I wish Nokia sold laptops. I really liked my Nokia 770, that I bought in December 2005. It’s running mostly free software, and is very Debianic. I wasn’t traveling with a laptop then, and it was a nice (and often cheap) way to get online. I also read a lot of books with the excellent FBReader. And I created MaemoDict, which never really worked very well I must admit. But, silly enough I was more focused on working on the CouchSurfing code base once I finally bought a laptop (that is seriously broken now).
I saw the announcements of the N810 a couple of weeks ago, and I was just in time to apply for Nokia’s developer program, which gives developers the possibility to buy the device for 99 euros instead of the usual price. So I’m very happy to receive that they accepted my application (”I want to have many dictionaries and encyclopedias in my pocket”). Now I’m actually reading Nokia’s entire announcement, and it’s friggin great! The N800 already had a faster CPU, a webcam, much more memory and a normal SD card, but the N810 is totally awesome, it comes with GPS and a real mini-keyboard! And, it’s great to see that Nokia has moved away from the proprietary Opera to a Mozilla based browser.
Because of the GPS it could be interesting for Citizen Logistics, and I’m really looking forward to see if it’s possible to get maps.hitchwiki.org on it!
kia ora!
i am still waiting for OpenMoko to become useable: http://openmoko.org/, a completely Open Source phone platform. last time i heard an interview with one of the developers, he said that there are problems with the hardware manufacturers, they don’t like too much openness. hence the possibility that the hardware will be a bit ouf of date. *sigh* i am not ready to shell out US$ 300 for a piece of hardware that does not work yet.(especially since my laptop broke down which is way more expensive than EUR 600 if you want have a 12″ display and decent screen resolution).
Yeah, OpenMoko is great, I really hope it will become affordable and usable soon. The N810 is a bit different though. It doesn’t have a SIM card, and yes, it’s not as free as OpenMoko, but Nokia is behind it. And it’s definitely refreshing compared to Apple’s amazing but super proprietary phone. Also, I expect OpenMoko and Maemo to be compatible in some kinda way.
I’ve got an N800. I downloaded MaemoDict (dict, dictd) from somewhere, but can’t get it to talk to dictionary files. I have dictd installed on my Linux desktop, and copied dictionaries from there to /usr/share/dictd/, but it didn’t work, even after restarting the dictd daemon, or even rebooting. Am i missing something simple? It’d be real nice to have it work.
The trail for MaemoDict has gone cold. Broken links to documentation. I’m not sure i could repeat my install, just a few days ago.
Once i have it working, i might be motivated to throw together a simple GUI interface. You know, let you configure internet sources for dictionaries, and of course, look up words.
Let me know here, or email suitti@yahoo.com
On the laptops bit, i just ordered an i go bluetooth keyboard. Amazon has them for $37 US ($45 US shipped… YMMV). One of my buddies has an N800 with an i go, and it works. So that gives me a keyboard, and better typing speed (70 wpm on a desktop). And, the n800 (or 770) fits in my shirt pocket.
Years ago (1995), i had a 3.5 pound (1.6 kg) Compaq Aero subnotebook. I loved it. 486/25 with 16 MB RAM and 170 MB disk, 640×480 monochrome. I put Linux on it, with Emacs, gcc, Apache, and Postgresql. I paired down Linux so i had 70 MB free for my stuff. I developed web based apps on it while taking the subway to work. The 770 is much faster, has 800×480 color, 64 MB RAM, 128 MB ‘disk’, and i have a 2 GB mmc card. (There’s a kernel patch that makes the Kensignton mmc card run reasonably fast.) Huge compared to the Aero. And, it doesn’t make any noise (unless you want it to).
The shirt pocket portable bit is really a plus. The i go keyboard folds, and fits in my pants pocket (they’re pretty big pants pockets). No briefcase, no backpack. Really portable.