Nokia N800

OK, everyone get flashing.

Diablo, Nokia's latest release in the Tablet OS series, has officially been released. Go get it now.

I haven't had much time to play around with Diablo yet but I'll be posting my thoughts shortly.

If you want to know what's new in this release there is a great (and long) thread over on Internet Tablet Talk discussing the features.

Happy flashing.

EDIT: A comprehensive look at what packages have changed can be found here.

A little secret has been let out of the bag :)

Canola2 can be run in windowed mode rather than taking over the whole screen. Whilst this may not be for everyone and its not guaranteed to be there in the final version it is indeed present in beta5.

To do this you need to drop to an xterm and type:

canola - n

Windowed mode shows nicely that the icon's can rearrange themselves to fit the available screen real-estate. Everything else that I've played around with seems to work too.

I'll be sticking with full screen mode though, why have it windowed when you can have it full screen and just switch windows with the home hardware key?

I'm still looking for the holy grail of podcasting; software that will fetch my daily audio podcasts and put them in a sync directory. On top of this I want it to be able to download video podcasts and automatically convert them to the correct format ready to be synced with the Nokia N800. And to make matters worse, I want the N800 to 'wake up' at a predetermined time and sync with this said directory!

Is this too much to ask?

Ferenc Szekely has just posted an explanation of what went wrong with the firmware and repository downloads over the holiday period on the Maemo developer list.

"The infrastructure is built so that the content from repository.maemo.org is served thru a huge caching network. We were supposed to use the same network for the firmware downloads as well, but due to a misconfiguration and _my negligence_ all the requests ended up at our origin server (stage.maemo.org).

Soon after the N810 launch the traffic dramatically increased and the server could not handle it anymore. It was actually never meant to handle such load."

Read it all at:

http://lists.maemo.org/pipermail/maemo-developers/2008-January/013972.html

If like me you are unfortunate enough to have to work with Microsoft Outlook and a Windows based mobile smart phone for work, then syncing with GPE-Cal on a Nokia Internet Tablet seems like a tall order. In fact its not that difficult; you just need to know how to 'glue' the bits together.