Tag Archives: N800

Long Week Words

The tool shapes the hand.

A posh way of saying that if the only tool you have is a hammer then every problem looks like a nail.

I am writing this on a Nokia N800, a little internet tablet, kind of like a Linux based iPhone but without the phone bit just wifi, Skype and Gizmo, Firefox and access to a large repository of free software.

The thing I have found most interesting about using such a device is how it shapes my approach to the internet. The internet is no longer something remote, locked away behind a computer that will take ages to boot, but it is now immediate, personal, readable!

I am not a big fan of the ebook concept, it threatens to leave the past mutable and the present controlled, but as I type these words and my brain nods sagely I can feel my paws twitch as they dream of an infinite library.

Quick, quick, slow

An interesting post on Daring Fireball about the speed of Javascript on the iPhone.

It’s always dangerous to generalise from such things but if I run the test on my N800 “Diablo” running Firefox then I get the following results – 0.394, 0.078, 0.353, 0.65, 0.250.

Apart from the string allocation figure the results are about 0.5x those of the iPhone with the latest Webkit.

Unlike the iPhone, the N800 does support Flash but to be honest I tend to turn it off save when accessing particular sites as Flash ads reduce the overall web browsing experience.

If I generalise wildly on such only mildly related benchmarks I would guess that Flash on the iPhone would be completely possible and would support most sites but it would still have to deal with those blasted Flash ads which both slow the browsing experience and which are very irritating indeed on a small screen.