Nokia N900 Or Openpandora

[peca]

But N900 cost as 2 Pandoras. And I have telephone already.

 

[Tor]

If you want to play games IMO the best approach other than buying a Pandora is use the N900 with TV out cable and PS3 controller on a plasma!

Haha, indeed, that should work fine! I don't have a PS3 controller, but I've tested running games on the big TV and the N900 is surprisingly good at it. The cable (3 RCA plugs in the TV end) that comes with it is shorter than what we'll get with the Pandora I think, but it's quite decent anyway.

Someone mentioned battery. The battery in the N900 is 1320 mAh, and I nominally charge it every second day. I'm on wi-fi most of the day, but I don't sit around streaming videos or whatever. I wish the N900 had space for a 1500 mAh battery, I have a feeling that would have made a lot of good difference (the battery for the older N800 exists in two versions: 1500mAh and 1320 mAh, and the former is much nicer in practice - I've used both).

-Tor

 

[Exophase]

No, the physical keyboard doesn't count as a similarity. Nokia's sliding keyboards are not great;

I haven't used a lot of phone keyboards but I have used an N900's and I liked it. Are you sure it's bad just because N810's was?

 

[Exophase]

N900 has it, pretty much all A8 devices will

Only some of TI's OMAP3x line pairs a Cortex-A8 with a C64x+ DSP. OMAP4 may have a compatible DSP but that won't be Cortex-A8.

Some other A8 SoCs have a DSP, but not the same one. Modern day DSPs like these are really more like CPUs with DSP features like ring buffers and a few thousand ways to multiply two numbers. C6x is a predicated VLIW design like Itanium or Transmeta's CPUs. It'll happily run compiled C code. It'll perform best on math-heavy code with large computational blocks and few dependencies, but it should probably do well with pretty much anything (except floating point).

In fact, if you clocked the CPU and DSP at the same rate and ran a bunch of standard benchmarks on both I bet the DSP would win a lot of the time, sometimes by huge margins.

 

[Gricey]

If you want to play games IMO the best approach other than buying a Pandora is use the N900 with TV out cable and PS3 controller on a plasma!

Haha, indeed, that should work fine! I don't have a PS3 controller, but I've tested running games on the big TV and the N900 is surprisingly good at it. The cable (3 RCA plugs in the TV end) that comes with it is shorter than what we'll get with the Pandora I think, but it's quite decent anyway.

IME (N900 owner) the TV-out is a crappy picture. I output it to a 22" 1080P LCD in my gym, and it doesn't look great (though is usable). Fine if you're sweating away on an ellptical, but no IMAX.

 

[elitistlinuxuser]

Best combo Openpandora + Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 = complete and total awesomeness and probably my best bet.

 

[elitistlinuxuser]

Xperia runs WinMo, not as stable as Symbian, imnsho
Nokia would be better, especially those with good camera, radio transmitter

Windows Mobile not the best but a certainly better than symbian.

 

[PhillipJ]

No, the physical keyboard doesn't count as a similarity. Nokia's sliding keyboards are not great;

I haven't used a lot of phone keyboards but I have used an N900's and I liked it. Are you sure it's bad just because N810's was?

I haven't used an N900 but I was under the impression (from reviews) that it was worse than that on the n810 because it's only three rows, vs four rows on the n810. Better than a resistive on-screen keyboard but not as good as it could be. My girlfriend's e63 has a better keyboard because the keys, while tiny, are rounded and your thumb doesn't bump into anything when you use the top row.

 

[Gricey]

No, the physical keyboard doesn't count as a similarity. Nokia's sliding keyboards are not great;

I haven't used a lot of phone keyboards but I have used an N900's and I liked it. Are you sure it's bad just because N810's was?

I haven't used an N900 but I was under the impression (from reviews) that it was worse than that on the n810 because it's only three rows, vs four rows on the n810. Better than a resistive on-screen keyboard but not as good as it could be. My girlfriend's e63 has a better keyboard because the keys, while tiny, are rounded and your thumb doesn't bump into anything when you use the top row.

The keyboard is nice to use. The only trixy buttons to hit are things like pipe (|) which require going into a submenu, annoying when you're at the command line.

 

[WoD]

IME (N900 owner) the TV-out is a crappy picture. I output it to a 22" 1080P LCD in my gym, and it doesn't look great (though is usable). Fine if you're sweating away on an ellptical, but no IMAX.

I would tend to agree, it'll be interesting to see whether or not the TV-out on the Pandora is any better.

 

[urjaman]

IME (N900 owner) the TV-out is a crappy picture. I output it to a 22" 1080P LCD in my gym, and it doesn't look great (though is usable). Fine if you're sweating away on an ellptical, but no IMAX.

