Nokia recently released the “Diablo†update for the N800/N810 Internet Tablet. This a relatively minor update to their OS 2008 firmware, but if you’ve been having problems with battery drain (as I have) then you should definitely give Diablo a try.
The main benefits of the upgrade have been written about elsewhere:
- A noticeable performance boost in its Mozilla-based browser. I found the improvement most welcome in Google Reader, which now performs quite acceptably on my N800.
- A new e-mail client named Modest. Modest, unlike the default e-mail program on the original release of OS 2008, gets along well with Gmail’s IMAP service, and is much faster than my previous favourite, Claws. The only complaint I have about Modest is that it has no option for displaying images in e-mail, but a relatively simple fix for this can be found here.
- An improved Application Manager which runs reliably in the background (the previous version ran unreliably even in the foreground).
Since this update also allows future updates to be installed without “reflashing†(i.e. reinstalling all your apps and restoring all your settings from backup), there are plenty of reasons for N800/N810 owners to take advantage of this upgrade.
The improvement that has me the most excited, though, is one that hasn’t been mentioned elsewhere. As I’ve written previously, my N800 is a “light sleeper†– when left in low power “sleep†mode the battery would mysteriously drain. Since I had no explanation and found no workaround, my only option was to close all the apps and shutdown the device when I was finished using it, then boot it up the next time, which defeated much of the convenience of a portable PC.
Thanks to Diablo my N800’s insomnia has been solved. It now works the way it was intended – when I’m finished using it I just slip it in my pocket and let its power management software worry about the battery usage.
This particular benefit of Dialbo wasn’t widely noticed because the original problem didn’t affect most N800s. It seems that a batch of N800s and N810s bought in late 2007 and early 2008 had a flaw with their power management. Nokia released a minor fix to the firmware in February that fixed a power-on problem in these devices, and now it appears that Diablo has made another adjustment that fixed the battery drain. Admittedly, all of this is speculation since Nokia didn’t announce any change to power management as part of Diablo, and it seems that the upgrade has caused battery drain problems for some devices and fixes them for others. Still, if you’ve been having problems with the battery usage of your N800/N810, be sure to give Diablo a try!