Nokia N900 Hints And Tips

[VodafoneUK]

Welcome to our list of Hints and Tips!

If there is anything not covered here, please feel free to add your own finds as a reply, and these will be compiled into the main list periodically.

Thanks for your feedback!

[Retired-Moderat]

Hi everyone

As mentioned above, we will occasionally condense this thread for easy viewing.

Below are 9 fantastic hints and tips provided by the eForum community. One final thing to remember is that these hints and tips aren't from Vodafone so make sure to take care when going to any links etc.

Pangasius started things off with these handy tips:

To take screen dump which is saved in images Ctrl - Shift - P

AND

The N900 is battery hungry, to conserve power disable GPS, settings - location.

AND

If you dont want to use all four desktops you can disable which ones you dont need.
Tap the screen - tap the gear cog that appears to the right of the Vodafone name - tap on Desktop Menu - Manage Views - Tap Done

AND

When internet browsing you can also use the arrows on the keyboard to move around the page.
The volume button can also be used to zoom in and out whilst web browsing. I prefer the clockwise and anticlockwise gesture on th screen to do this.

AND

Wifi Power saving and Wifi Power Boosting Wifi

Tap top left - settings - internet connections - connections - hilight Wif connection with the up or down keyboard key- edit - next - next - next - advanced - select the tab called 'other' - Power saving :rolleyes:

This does effect your battery, but if you have poor battery performance it is worth checking out

Gazwkd also mentioned:

The N900 has an FM transmitter, when you go into media player and play either a song or stream a radio station tap now playing at the top and you'll see the option.

gives you the opportunity to transmit through stereo systems such as in car.

SoundWave provided a useful tip:

Additional key locking method

As well as using the dedicated lock switch on the right hand side, you can also press the power button twice.

Pressing the power button once brings up a small menu which is useful to quickly change profile or get to the Phone.

Sticky Mick posted the following:

If you want to use the web browser as a file browser. Start the browser and in the address bar type "file:///" (without the quotes).

AND

To switch from one desktop to the next instantly. Hold the phone with both thumbs above the screen, one on the left, the other on the right. Now quickly tap left then right. If you get it right the screen will flick over instead of scrolling.

Thanks to everyone for all the great and hints and tips. Please keep them coming.

eForum Fast Response

[Sticky_Mick]

Who needs Google Earth when there's Flashearth.

Go to www.neave.com where you'll find a Google Earth Experience but done using Flash.There's also a planetarium and a few games.

Not too sure how it all works though, just discovered it

[Mad-Halfling]

BBC iPlayer
I'm sure a lot of people may want to use the BBC iPlayer, but may currently be having problems. A short while ago the BBC changed some aspects of the iPlayer and this seemed to cause problems to some linux viewers, however you can, quite simply, get it playing on the N900 - it took me a short while to find this, so I thought I would post it up here to save other folks a bit of time. When you load up the program, look in the bottom right corner of the main player area - there is a small icon to open the player in a new window, click that and voila, it opens up a separate player window that works fine.

[Davey101]

I'm going to suggest a few useful apps that make the N900 experience a bit richer... these can all be found in either the extras or extras-testing repositories.

Shortcutd - allows you to configure the camera focus button (the camera shutter button pressed lightly) to perform other actions when not in the camera app. I have it configured to bring up the task switcher on a short press and the task launcher on a long press.

Call Notify - adds notifications of unread texts and missed calls to the status bar, along with sound and vibration alerts if desired.

Lens Cover Reminder - adds an icon to the status bar to show that the lens cover is open. It also vibrates if the screen and keyboard are locked with it still open.

Easy Debian - this is a big one. It needs 2.5GB of free space during installation and 2GB afterwards. Be aware that you should do the large download over wifi rather than 3G and that the unpacking part of the installation takes a long time (up to an hour)

It's well worth the wait because of the extra potential it adds to the device: the ability to install and run apps written for the Debian desktop distribution, within a virtual filesystem (chroot). The standard installation comes with Open Office and the Iceweasel (Firefox) web browser, among other standard Debian programs. Adding more programs is easy enough using the Synaptic Package Manager. Gnumeric is worth a look since it is faster than Open Office Calc and gFTP is far better than the current Maemo-specific version.

http://wiki.maemo.org/Easy_Debian

[Davey101]

I've thought of another one, along the lines of the first three I mentioned: LED Pattern Editor. This allows you to alter any of the LED patterns, including the blue double-flash that indicates a missed call or text.

I've left mine largely unaltered except for some of the colours: an email is still a blue double-flash but a missed call is red, a text green and an IM is indigo.

The usual warnings apply about software from extras-testing... use at your own risk because it is liable to brick your device, lose your data and rape your father.

[Sticky_Mick]

There's a new contacts app, mysteriously called "MyContacts" available for download from one of the repositories. It allows searching by thumbnail, name or email address. And what's more it supports auto-rotation when the hardware keyboard is closed. It also has it's own QWERTY keyboard when it portrait mode.

[sorrento205]

New calender widget is pretty good too IMO

[Tanthalas]

Not sure if this has been mentioned on here or not, but just found this one the other day:

A small app called Canola Layout: This app automatically alligns your desktop shortcuts etc on all desktop. I find this useful as I am often playing about with my desktop shortcuts and it can be fiddly to get them all nicely lined up (yea I know, I am a bit picky haha).

Not sure which catalogue the app is in, I was just browsing through All and came across it. I do have extra-devel and extras-testing so may have been in one of those.

Just puts an Icon in your normal app menu, click it and a second or so later the job is done. It isn't perfect and I have recently had all my icons aligned really strangely with them overlapping.

Having just typed all that and been playing about with it, it just crashed and restarted my phone haha, possibly because I was trying to reset the icons to often, too quickly.

[Sticky_Mick]

I did notice Canola Layout, but didn't download it because I have "Tweakr" installed. Tweakr is a lot more refined and allows you to change the size of the desktop grid under a setting called "Snap icons To Grid" - No; Small; Large and Huge.

But personally I'm loving all the Qt compliant stuff that's now started to appear in apps.