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This is going to be a bit of a long review, so I’m going to cut most of it, and if you’re interested in reading more about it, follow the cut.

A brief introduction to the Nokia N800: about the size of two decks of cards put side by side, the N800 is the successor to the Nokia 770, and now has a sibling in the GPS-equipped N810. Unlike the majority of Nokia’s previous offerings which ran some flavour of Symbian or another (or Symbian’s predecessor), the N800 runs a customized version of Debian called Maemo.

The latest version of this operating system is called OS2008 and debuted with the N810 device around the middle of October 2007. Theoretically, OS2008 was made available for the existing base of N800 users in December 2007. I say theoretically because Nokia’s servers collapsed under the load and it was not until the last half of January 2008 that I managed to successfully download the whole thing and install it. So this is a review after using it for a month – and is primarily a catalogue of one reasonably power-user’s take on it.

Maemo is optimized for low-power, small touch-screen devices with limited number of buttons and so far, I’ve only seen devices using ARM chips. Supposedly, Intel’s new line of Mobile Internet Devices (which are x86-based) also run some version of Maemo, but I’ve yet to see one of the devices in person or play with it. Maemo’s UI is called Hildon, and is based on GTK. This is one of the areas where OS2008 has taken a huge step forward compared to its predecessors and so it’s worth talking about briefly.

OS2005, OS2006 and OS2007 – the first three versions of the Internet Tablet OS – all used relatively older versions of GTK (2.6, if memory serves); OS2008 uses 2.10, which is the equivalent of moving from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X in terms of capabilities and makes porting applications to Maemo considerably easier. The interface, too is a significant step forward, eschewing the relatively staid glossy interface of OS2007 for a brighter matte finish, with significantly better use of bright, bold colours. Using just one or two colours and their close relatives for shadowing and highlighting has made it infinitely easier to read status icons without squinting, or having to guess what the icon means. I would say that this is, hands down, one of the best interfaces I have ever used – and I don’t just mean on mobile devices. Even Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” has many such interface rough edges, which I don’t see here – everything is clean, clear and easily legible. There are also a number of well-used animations and translucent effects. Mainly, these work to enhance the user interface, but occasionally the animation gets ahead of the application. For example, when an application crashes, the application gets the close animation, even though nothing has occurred.

However, all is not rosy – a number of applications that “just worked” under earlier versions of the Internet Tablet OS no longer do, in part because of the very tricks they used to run under GTK2.6. The net result is that a number of applications that I used quite happily earlier are not available.

The one I miss the most is AbiWord, with which I wrote a large chunk of my posts earlier and used to open and look at documents from friends and colleagues on the go. There’s a porting effort under way, but like many open source projects and Trillian it’ll be done …. Soon. I – like many others, I suspect – would love to contribute to FOSS projects, but lacking programming skills, are limited in what I can help with. Testing, certainly, but that’s really about it.

Other applications that are MIA include the combined processor/memory load and clock applet that allowed me to check the time without minimizing the current application. I have not yet understood Nokia’s reasoning behind failing to put a clock in the status bar, but the lack of one really hurts usability for me, and judging by the number of attempts to put clocks into the status bar, for many other people as well. This is unfortunate, and hopefully will be rectified sooner than OS2009.

OS2008′s other major end-user change is the switching of browser rendering engines and the updating of Flash. While earlier devices and OS versions used a custom developed Opera browser and an ancient version of Flash, OS2008 uses a nearly complete version of Gecko and is Flash 9-compatible. The browser is thus compatible with anything that the latest beta of Firefox 3 is compatible with.

