Thumbs down for the N800 from me
(note in advance: anybody from the osso/maemo/nokia engineering-teams should not feel attacked by my following rant, but the tie-wearing folks making guiding- and final-decisions about what goes into a product and what to leave out should feel the beating… really bad!)
I was lucky to receive a N800 on developer-discount. Thanks a lot to the Nokia/OSSO-people involved in this. As much as I want to like the device I just cannot. Everybody else seems to like it, so what in the world is wrong?
case, design: The hull of the N800 is a regression in my eyes. It feels fragile compared to the N770. While I don’t expect such a device to withstand an aircraft-crash, I like the tough feel of the N770-case far more. The look/design of the N800-case itself reminds me of some fm-radio form the 80s. This is not what I would expect form a stylish “internet/digital-life in your pocket”-device of today.
camera: The image-quality produced by the built-in web-cam is very bad. Especially for a device that usually costs ˆ 400,-. I would certainly expect much better image quality. In the N93i phone (it’s rather a monster camera with a cell-phone wrapped around it) they use such a high-quality camera. While it does not need to be this kind of a high-end camera, a CCD-sensor based one, which doesn’t spit out those terribly grained frames, would be nice.
bundled software: The flash-player plugin, coming with the N800, is crap! Why, oh why, no smooth playback for flash-videos, Nokia? Kick Adobe harder to provide a proper product for which you pay them. I don’t think the flash-plugin can be included for free on the N800. This Orb-workaround does not count! It’s all about end-users, not geeks, isn’t it!? The processing-power of the N800 should be enough.
graphics/rendering-capabilities: OMG, the sorest and sadest spot of them all. When I read about the specs of ImaginationTechnologies’ PowerVR MBX built into the TexasInstruments OMAP2420 used in the N800, I got really psyched and thrilled about having hardware-accelerated OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG 1.0 available. My dreams and ideas went wild… but only to be blown into oblivion by the fact that there are no drivers available for it on the N800. This is so stupid I cannot grasp it. But wait it gets even better/worse. ImaginationTechnologies actually seem to offer drivers for Linux and also the SDK from TI seems to pull them through. But there’s nothing to be found on the N800. Instead there is some strange X-server altered to restrict screen-refreshes to 14 Hz using only an external framebuffer. WTF!? There you have a large multi-million dollar company like Nokia, which decides to put a real 3D-graphics core into on of their products. They pay their supplier for it… and don’t get driver support for the OS they intend to use on the device… although the supplier has driver-development experience on the said OS… @#!?&%$??? Gee… give me a break… honestly I could hit someone for this!
Isn’t there anything I like about the N800? Sure there is. The screen-quality is very good. It being based around a mostly FOSS-stack and open standards is a sure merit in my view. The sound coming out of the built-in speakers is nice. The virtual thumb-keyboard I like a lot. The darker default UI-theme I greatly enjoy.
But, like it or not, Nokia, you are going to loose many potential customers to the iPhone this year and next year, if Apple not somehow severely screws up. Regarding the graphics on the N800 you screwed up for the moment. I’ve seen your nice “view of the future”-videos promoting your ideas about potential embedded devices having all tricked out UIs, smoothly zooming and juggling around 2D and 3D graphics. I seriously hope you don’t expect to reach these dreams making business-decisions displayed with the N800.
Boy, do I feel like hitting someone hard in the roda today!
Just my ˆ 2/100.
February 6th, 2007 at 1:12 pm
Well, if you dont like it and want to sell it……
Interesting post though, I did not realise the limitations of the graphics drivers. Would this be something they are trying to iron out, or is it a design decision, it would be interesting to see a reply from a Maemo team developer.
Phil
February 6th, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Maybe the first review that says something a little bit more elaborated than just a "thanks Nokia for the discount code"…
February 6th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
its quite often that the TI chips have certain features enabled or disabled depending on the price paid for them. Maybe Nokia bought the chips with whatever features you think it should have turned off. Consider it like Vista Home and Vista Pro, same product with different features and different prices
February 6th, 2007 at 1:52 pm
Not quite sure where you got 14Hz from: it’s actually 20Hz. If you want to grab the source, tweak that to, say, 33Hz, and see what happens, you’re welcome. (I’ll give you a hint: the results aren’t good, since you wake up more often and consume more cycles for no gain in latency.)
As for the MBX stuff, unfortunately you can’t keep everyone happy, as the driver is closed source. No matter what happened (not that the decision was mine to take), people would’ve been very unhappy.
