James Moore’s extemporaneous website

NITDroid (the version of Google's Android operating system for Nokia tablets) is looking stable and worthy of installation on the N900. I think I may give this a go...

My Game Gripper for the N900 arrived. I was somewhat hesitant ordering this, but decided that this would be an excellent way to use emulators on my mobile ‘phone. And it is…. Combined with a TV-out cable this will be travelling with me every time I take a trip – a perfect way to while a way the hours in dreary hotels.

Interestingly, the instructions / disclaimer form that arrived with the package was a little defensive. The Game Gripper will increase wear and tear on my ‘phone. Hoping that any damage to the keyboard is minimal.

This week I have been out of the country. As usual I am carting round the usual travel gadgets that I think are moderately essential ('phone, camera, meter, etc.) and used the opportunity to see how well I would travel with an iPad to replace my laptop. Not very well it turns out. Whilst the iPad is a stunning machine for leisure activities (playing games, watching movies, listening to music, sharing photos) I find it hard to work on - basic editing of documents is more frustrating than I had anticipated. I thought that I would be able to revise a couple of Keynote and Pages files during stolen moments of the day, but my preloaded documents did not copy across cleanly to the iPad I needed an external keyboard and a stand for comfortable typing - so I am not really saving that much space in my bag. However, the most noticeable issue was with wireless reception. We are staying in a gorgeous hotel on the beach, but wireless coverage is less than stellar - Heidi's Macbook and my cellphone can sometimes get online, but the iPad cannot. Without wireless access the device becomes a bit of an encumbrance - I found myself using my N900 cellphone over the iPad. Blogging was considerably easier on the cellphone than the iPad, even though the iPad had a dedicated WordPress application. So it seems less likely that the iPad will replace the laptop for me (though I wish Apple would come out with something more netbook sized with a 10-inch screen.

This is a short post that I am using a test of mobile blogging. One of the reasons I upgraded from the Blackberry to the Nokia N900 was the Blackberry's lackluster Web browsing capabilities.

Currently, my method of writing a journal entry is a little convoluted. I begin by composing my text in OpenOffice – setting the page width to fill the screen and bumping up the font size to 36 points (so I can read what I am typing). Once Abiword is available in Extras I will probably choose that over OpenOffice.

Images are edited in the native Photos application, which allows me to easily crop and resize pictures. I then open up a browser and paste the text into a new blog entry and upload my images. Drupal lets me apply additional formatting (and uploading of images).

Morpho QuickPanorama is one of the Nokia 900 applications that I have just started playing around with. The application works by letting you pan your camera to capture a wide-angle image – a little like the Widelux mechanical cameras used for school photos (where you could be photographed at the left of the shot, then run to the right to be in the same picture twice).

Anyway, have not spent much time with QuickPanorama, but managed to take two quick pictures at lunch (which have been resized).

The application can be downloaded and purchased from the Ovi Store.

The cheerful folks at Opera released a browser for the Nokia N900 this week. I have installed and I am suitably impressed. The application looks good, and runs quickly. No Abobe Flash just yet, but the default browser can handle this.

 My current cellphone (Nokia N900) has been launched in Hong Kong. Two good things have come of this:

1. Nokia put together a particularly cool video, which highlights features of the 'phone.
2. Nokia has released the PR1.2 system update, which hopefully will come to the U.S. soon (although there is a leaked version floating about).

 Yeh! - Firmware update and the Ovi Store now open for the Nokia N900. Incredibly impressed that this all happened OTA (over the air). Still hoping for a spellchecker though...

I wrote this a while back, but have not uploaded until now.

The Blackberry has been handed down to another. My new 'phone (and perhaps 'phone is the wrong word) is a Nokia N900. Basically it is a pocket computer that can make telephone calls. It is a flawed device, but I like it a lot.

• The email client on the N900 compares very poorly to both the Blackberry and the iPhone/iPod Touch. Checking email is torturously slow. My understanding is that an upcoming firmware update will fix this. I cannot wait.
• The headphone socket is in a less than ideal place - anything occupying the slot gets in the way of typing. Which is a pain during the morning commute. An angled plug on the earphones could improve things.
• Mac support is limited.

 And then there is the good...

• The N900 has the best browser out there. I can pretty much browse the Web as if this was a desktop machine. Whilst the screen currently does not have multitouch, I can access and use websites that were unavailable to me on the Blackberry and the iPod Touch. I am a happy camper.
• It gets better. The installed OS is Maemo 5, which is largely built on Debian. There is no need to hack or unlock the device to install additional packages or applications. This 'phone is a developer's dream with cool hardware to utilize (including two cameras and an infrared port). Currently the available applications are not as rich as comparable offerings for the iPhone, but I see the situation changing soon.

Whilst I have respect for both Apple and RIM, I am now a fan of Nokia.

I have just installed MaStory on my new Nokia N900. MaStory is a blogging application that runs on Maemo 5. Over the next few weeks I am going to test how well this software works for mobile blogging. This post was composed in MaStory, which allows me to employ basic HTML formatting such as:

1. Ordered lists.

• Unordered lists.

Blockquotes...

And so on.