I would tend to agree, it'll be interesting to see whether or not the TV-out on the Pandora is any better.

I'd guess they're at the same quality level, if (i assume so) they both use the OMAP's TV out feature.

 

[meandu229]

I have a n900 and love it, OC'd it runs lots of psx games very well snes and the like, the media player is balls, hardly any portrait funcionality (except browser and phone mode) controls are too hard to play most psx games and the like, not tried with ps3 controller cause i dont have one but apparently good, can also use a wiimote. Has great TV out, 32gb storage is awsome but wasted with crap media player which doesnt like more than about 500 songs. i have to charge my battery every night or i wake up with about 20% left but i use it quite alot. maemo has quite a active following now over at maemo.org and with meego promised to the n900 I can recommend it. Having said that its really not good for gaming buttons are just to small to be able to use properly and no shoulder buttons limits what you can do on psx emu. I have just re-pre-ordered a pandora so ill have gone to the back of the queue. I got the n900 sort of because I wanted the pandora but I guess now ill have both,

 

[elitistlinuxuser]

One last question does the openpandora have adobe flash and a full openoffice suite. On the nokia n900 I would end up running that slow as hell easy debian to run openoffice and gimp the pandora would be awesome if it had native versions of both.

 

[quadomatic]

One last question does the openpandora have adobe flash and a full openoffice suite. On the nokia n900 I would end up running that slow as hell easy debian to run openoffice and gimp the pandora would be awesome if it had native versions of both.

OpenOffice should be available. Flash won't be available right away (may never be available) but since HTML5 is looming over the horizon, you won't miss it.

 

[elitistlinuxuser]

One last question does the openpandora have adobe flash and a full openoffice suite. On the nokia n900 I would end up running that slow as hell easy debian to run openoffice and gimp the pandora would be awesome if it had native versions of both.

OpenOffice should be available. Flash won't be available right away (may never be available) but since HTML5 is looming over the horizon, you won't miss it.

Sorry lack of flash is disappointing being as html5 is incomplete and it isn't supported by many video streaming sites however openoffice is a killer app but I will wait on the pandora to develope I have used html5 web site and the performance is alot better than flash but html5 is as standard.

 

[Elanzer]

I wouldn't worry about flash on Pandora, if it doesn't get ripped from other Linux based devices like the N900, it will come natively in a browser like Chrome which plans to integrate it.

 

[kingoddball]

@ above post: OpenOffice.O is not "available" for N900.

Its available for easy debian, which is essentially just an emulated debian distro running on N900.

After having my N900 for a few weeks - the iPhone is actually a better option for someone after a phone....

N900 is great but the flavor wears off pretty quick with no real games or controls. iPones touch is great for games.

Maybe once PR 1.2 comes out with QT support maybe more programs and/or games might come out.

There is no decent office suite available, and has had me resort to Google Docs (which is great anyhow).

@ Elanzer: Flash came natively with the N900. Nokia licenced it.
Not hacked from other hardware.

As you said, yes, Pandora will have to hack it to get it.
Im sure even Google Chrome cant install it IF ADOBE/OP does not have a licence.

 

[elitistlinuxuser]

@ above post: OpenOffice.O is not "available" for N900.

Its available for easy debian, which is essentially just an emulated debian distro running on N900.

After having my N900 for a few weeks - the iPhone is actually a better option for someone after a phone....

N900 is great but the flavor wears off pretty quick with no real games or controls. iPones touch is great for games.

Maybe once PR 1.2 comes out with QT support maybe more programs and/or games might come out.

There is no decent office suite available, and has had me resort to Google Docs (which is great anyhow).

@ Elanzer: Flash came natively with the N900. Nokia licenced it.
Not hacked from other hardware.

As you said, yes, Pandora will have to hack it to get it.
Im sure even Google Chrome cant install it IF ADOBE/OP does not have a licence.

why would I want an iPhone it isn't an option for me being as I use linux and I'm a t-Mobile customer.

 

[kingoddball]

Im in Australia - No clue about tmobile.

As for linux - there are ways apparently.

also, my reply was not directed at the OP(original poster), it was about the open office and to Elanzer (not an attack or ANYTHING mean) and a little bit of a rant (Im posting using n900 now).

as for using linux, it is virtually a must if you intend to develop for n900 as nokias scratchbox only works on linux (i use a VM).

im sure it will be MUCH better when pr 1.2 comes out with the 'qtlib's'.

 

[Elanzer]

@ Elanzer: Flash came natively with the N900. Nokia licenced it.
Not hacked from other hardware.

I didn't mean that the N900 didn't come with flash, I meant that someone would take the flash plugin from something like the N900 to use it on the Pandora.