wnd's weblog

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. Nope.

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 Nokia 770.