Nokia finally released an much anticipated update of the operating system for their N800 (and the new 810) Internet Tablet. There is an excellent in-depth review at tabletblog, so I won’t re-cover that ground.
Overall, I am liking the improvements and additions that were made. However, two things stick out that really need to be addressed. One is that the web installer is fundamentally broken in that it always attempts to download the install image from the web without first asking (or checking) for an existing image. When I went to download the update from Nokia, the download took something on the order of four and a half hours. By that time, the battery on the N800 had run out and the installer wasn’t able to connect to tablet. Install fails. Re-start the installer, wait another four-plus hours (with the N800 on AC power) fails again. Eventually I had to download the image from another source to complete the install. In a way, this is the kind of brain-dead programming style/user experience I would expect from an installer written in the loathsome dot-Not framework.
The second issue is that the Nokia software archives appear to be woefully mismanaged/under managed. Attempts to update software (which is usually seamless) results in far too many ‘install file is corrupt’ messages from installs hosted on the maemo.org site.
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development, innovation, mobile, n800, nokia, nseries, os2008