There seems to be many complaints about the slow GPS satellite lock with N810 Internet Tablet. According to my experience, the locking time can be vastly decreased by installing the latest version of OS2008. This could be explained by that my N810 was part of the first N810 sold in the European web stores, and the OS seemed still to lack the final touch at the time of the purchase. New OS version helped!

Then, the really cool stuff was to install the Maemo Mapper application. One motivation for this post was to link to a right page, where you can just install with a single click. The initial attempts to use tablet’s own application manager failed because of missing libraries , but once the mentioned page was found it was straightforward.

Maemo Mapper uses raster maps from Open Street Map. Some writings mentioned this to work well for walking and biking use. Purely vector based maps were recommended for car use where maps need to be updated more frequently.

Hmm, away from blogging for a while. Just got my brand new Nokia N810 last Friday. Waiting to get developing on the gadget. The first impressions are that THIS IS THE PRODUCT. The gadget arrived with very nice packaging. Pulling the nicely finished aluminum chassis out from the leather pocket gave luxurious feeling. The user interface was superb. All-in-all, the first impression is that this is the travel replacement for your laptop. In addition, the N810 makes the older N800 look like a prototype, including the protecting pocket which has changed from the cheap fabric to nice leather. And the maps are Terrific!

The evolution from N770 to N810 via N800 illustrates nicely how to make a consumer product.

However, the manufacturer has still something to improve. Trying to start the Skype application resulted in information which leas to firmware update (some Hildon framework libs are not anymore compatible with the latest Skype.). This kind of “need to do some hacking” stuff should not appear when you pull out your new shiny device from the nicely finished box.

And final notes: My PSU (thermaltake 420W) blew up during the Christmas holiday, and I am waiting for the replacement to arrive. After, the benchmarks on Flash performance will be published. This time I used real *nix kin of methods (/usr/bin/time, /dd, and like) to do the measurements. Let’s get back…

I started porting a Java client application on Nokia N800 on which I had installed Java CDC (binary). Quite soon after starting the building, I noticed that the log4j libraries are not going to work on CDC device because of lack of support for reflection API. For this I removed (with some python scripting and manual fixing) all the logging information from the project, and managed to build and run the project without log4j dependency.

However, some of the libraries in my project used commons-logging library, and I was very lucky to find a patched version, which enables running commons-logging on J2ME (Java CDC) device.

You can find information on how to build Java projects to run on different platforms, from here. I modified the javac task, by adding compiler, source and target definitions as follows to make code that runs on CDC Java.

Just a small post to inform that the blog is not totally dead yet, even there has been a long break. Today, notes on updating N800 was published at its first form. The purpose is to share a links page for easy access to basic software development tools, easy way to get started after an upgrade.

This site is currently (July 2007) under construction. Beginning from autumn variety of topics on mobile system development and research will be covered here by an expert on the field. Stay tuned.