[debian] Evince works and is nice for ebooks

[Ian]

<snip>
> With the price of the phone you payed the hardware, personally I think
> a very good hardware. If you want to confront the Open Source
> Community with a propretary software firm, you are in a wrong
> direction.

OK, I'm taking the bait (no offence is meant by this post to anyone,
don't take it the wrong way. I'm anticipating most of the shortcomings
I mention here will be fixed in future phones anyway)

"good hardware", ey?

GSM, what, no 3G? Oh well, nevermind, that's why I carry an N95 with a
data only plan and I never had the intention to use the FR for data
anyway (too expensive down here to have a single device do both)...

Wifi - range not so great, but doesn't bother me too much.

USB1.1 ?!?!?!?!?!!?!!?!?!?!?!?!? Sorry, I'm kind of used to being able
to flash my Internet Tablet in a matter of seconds (not exaggerating)
and then finished booting into the new OS in under 2 minutes. The neo
is kind of like start flashing, and now watch some TV while I wait --
and I better just hope that MythTV recorded something worth watching!

Bluetooth - well, you can't really go wrong with bluetooth, so no faults here

Accelerometers - I'm not entirely sure why I need two of them, but hey
it's still pretty neat :)

GPS - Haven't tried it, can't imaging there being any hardware issues
with it thoguh.

Lack of keyboard - ewww, oh well, I guess it can be compensated for by
a decent on screen keyboard, right?

Screen - not sunlight readable!?!?! Dude, WTF? I guess the lack of a
keyboard CAN'T be compensated outside in the middle of the day then.
Oh well, I guess this is only 2nd gen after all, and it did take Nokia
until their 3rd gen Internet Tablet to include one... resolution of
480x640 - "meh, I don't need that much".

Audio jack - haven't used it yet, I would have preferred a 3.5mm jack,
but doesn't bother me too much.

RAM - 128 glorious MiB :) Just, please no one port firefox (microb or
other browsers using gecko, sure, just not the whole firefox).

NOR - *thankyou* for the failsafe FIC, speaking as one who has bricked
embedded devices before (and thank goodness I had a debug board with
jTAG for that).

NAND - 256 MB can feel cramped at times, but that's OK, just a sign
that I should probably have remembered that it's an embedded device
before I tried to install OpenSuSE desktop (kidding).

Camera (or lack there of) - Doesn't bother me personally, but then I'm
the guy that can be identified by carrying 3 phones (FR+N95(works as a
3G bluetooth modem and camera)+Work mobile) and an internet tablet in
various pockets in my cargo pants. It's an interesting point of debate
- on one side I'm hearing lots of people say "ooh, a smartphone I
could take into work", on the other side I'm hearing a lot of people
asking me about the phone and finally commenting "what? no camera?".
Though until the software gets better I'm not entirely sure how many
businesses (other than FIC obviously) would appreciate one of their
employees taking some time off to run some straces on the phone to try
to work out what's wrong with his SMS app THIS time, and just wishing
he had something with him that he could use to SSH into it to make
this faster...

Open - It's why I bought the thing



So yeah, overall the phone hardware is OK, but I wouldn't really call
it good. My main personal complaints are the lack of a sunlight
readable screen, USB1.1 and the lack of a keyboard or keypad. The main
hardware related points that random people keep bringing up when they
have a look at it are no 3G (probably thinking iPhone) and both sides
of the camera argument.

my 2c,
-Ian

-- 
http://darkstarshout.blogspot.com/
--
On the day *I* go to work for Microsoft, faint oinking sounds will be
heard from far overhead, the moon will not merely turn blue but
develop polkadots, and hell will freeze over so solid the brimstone
will go superconductive.
     -- Erik Raymond, 2005
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