Hocherfreut stellte ich bereits neulich fest, das es ein Projekt der Community gab, ein iSync Plugin für das N900 zu entwickeln. Nunmehr hat es die Version 1.0 erreicht und befindet ich in Beta.
Funktioniert absolut prima für mich.
Downloaden kann man es hier!
Mein Dank gilt der Community! Gleichzeitig demonstriert dies den Vorteil einer offenen Plattform.
Seit Anfang Dezember habe ich ein Nokia N900 welches allerdings sich erst einmal als weitgehend unbenutzbar rausstellte (siehe einen älteren Blog-Post). Seit einem Software Update vom Anfang Januar ist es allerdings in den Bereich der guten Nutzbarkeit vorgedrungen. Zwar synchronisiert es nach wie vor nicht mit auf der PIM-Ebene mit meinem Mac und es empfiehlt sich auch mindestens einen Ersatzakku dabei zu haben aber immerhin kann man das im Vergleich mit dem von mir auch gern genutzten Iphone.
Ein gestriges Erlebnis auf dem Weg zur favorisierten Cocktailbar des Abends brachte spontan ein wirklich witziges Vorgehen welches auch von den Anwesenden als sehr interessant wahrgenommen wurde 
Rein ins Taxi, den Fahrer bitten einen Sender einzustellen auf den man den eingebauten FM-Transmitter eingestellt hat und schon konnte man sich während der Fahrt mit der Musik der eigenen Wahl in guter Qualität unterhalten – perfekt. In meinem Fall war das dann Combichrist mit “What the f*ck is wrong with you people” und es war einfach gut. Dabei hilft aus dem Development Repository dann noch das FM-Boost Script, um ein paar mehr Milliwatt auf der Luft-Schnittstelle zu haben
Coming from two years of steady iphone usage with a little change while trying out the Palm Pre for a couple weeks I took a look at the Nokia N900 as being the mother of all phones spec wise that I’ve seen in quite a while.
After nearly two month of backorder from amazon it arrived and I started using it. After installing the current software release which was a flawless experience i started using it.
Things to say:
- It does not sync with a mac on the contacts/calendar side. Not at all at this time. You can import contacts by doing an addressbook export, copying it on the device and importing them. Syncing is something different.
- Having skype, jabber and google talk running all the time is a nice experience. However do not even thing about having the battery last for more than three hours at a time. Good way to crash the phone for me at least was to simple send a picture in skype. I really like the permanent skype connectivity especially since it does run in background as compared to the iphone.
- I had numerous crashes – what I did find out was that there are hardware releases that show this behaviour and there are others that do not. Once I had it crash so hard that I actually had to reflash it which lead to partial loss of user data (email settings for example). Finding out why it crashed – “/proc/bootreason” is your friend.
- The email client is slow and broken, unsuable at this time in my opinion. Haven’t tried exchange support, however what I heard is that it is very buggy.
- There is no support for MMS, not that I do miss it. However it is simply not there.
- After enabling the extras repository in program manager you can actually have an ssh client and server on the phone enabling you to log in and play around on it. This is nice and you do not even have to have any jailbreaks for it. For people curious, here is the output of /proc/cpuinfo:
Processor : ARMv7 Processor rev 3 (v7l) BogoMIPS : 499.92 Features : swp half thumb fastmult vfp edsp neon vfpv3 CPU implementer : 0x41 CPU architecture: 7 CPU variant : 0x1 CPU part : 0xc08 CPU revision : 3 Hardware : Nokia RX-51 board Revision : 2101 Serial : 0000000000000000
- The front camera sucks quality wise, the back camera is usable but not great. At least it does record video and it does have sort of a autofocus.
- In its newest version Nokia Multimedia Transfer for Mac does support the phone and can transfer audio from itunes as well as pictures to the device. It does mainly work but some things take forever.
- From the user interface point it does not even come close to the usabillity of the iphone or even the Palm Pre. However as it is open source that can be fixed by the community and that at least leaves the abillity to do it.
- It is a great phone for geeks that love to have something to hack with them, definetly not the right thing for a user only at this time. And absolutly no competition for the iphone.
- I am definetly missing a good twitter client like Tweetdeck on iphone. But I believe those will start to show up pretty soon.
After two weeks of usage, it goes into secondary phone only mode for playing around with it occasionally from time to time. Primary phone is back to the iphone now.