So, I'm using my N800 daily, doing chat, browsing, playing media, as an alarm and I can say: it's a great improvement over 770.
Opera browser, the main application, is much faster and reliable. Just now I can use Gmail and other web applications without problems. Flash is still bad for youtube, but suck less for sure.
Thumb mode everywhere is cool, but could be better used, mainly on application menus, where it should be wider, possible taking the fullscreen (since you can't do much while menu is open), more GUI issues were pointed in a nice review by Sean Luke.
Media player is much improved and new possibilities are open due split of Gstreamer elements that were codecs and were outputing video using DSP and now are just codecs, allowing you to use Xv or X11, enabling On-Screen-Display, for example.
However, not everything is good: battery could last longer and video conference could be easier to setup with non-n800 peers and use Jabber/Gtalk instead of nokias own servers, that register your "screen name" with a weird number/hash at call.tableteer.nokia.com. Also bad is the (d)effect that you get from a faster processor and lack of sync between applications and X/video-driver: sometimes you redraw the screen while driver is updating it, then you may have half top on the previous animation frame, while the bottom on the next frame, giving an weird result. This happens in every application, more noticeable on horizontal moves, from SDL games to Opera browser (try drag and move pages). Most of issues are software-related and may go away with software upgrades.
Summary: upgrade ASAP.
So, I'm quite incommunicable these days, no blog posts, no IRC, IM or mail... that's because we're heading to Canola beta2 and you know: do { code(); compile(); test () } while (1);
What should you expect in Canola 1.0 beta2:
- Internationalization (i18n) support
- Canola now provides i18n support and has been translated to many languages, from portuguese to russian. Just canola-conf (web-ui) will lack this, support is already there, but we still miss a final version of new HTML/JS to have translators to do the job, maybe this will go in beta3.
- Many bugfixes
- Over 30 bugs were reported to our tracker, just 6 are still open but most could not be fixed in our side. We removed some memory leaks, reduced CPU usage, fixed some bugs with player, improved UPnP and DMAP support and we'll ship with canola-conf binding to localhost by default.
- Many improvements and features
- Although we're in beta, we've implemented a lot of features, things that you've requested and things that we were missing. That's a huge list for sure, but you may expect, at least:
- Non-fullscreen video player, with seek support
- Internet Radio now updates song information
- Scroll position indicator, really useful on huge folders
- Smaller canola applet
- Use adjacent JPEG if no album art embedded (cover.{jpg,png})
- OPML support in configuration tool (IRadio, Podcast and Photocast)
- Improved "Audio Library" layout, "Songs" is the first item
- Random/Shuffle list of all songs, albums, artists and playlists
- Dynamic playlists with all known playlists, both sequentially or joint/unique
- Improved theme capabilities (font color/size/shadow)
- Lots of configurable parameters using GConf (albeit no GUI for those yet)
Wow, just now, while looking at our closed bugs, SVN log and other resources I see how much we changed. It seems to be even more stable, but that's the
test(); step, we need to do it even more to improve the situation and we count on you, testers, to help... stay tuned, it may happen soon!
As a final note, we'll release the 770 version now, but we will support both 770 and N800 for some time since the former is still good enough what we have now, but we may have unique features for N800 (camera, for example). Our N800 version is almost ready, but I'm still trying to solve the problem with Vertical Sync, causing shearing/tearing which is much more noticeable now due the faster processor we have.
PS: Since Thoughtfix post "Canola as an In-Car Media Player" I'm running Canola in my car and that just make me think about one thing how long will I wait to make Canola an interface for my 60Gb iPod and replace my old-fashioned cd-player? Using libgpod and this hack to use devices in usb-host mode, it may happen... just need to release the next beta and start this... what do you think? ;-)