Roland Tanglao's Weblog

The N800 together with Skype and WiFi makes a great "long distance telco route-around device". I have used my N800 to call people on their land lines in Belgium and California and Seattle from Vancouver over my WiFi at home (802.11b on an aging Airport) and it works fine!

Yes! Sign me up for the beta in July! Can't wait for Skype on the N800! Looking forward to doing a head to head comparison versus Gtalk and gizmo!

FROM jkOnTheRun: Skype on the Nokia N800: it's alive, it's ALIVE!:

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I'm getting ready to leave NYC and the Digital Experience show, but had to share one tidbit before leaving. Among the many booths I stopped at was the Nokia booth. The big news there wasn't a new device, it was a service, and that service is Skype! It's been a long time coming, but Skype support for the Nokia N800 is right around the corner. I got a chance to see it, but it won't be available as a download until some time in July. The Nokia N800 already supports Gizmo for VoIP, but the addition of Skype adds more choice to make a good mobile device an even better one.

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The N800 makes a fine car MP3 player. Unfortunately my naive drag and drop of 500MB of music didn't work (could only fit about 100MB of music in a single directory even though I have over 3GB free on my two 2GB cards). I guess I'll have to do some googling and asking around. Hopefully I can get it to auto-sync with Mac iTunes via a plugin!

I misplaced my mouse at Super Happy Dev House. I went shopping for a replacement on Friday and found that the combination of the:
N800 and 850 GSM phone + unlimited data plan = perfect price checker and shopping companion.

The 850 means that unlike GSM 1900 phones it basically works anywhere except a Faraday shielded bunker :-) ! A bit geeky but it was fun being able to take notes and check out the websites of the mouse I was considering as well as verifying that contrary to the label on the box, the mouse I bought, a Microsoft Wireless Bluetooth Mouse 8000, actually works with Macs (inaccurate MS 8000 mouse review - works fine for me out of the box with latest MS drivers - I luv MS mice; I think this is the 4th I've bought with my own money!) !

And I guess maybe not so geeky since I didn't get any second looks and I see "normal" people playing around with their Sony PSPs and Nintendo DS's all the time these days.

Mark my words, shopping and checking prices and taking photos and sharing media back and forth about what you are buying with friends while shopping will become just as normal as playing games on mobile devices!

I'm really enjoying the Nokia N800 that I received from the Nokia Blogger Relations Program. Surprisingly, Nokia have made Linux almost usable :-) . Seriously, it's fast enough and does what it does well (of course what is the market for the N800? I think it's a great portable Linux computer for geeks and cheap phone and video call power users today!). I am not a big fan of the stylus so I am happy that you can use your fingers. Going to have to try to go a day without my laptop once I have all the apps installed (irc client, ssh client, and a few others).

I think that all major operating systems will be built on an open source core in less than 10 years. So why not build S60 on top of Linux instead of whatever it's built on top of now? Perhaps the N800 as atmasphere suggested in twitter is the one of the first steps to that.

In the long run, it makes sense given the introduction of Open C and Widgets on S60. If apps actually use these two APIs then they should mostly work if S60 were to switch to Linux.

Got my free trial Nokia N800 from Nokia Blogger Relations on Thursday (thanks Nokia and Andy). Haven't had much time for fun video, voice and other N800 geekery yet (fun with the Canucks in the playoffs, work and family has taken up too much time :-) !). Have to install new update to the N800 operating system and have bought two 2 GB SD cards to store music and my experiments. Looking forward to video GTalking (rolandt AT gmail.com) with you all (I'll finally be able to see Ken Camp!).

First impressions:

1. Have had one spontaneous reboot already of the N800 (I thought this only happened with S60). Hope this is fixed in latest N800 update.
2. The built in Opera web browser is fabulous!
3. The automatic WiFi detector works great!