen so he can watch some videos, an FM tuner, and internet access via wifi, which sadly he doesn’t currently have access to, or via a Bluetooth mobile phone, which he does have access to.

It’s an interesting device, the current incarnation is the N810 which also includes a hardware keyboard. The device runs a variant of Linux, Maemo and it has a pretty high resolution screen for a device of this size, at 800x480, a significant step up on the iPhone/iPod Touch’s 480x320 screen. This is pretty impressive taking into account the fact that the screen physically isn’t much larger than the iPhone’s. Sadly though the touch technology is resistive which feels a bit “soggy” compared to the capacitive system used on the Apple devices and the UI feels very old fashioned, missing any multi-touch features and relying almost entirely on the included stylus. I spent quite some time flicking lists to scroll down them before remembering to use the fairly fiddly scrollbars to the side of the window.

While interesting it seems a bit of an unusual product in many ways, there isn’t an obvious market for it. This model came out before the iPod Touch and iPhone, and for Nokia is an esoteric device as it has no built in cellular facilities. At the time though it was pretty unique, it’s just been superseded by other devices. Personally I think the UI is not great, the browser seems pretty poor and in general it feels slower than the iPhone despite being pretty similarly specced in terms of RAM/CPU (both are ARM based). It’s also really bad at media; music and video handling is so far behind the iPod it’s not even funny. Finally it costs quite a bit more! In fact there’s only a handful of reasons I can see to buy this over an iPod Touch:

  • You bought it before the iPod Touch existed.
  • You really like the very high res screen.
  • It has a passable webcam.
  • You’re buying the N810 which has a hardware keyboard.
  • You like something very open and very flexible.

It’s the last point, the flexibility, where the N800 scores. I’ve quite enjoyed having a play around with it today. I don’t think I’d actually enjoy using it as an internet tablet in general, but as a geek toy it’s quite good fun, albeit expensive for something with a UI that feels at least a generation behind current devices. The N800 has given me a request for Apple however.

Add external input support to the iPod Touch and iPhone!

I really like my iPhone, for browsing, reading emails, texting, games and media it’s brilliant. As a phone it similarly does everything I need. I just can’t get away with it for writing or responding to emails if they require more than a few lines of text. I don’t think this is a problem with the software keyboard on the iPhone, my brother had a Windows Mobile based device a few years ago that had quite a good hardware keyboard, but I thought that was dreadful for long text input as well. Any keyboard small enough to fit onto a phone, be it software or hardware, is going to be too small for me to type anything remotely wordy on. This afternoon I hooked an Apple Bluetooth keyboard up to the N800. It was easy to do and it’s brilliant. OK so that particular keyboard isn’t that practical to carry with you everywhere just to use with a phone/internet tablet but foldable keyboards have been done, by a few people and it would actually let me do some real work without dragging my laptop everywhere with me. I know external hardware support has been added to iPhone OS 3.0, currently in beta, but as far as I’m aware there’s no general human input device support. Hardware support can be added inside an application, so your specific app can talk to a piece of hardware, but there’s no support for general system level drivers. So unless Apple suddenly developers to add kernel extensions or the like to the iPhone (very doubtful) we would have to wait for Apple to add something of the equivalent general driver that they have on Mac OS X (AppleHIDKeyboard.kext).

Compared to some of the new features coming with OS 3.0 adding human input device support would be, almost certainly, trivial.


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