Evan and I have been trying to hack Android onto one of the Nokia tablets on and off for about four months now. He recently pointed me to a guide that makes the whole process fairly simple. (Note: try at your own risk).

I’m excited to finally be able to have it on an actual device (my N800). It runs a bit slow and the touchscreen doesn’t work (which means no typing) but it looks very neat.

I can’t believe this idea hasn’t received more press considering how valuable it is – and how simple it is to setup. In the past, I’ve written about how you can tether your Nseries handset to your computer to take advantage of your GPRS/3G connection for Internet use. This requires pairing of the two devices over Bluetooth – and only allows a one-to-one connection. That is, you can only connect one laptop to a handset. If you and a friend are both traveling and struggling to check email at an airport or something, you’re out of luck. Joikuspot aims to solve this problem with a brilliant solution. It is an application that turns your Nseries handset into a WiFi hotspot. Now you can share your handset’s Internet connection with a few different machines – all over WiFi – no need for tethering and other miscellaneous setup. I’ve successfully connected both my MacBook and my iPhone simultaneously to get at content. (Technically, the iPhone was browsing over a 3G network!)

I wrote about Joikuspot setup on the Nseries Workshop blog.

I’d been playing with the idea of trying to hook up more (digital) music in the living room. I wanted something that’s more on-demand and easier to control. I tried my iPod but this doesn’t interact with last.fm (I like keeping a listening history). I tried my iPhone – it’s hacked to run MobileScrobbler and therefore can log to last.fm. But this gives me issues when people call or send me texts. I tried plugging my laptop into the speakers. This was a little awkward because the laptop has to sit next to the TV and the speaker (running the cable all over the place is just not a good idea especially when people are over). And this method just made it hard to do work; I was standing hunched over trying to type emails. I started looking for other devices around the house. The PSP was nice and would’ve looked cool next to the TV – but I couldn’t figure out a way to get last.fm running properly – and syncing music with the system didn’t really fit my workflow. Then, my Nokia N800 volunteered for the job. I found a last.fm client for Maemo called Vagalume that works pretty well – it watches my last.fm radio and plays tracks non-stop. And it looks really cool. Sweet.

I’ve always liked neat hacks that allow me to control my phone from my computer. For instance, having the ability to type up a quick SMS from my computer instead of my phone is sometimes just convenient. My hacked iPhone allows me to control it in various ways just by logging into it like any normal server.

But what if you don’t want to hack your phone? Nokia just took a step ahead in bringing such features to the mainstream. An application called Nokia PC Phone is basically an extension for your browser and it exposes your phone’s contact list. You can use this list to make calls and send text messages directly from your browser.

I wrote up a quick howto on the Nseries workshop blog.