What I Have Done So Far With My N810

Well I got my Nokia N810 yesterday and here is what I have done with it/to it so far ...

Powered it on right out of the box

This may not seem like a big deal, but since it was used it had to be the first thing to try. To my delight it powered right up and had half battery life. I immediately clicked on "Get Started" and was awed by the great tutorial that played.

Reloaded the firmware

I noticed some lag and other wierdness like the fact that there were two email icons. After playing around in the candy shop for a while I decided to just reload the firmware and start from scratch. This was not too hard and the firmware load itself (135MB) only took about 10 seconds. After a reboot I walked through the startup screens and everything worked much better.

Setup my work email

One of the primary applications of this device is quick access to work email. I am on the road a lot and it's a pain to take out my laptop every time I need a number for a conference call that someone emailed me. After setting up my email account information I was up and running. One thing I did was limit the number of headers that the n810 downloads at a time since I have several thousand email messages in my inbox at any given time.

Installed a bunch of applications

I am truly impressed by the number of great applications that exist for this device. Most of them have been contributed by the community. Don't forget to enable the community repository in the Application Manager!

Where am I?

I installed Maemo Mapper and tested out the GPS receiver. After I figured out that I had to be outside to communicate with the GPS satellites things went a lot better. I plan on doing a road test later.

Skype

I tested a couple of Skype calls. The application seems to work just like the PC version. No problems. It would be nice if it could use the built in camera to do video though.

Enabled root access

There are some things I want to do that need root access. Unfortunately there is no built in way to get it. However, Google is your friend here. By putting the n810 in R&D mode I was able to get root access and change the default passwords. On with the show ...

Access my media

After I had root access I was able to mount my media share on my home network. However, there is no easy way to browse your filesystems on the n810 from the gui. Once I found where the gui was looking for files I just created a symbolic link under that directory to the mount point of my nfs filesystem. I also installed mplayer which performs much better than the built in media player.

Setup VPN access

Much to my surprise there is a vpnc application in the catalog. After cloning the settings from my laptop I was able to connect to my works internal websites with no problems.

What's Next?

All that in just one day. Phew! Here is what I plan to do in the days to come ...

Games!
GPS navigation
Playing media in the car
Access the internet through my cellphone
IR remote control
Instant messaging/IRC

... and probably a podcast episode about all of this stuff.