- the N800 X server maintainer
February 6th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
My guess is that all limitations are somehow connected with power. For example, I think we have no slightest idea how long iPhone could hold on. If it will be just 1.5 - 2 hours…then sorry, it will be maybe cool toy, but not serious mass production product.
Just my two cents,
Peter.
February 6th, 2007 at 2:13 pm
daniels: Hi Daniel, great that someone from "inside" replies! The 14 Hz I got from some OSSO-people in #maemo on freenode. So the driver is not part of of the N800-package because it is closed source? Hm… and only because of this it is not included? *sniff* While an OSS-driver would be nice - no doubt - I would still feel happy with a closed one. Still better than none. I don’t belong to that overly everything-needs-to-be-OSS-crowd. But like you said, no matter what one decides upon, someone is going to feel pissed off
Once again Linux is held back by the bloody driver-issue *sniff.sniff* What did you have to pull off development-wise anyway, because of the "missing" driver. I do not imagine it to be easy to get X going on the N800 without a workin driver. BTW, does it mean that the PowerVR MBX in the OMAP2420 is fully functional and not crippled like anon suggested? Any chances to get X running with that closed driver on the N800 and gain hw-accelerated OpenGL and OpenVG?
February 6th, 2007 at 2:21 pm
Peteris Krisjanis: Agreed. Power-comsumption for the use of 3D-hardware is something I cannot make even the slightest guess on, due to a total lack of knowledge on this subject. Still I would so much love to have the ability to do OpenGL-based development on the N800… iPhone or not. It’s not that you have to constantly run the device at 30 or 60 Hz refresh. With proper care you can do nice animated UIs that "come to a rest" when the animation-effect is finished.
February 6th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Regarding OpenGL, presumably Clutter (http://clutter-project.org/) is meant to run on similar hardware as the N800. I wonder if canola uses Clutter.
February 6th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
Canola uses SDL.
P.S: I got 3 failures with the bloddy captcha thing. You might want to consider using other kind of human-being-checking-technology like http://damienkatz.net/2007/01/negative_captch.html
February 6th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
Yeah, my guess is that the drivers are closed source, so Nokia can’t legally sell them linked in to the kernel, and they don’t want end users to have to start building and linking kernel modules.
That was actually one of the things I wondered when I bought my N800–whether Nokia was obeying the GPL with respect to kernel drivers.
February 6th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
MacSlow: I wasn\’t the one that made the decision, and it wouldn\’t have been made because the driver was non-free; it\’s just another thing to consider. The framebuffer is there anyway, and we needed to write a driver to use this regardless, as the MPX just draws into a chunk of memory: it doesn\’t actually power the LCD or do anything like that. So it was actually almost no extra work. The only real work went into the colourspace conversion stuff.
February 6th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Murray: From the clutter site: "Clutter uses OpenGL [...]".
What you suggest would mean canola uses a sw implementation of OpenGL, which (although witnessed on the device) sounds hardly like a big win…
Daniel: Do I understand you right that now the graphics path is now
X protocol -> (sw rendering) -> framebuffer (chunk of mem) -> LCD controller
and with acceleration it would be
X protocol -> (hw rendering) -> framebuffer (chunk of mem) -> LCD controller
?
Just trying to piece the picture together, there wouldn’t happen to be any presentations or such available on this?
February 6th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Murray: Yep, the plan for clutter has always been to run on openGL/ES and thus embedded graphics chipsets. Infact recent work involves merging the ES branch into trunk for eventual 0.4 release. Canola does not use clutter (SDL Afaik) but Canola is the kind of app you could build with clutter except maybe a little ‘richer’ UI wise.
MacSlow: Having had the chance to play with the Linux PowerVR drivers (though not on OMAP) I can say they are not they much to write home about. Afaik limited to 2.4 kernels and pretty unstable and unreliable (and them being closed means myself nor the wider community can fix). Maybe the situation has improved since I played or are better for OMAP, I dunno.
PS, your captcha thingy is a bit borked
February 7th, 2007 at 11:13 am
"The image-quality produced by the built-in web-cam is very bad."
It’s still a lot better than on the 770, which has NO camera at all. Want a good camera? Then buy a camera.
"graphics/rendering-capabilities: OMG, the sorest and sadest spot of them all."
So, is it worse than on the 770? No? In fact, it’s better? Well, what’s the problem then?
