Re: My N900 Experience
 

SURVIVAL!!!!

I completely forgot I ordered a spare battery, and I was shocked to see that come in the mail today! I immediately checked my Amazon history, and sure enough, I ordered it the same day I ordered the N900. Alrighty then.

First thing's first, I'm uninstalling Catorize. I downloaded batterygraph, set the CPU frequency back to 600MHz, let batterygraph run, uninstalled Catorize after an hour, and reinstalled Catorize. I saw the battery usage spike, and concluded quickly that it's not worth it to have my apps sorted neatly if I'm gonna have to deal with excessive battery drain.

I bet there's someone reading this thread, saw my troubles, and said, "Yeah, that sounds about right."

Re: My N900 Experience
 

After reading up on how to keep the N900 healthy, I'm well-aware of the USB port being a problem. Idk when I'll do this, but I'll reinforce the port soon. I don't have a soldering iron anymore, but I do have a coil of Rosin-core solder. Good thing, too; I can just throw nails in a pan and use pliers to handle the nails since this solder melts at lower temps.

I'll consider filing down the catch pins, but I'm not sure if that's necessary after reinforcing the USB port w/solder.

As for the external battery charger, are you talking about this?

Re: My N900 Experience
 

About external battery charger: it may be just my personal experience, but the external battery charger I got first (made in China, shaped like this one) had fallen apart due to poor build quality (wires coming apart from PCB, and the like). So, I am now using Nokia's battery charger.

The only complaints about DT-33 are: lack of power cord in the box (you need to find the 2mm-pin power cord separately; like, AC-8), and occasionally, that battery loses contact while being inside the slot (you need to check that it does charge, before walking away for whole day).

[Edit]
I was surprised, too, by lack of power cord. But the dock was designed when Nokia phones used 2mm for charging, not microUSB, so they avoided duplicating functionality.

Besides, it's an on-table dock, not an in-wall dock. It gets better visibility, this way. No need to dive under the table to fetch the battery, either.

I have never experienced "loss of contact" because I know that this form factor, by definition, requires user to insert the battery properly, all the way down the slot, and not just haphazardly throw it in and pray to unknown deities that the battery will touch the charging contacts.
[/Edit]

Best wishes, and good luck.

Re: My N900 Experience
 

I use a Nokia X1-00 for charging . It has the same battery as n900 and cost about 1500Rs here in india when i bought it a year back .I found it more reliable than the third party chargers and for 1500Rs, it gave me an extra original BL-5J too.Even though my usb is perfectly ok i dont use it for the fear of breaking it . :)

Re: My N900 Experience
 

@tiger...yup...there are a few models with slight differences....but yea...that is a UBOC great charger...has surge protection...all the necessary bells and whistles...love the sucker...eliminated all my individual battery chargers for my devices. works great.

I never had to solder. Utilizing an external charger and filing those points down and using the pc connector cable only for reflashing and (seriously limiting the amount of times used for file transferring via cable) using wifi and bt instead to transfer files...I think I have used the connector cable less than 50 times in total...to date...with no reportable probs yet with said usb port.


@wiki. oh yea..I had one ...looked alot like the one you posted.
sucker always had me worried....I never took my eyes off it...used it only a couple of times ...it's been sitting in the bottom of a box in my garage for a few years now.

Re: My N900 Experience
 

I resized the EXT3 and VFAT partitions. Reduced the VFAT partition to 15GB and filled the leftover space with the EXT3 partition. So far, no data corruption as a result. This is merely a preliminary step to using Easy Debian, however. I'll get around to that once I'm done getting everything to the way I want.

Also, once I get another uSD card (my only one died a while ago), I'll further cut the MyDocs partition. On a phone with uSD slots, I like to keep my files (docs, media, downloads) on the uSD slot. It's much safer that way. Your phone's borked? Just take the card out and you'll have all your data!

Eat your hearts out, iPhone users. I don't even need cloud storage.

Someone in the "Why Modern Devices Kinda Suck" thread mentioned how the task overview in Hildon is very similar to GNOME Shell. I have to agree with that. You know what would make it even more similar? Keyboard shortcuts to overview, list of apps, and to show current desktop. Hell, throw in an app search option from typing in something in the overview and it'll literally be exactly like Dash. In fact, I wanna do that!

...except I have no idea how to set shortcuts in Hildon. Is it in a config file? If it is, which one?

I'm also closely following the DebiaN900 thread. Since Fremantle will have to be ported and the Neo900 will most likely ship with Debian (or a derivative), that thread will likely help the Neo900 folks with software once they're finished with the hardware.

Re: My N900 Experience
 

Ain't no rest for the wicked...

Apparently, the phone doesn't charge when OC'd. Seems pretty obvious, but too bad I couldn't work that out beforehand. *sigh* Welp, good thing I made more progress before this blunder.

There's gonna be an external charger in my life in the near future. I might just stop OC'ing alltogether. Enabling HW acceleration of the desktop definitely helped the slowness and jittering.

Speaking of, why would that be disabled by default?

Re: My N900 Experience
 

Well there is Ctrl+Backspace to display the task manager. Is that what you mean by overview?

You probably want to check out the wiki page if you haven't already:
http://wiki.maemo.org/N900_Shortcuts_and_Gestures

Re: My N900 Experience
 

Thank you for the link! And the shortcut!

Yeah, that's what I mean. I didn't know what it was called, so I just called it overview. It makes sense to me.

Re: My N900 Experience
 

It does not have me worried ;-) Well, except for continuous jokes about battery exploding :-) It's high quality, so I can be assured that I will not have to un-screw it, ever (not that I know how; to my eyes, it's smooth like chocolate and soft like velvet :-) )

And it charges very quickly, if you choose proper AC-charger. With the highest current ;-) It's recommended that you read compatibility list of DT-33, before ordering an AC-charger, just as extra pre-caution.

Best wishes.