wnd's weblog

N810 and built-in e-mail client

My and my curiosity. Sigh. When I was told the built-in email-client on N770 was bad, I should have believed them. Instead, I wanted to believe there would have been progress since then, and wanted to experience N810 e-mail client myself. Bad move.

The first impression was "OK". I didn't like how the thing looked, but settings up an account with GMail was straightforward. It started retreaving the headers -- all 5000 of them -- so I just waited. Once receiving headers was finished I scrolled down and doubletapped on one of the emails. Scrolling was horribly slow but I figured 5000 entries in the list would explain it.

After tapping one of the emails a new window opened, showing nothing but the header information. After a few minutes of waiting I still didn't have the message body. I closed the window and concluded that the client was not suitable to be used with GMail. I opened Accounts dialog and clicked "Delete". I confirmed the deletion and waited. And I waited. Switching to desktop and back to e-mail client gave a clear indication that the device was busy doing something. I didn't know what it was and at this point I didn't care much. After five minutes of waiting, the dialog was still there, all buttons disabled. I killed the client from X-Term and tried to restart E-mail. Nothing happened. Oh great, did I just manage to break this?

I rebooted the device and tried again. Now E-mail would start and there was nothing in Inbox. I quit the client and continued to try different application. A few minutes later the device started blinking the LED and gave an indication I had new E-mail. Huh, how? I had just deleted the account, right?

I opened the E-mail client and suddenly my Inbox was filled with my GMail e-mails. I tried to open the Accounts dialog again but with no success. I tried and tried, but nothing happened. top showed enprocess was consuming all the CPU time so I killed it. Soon after the E-mail client popped a generic error dialog like "Error occured" and died. I restarted the E-mail client and enprocess with it. Nothing had changed.

Finally I decided there was little to lose so I opened an X-Term, cdd to ~/apps/email/Main/Inbox and deleted everything. I restarted E-mail, canceled connection to GMail and finally managed to open Accounts dialog and delete the GMail account. My E-mail experience was finally over.

My Nokia N810 is finally here!

Back in November -- or maybe it was at the end of October -- I decided to participate in Maemo developer program once again. I mean, even though I was turned down before, you never know. In 9 November I got a b0rken email telling me how things went wrong in a PHP-application -- and btw you should receive your discount code shortly. Huh, wha-- I was accepted? Nice, maybe I could get the device before Christmas. If only I had known...

Everyone received the discount code on 12 November. It would do no good for time being, but it would be a start. A good start. Days passed, a week passed, and the device was launched in the USA. No news about the developer program. Weeks passed, a month passed. I accepted the fact the device would not be here by Christmas. Soon it would be 2008. Finally, on 4 January, "The discount codes of the N810 maemo contributors program are going to be valid from today onwards". I placed the order and hoped for the best.

After placing my order I immediately checked the order status, which had my phone number as street address. I was a little confused and worried until I received a confirmation email, which had my address right. Also the order confirmation page, which I had printed as a PostScript file, had it right. I few days passed and the status was still "Open". On 7th we talked about this thing on IRC and it turned out some people had received an UPS tracking code -- and I had not. On the other hand, at least a few people who had the tracking code, couldn't view the order status page. The next day I got an email with the tracking code, and the order status page soon stopped working. It didn't matter, my stuff was finally being delivered, estimated to be here on 11th.

I spent the following days reloading the tracking page every half an hour or so. On Thursday morning (10 Jan) one of my friends got a call from UPS asking if it was OK to deliver the package around 14:00. At 9:59 my package was marked as "OUT FOR DELIVERY". I eventually got the call myself, and my wife received the package back home. After two months of waiting my new toy was finally here.

So I have the device here, now what? I'm not sure. :-) I spent the last night playing around with it, trying different things. SSH server and client both work perfectly, ScummVM works like a charm, using N810 as X-terminal is a breeze (although I'm missing two mouse buttons). Built-in Maps application is slow and it has horrible UI but it works. Meamomapper is faster but I dislike the UI even more. Built-in media player doesn't suit me but it's better then what I thought it would be. Canola looks pretty but I don't like it too much. UKMP is far too complicated for me, and selecting a track to play with Kilikali takes too much effort. Mixed feelings but I'm sure things will turn out fine. All in all, Nokia has come a long way since N770.