You make it sound like N800 is a bad product. But how well does it compare to 770, it’s predecessor? Most things you listed are things that could be better than they are right now, but they are still a lot better than the things in 770 are. Well, the case might be a bit worse on the N800, but other than that, all I can see is that they have fixed just about all the issue 770 had. More RAM, faster CPU, two slots for mem-cards, a camera, built-in speakers, built-in stand etc. etc.
Note: I don’t own N800, but I do own 770.
February 7th, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Two questions:
What architecture changes would you make that would still keep it cost-sensible as a consumer electronics device?
What interface changes would you make?
February 8th, 2007 at 8:59 am
@ Janne: Looking at Nokia’s in-house experience with stuffing high-quality cameras into small devices, the image-quality of the camera built into the N800 is a disappointment for me. BTW, their promotional N800 videos suggest a far better image-quality produced by the camera. As a normal full-paying customer I would feel heavily messed around with.
As you can probably see from my blog-entries I like to juggle around with OpenGL and cairo. Thus I would be very pleased if the N800 would provided the environment (hardware- and software-wise) to let me do this in a sophisticated fashion. It turned out that on the hardware-side of things the N800 is actually capable of accelerating this. But the software/driver needed to unlock those capabilities is not in place, due to the nasty driver-situation (the age-old problem with non-OSS drivers from the chip-supplier).
In my eyes the N800 cannot live up to its full potential, although the hardare is already in place.
@ ToughtFix: The absolute biggest let-down for me is the missing driver for the included and obviously fully working 3D-chip. While the specs of the PowerVR MBX don’t look like to be able to drive something like Doom3 on the device (I would absolutely not expect this, because that’s not the purpose of the N800), it has enough muscle to enable a richer more compelling UI (I assume the flash-plugin could benefit from the rendering-capabilities of the MBX too). So if I had anything to say at Nokia I would knock at the door of ImaginationTechnologies (or TexasIntruments) and either demand them opening their drivers, make the specs available for the OSS-community to write them themselves or next time go with a 3D-solution that better fits into the OSS-stack I build my platform around. I mean Nokia is not just anybody… well it’s Nokia. They should be able to pressure some players in this field… and wave with some cash if needed.
Just looking at the UI (for the moment forgetting that there is no full accelerated 2D/3D) I would step away from everything that’s desktop-app like (anything that’s best controlled with a mouse/stylus). I would focus more on the full-screen only finger-controlled environment (Canola is the nicest interface to use on the N770/N800 sofar). Also the thumb-pad is so cool to use. Get rid of anything with windows and borders, that just wastes screen real estate. The UI of the webbrowser would need to be heavily redesigned for this of course. Apple’s approach with Safari is… hm… not what I would have done. If anybody as some VC to spare, I would like to shake things up a little
February 12th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Is the powervr (mbx) thingy in the n800 the same one as in the Pepper Pad? This might be interesting to you: there’s a binary driver for povervr that claims its licence as GPL. See http://airlied.livejournal.com/39506.html
February 12th, 2007 at 9:39 am
@ Marius: Hey, that’s some promising news. Fills me with some hope again. Let’s see what comes out of this in the end.
February 19th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
OMG your catchpa rejected my message and now I have to type it all over again
Anyway, it would be great even if there were closed-source 3-D drivers for the N800. We’re used to closed source drivers for 3-D hardware by now.
The Pepper Pad has an Intel 2700g graphics chip which also features mbx, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it works the same I’m afraid.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_2700G
This one has an internal LCD controller, unlike the one in omap.
February 23rd, 2007 at 5:55 pm
re" They pay their supplier for it… and don’t get driver support for the OS they intend to use on the device… although the supplier has driver-development experience on the said OS… @#!?&%$??? Gee… give me a break… honestly I could hit someone for this!"
I spent months trying convince arm to break loose their spec for the graphics accellerator. Nothin doing. I think all the patent holders are afraid of the other patent holders in this biz.
btw, the ardour folk are considering a cairo based canvas in the next version of ardour (www.ardour.org). Hw opengl/compositing would speed up range display, buttons could "glow", and maybe pie menus would be interesting… if you have any thoughts towards how to get there pls stop by in #ardour on irc.freenode.org
February 23rd, 2007 at 8:38 pm
@ mike taht: And once again a ‘nice’ example of the ill nature of patents in IT. I have the feeling I will rant about this fact (in particular the N800/PowerVR issue) in every second sentence at FOSDEM
Great to hear Ardour moving to cairo for their drawing needs! While I cannot promise to step by in #ardour, I will still try to do so.
December 7th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
anyone tried to enable MBX 3D graphics on N800 ? any luck ? any updates on the driver ?