This has both positive and negative implications: browser compatibility is significantly up on websites, with my getting few to no errors on websites I normally traffic, where earlier there were significant issues. On the other hand, Opera was a speed demon compared to the current browser. While there were issues with Flash on the earlier devices, for the most part, the OS2007 browser sped through websites nearly as fast as my dual-core laptop. Slowdowns inevitably meant a crashed script, and were rarely anything else. The new Gecko-based browser on the other hand randomly freezes even loading pages like Google News, which is (relatively) static. The full version of Gmail takes so long to load, that I’ve bookmarked the basic HTML version of the site in order to be able to check mail before the day after tomorrow. So unless you’re trying to load an AJAX-heavy webpage, the new browser is an improvement over the old one: just try to load Google Maps in the OS2007 browser and in the OS2008 browser to see the difference.

The last major point I wanted to note is the change in processor speed. The N800 shares the same 400MHz Texas Instruments OMAP2420 processor with its sibling N810. For reasons which are now becoming clear to me now, under OS2007 the processor on the N800 was underclocked to 330MHz. Of course, now that I have seen the effects on the battery life, I’m beginning to wish I could restore it to its underclocked state. Generally speaking, under OS2007, I would get about three and a half days of standby time and a full day of use. Under OS2008, I barely get two days of standby, and about a half day of use. I’m sure that the next update will rectify this issue by more aggressively throttling the processor, and there will be other efficiencies gained through code optimization, but for a first pass, be aware there is a significant hit to battery life.

Other thoughts:

• I know that this is never going to happen, because it isn’t in Nokia’s game plan for the device, but I still wish that it would have at least basic PIM capabilities. At the very least, I would love to have access to my Google contacts, and a basic calendar that supported iCal. I know that there is the GPE set of programs that provide a basic set of PIM applications, but a PIM is still something that should be included – even on an internet appliance – as standard.
• I was hoping for a significant update and improvement to the mail client, but that did not happen. It is still utterly unusable and good luck trying to get it into workable state. I tried Modest, but there’s some runaway process there which will kill the battery in less than three hours. Claws-Mail, the other option for an email client on the N800 crashes while trying to load the 40,000+ messages in my inbox. While most people will say here “Clean out your inbox!”, I point out that Claws handled the same load (to within a couple of hundred emails) under OS2007 and crashed only under OS2008. So I suspect there is a change in the way the memory management is carried out that causes the crash. So I’m stuck using the Gmail webmail interface, which I’ve already complained about above.
• For reasons which are not entirely clear to me, the clock seems to be running faster than it should; it gains about a minute an hour. While this is easily solved by installing an NTP daemon to keep the clock in sync, when I’m not in network range it’s next to impossible to rely on the device for an accurate time. Perhaps this is related to the speed up on the processor side of things, but I fail to see why it couldn’t be adjusted for in code.
• Home screen applets are a major pain for me now. On OS2007, I had to enter a special “move applet” screen in order to move applets around on the home screen. Now, they are always movable, and an errant finger movement can – and has more times than I can count – dragged my beautifully arranged applets into chaos. Of course, to add insult to injury, it’s next to impossible to figure out where I’m supposed to tap and drag the applets, and the location seems to change every time I need to drag these applets. A simple “Lock home screen applets” would go a long way towards solving this issue.
• Probably the most noticeable thing about OS2008 is that it appears to start considerably faster than its predecessor. I say appears to, because I’m not convinced that what’s happening is not related to a combination of deferred processing (i.e.: the OS sitting around doing things after the home screen showing) and increase in processor speed. Before OS2008, the tablet took nearly as long as my Nokia N80 to start up – which is also a comment on the piss poor state of smartphone OSes – while post-OS2008 update, it takes visibly less time to start up.
• One major stumbling block to making devices usable as standalone platforms is the lack of the ability to update on the go. Notably, every new version of the Internet Tablet OS, or even incremental update releases, requires me to hook up the device to a full-fledged computer and initiate an update from the latter device. Given that operating systems like Ubuntu that have significantly greater hardware and software variations to cope with, and Nokia has experience doing over-the-air updates with phones as far back as 2002, I’m surprised that OS2008 still requires me to hook up my N800 to a computer to update. In fact, given the fact that Linux has been designed ground up to self-host updates, I’m quite disappointed that this last connection to a full computer has yet to be cut. If Nokia does get around to cutting this last cable, the platform will finally stand alone as a separate and equal to much more comprehensive platforms, like Windows, Linux and others.
• I would like the Application Manager (the equivalent of Synaptic or apt on the N800) to become smarter about repositories. After finally giving applications the ability to install more than one repository and to draw from more than one repository, the Application Manager still commits hara-kiri when a new install file attempts to add an existing repository. That it is so easy to compare a set of text strings (URL, distribution, sorted list of components) makes it seem that Nokia was lazy or slipshod about testing and fixing bugs. I appreciate very much that OS2008 has sped up the Application Manager, but it really is disappointing that Nokia didn’t test such an obvious case: a Python application’s install file trying to add its own repository and the repository containing the Python bindings for Maemo on a system with the latter repository installed.
• Java. Please. Especially now that Java is available under the GPL. The number of applications that would be made available by such a move would be staggering.
• Along those lines, I’m quite impressed with the Palm OS Garnet VM that Access offers (soul-sucking registration required to download). Since I’ve not used Palm for ages, I don’t know much about applications in that universe any longer. I will try out some applications once I reacquaint myself with Palm. Most notably, of course, this finally gives a way to install tried and true Palm PIM applications, but given that I’m unsure how long this beta will last, and the hassle of having to start a Mac OS Classic-like emulator that has no direct links to Maemo, I’m not convinced this is the best solution.

There’s hundreds of other changes – some visible immediately, some visible after much use, some not at all – in OS2008. I’ve covered a few that do impact me as a moderately power-user of the N800 and the Maemo platform. I don’t develop, so I’m not sure if there have been any improvements on that side of things, but I imagine that is so.

One thing that I have looked around for is a set of UI guidelines, particularly regarding menus, and haven’t as yet found such a thing. Certainly, some applications could benefit from UI guidelines; others could benefit from programmers finding non-technically inclined people to test their applications. As always with Linux, there is a tsunami of sub-1.0 releases that will never make it into 1.0 releases though they are pretty deserving of that final bit of polish, and there are 1.7.1.48.108-pre8-a93-maemo-test-4.0-branch2 releases that should have never made it past the “idea in my head” stage. Installing applications, as always, gives you a song and dance about Nokia not being responsible in any way, shape or form – thank you for the hundredth time – and hardly inspires confidence. Imagine how annoying that would be on a desktop OS and whether a less experienced user would try such a thing.

All in all, OS2008 is an improvement over OS2007. I don’t say that it’s a significant or massive improvement only because it still hasn’t made the transition to a complete platform in its own right. The day that this occurs, I will be happy to declare it my favourite and, depending on the devices that it runs on, my most-used operating system.

An aside about the future: I have mixed feelings about Silverthorne and the role of Maemo as a platform of choice for Menlow-based Mobile Internet Devices. I have long been a believer in the law of x86 inevitability. I would not be surprised if the next generation of Internet Tablets have an Intel processor under the hood. Should Nokia’s next internet tablet be Silverthrone-powered, though, I will be at least little hesitant about betting on Maemo. Linux and Linux-derivatives have had tremendous success on devices powered by processors other than x86 – on ARM processors, the OS of choice has always been, and shall be for the foreseeable future, Linux. However, should Nokia go down the x86 route, I suspect that I like many other people, will buy the device, wipe it clean and install my no longer used copy of WinXP Pro. I would give it less than a fortnight from the day the device is released to when the first WinXP install happens. Even Ubuntu – with its far greater application range – may supplant Maemo as an OS of choice on Internet Tablets. So while Silverthorne maybe in the Internet Tablet future, I worry that it will be the end of the line for Maemo as a platform if it doesn’t grow up quickly. Maemo has as long as the next generation of Internet Tablets to become a serious platform; any longer, and it will be sidelined. The earlier, the better.