Nokia n800 review

Well I’ve had this thing for over a week now, and I gotta say, it rocks.

You can easily find the specs on this at Nokia’s site. So I won’t bore you with that stuff. I will give you the highlights of what you get, and how good it is.

First of all, as this is billed as an “Internet Tablet”, you get a browser, with Flash 9, and email, as well as an Internet radio station player that handles all kinds of streaming media. You also get an audio and video player, as well as chat, skype, video calling, games, etc. That’s a lot to promise in this kind of device, so I was half expecting to be pretty disappointed. But it lives up pretty damn well on most points.

The browser is a full featured browser. Not a mobile browser that formats stuff for a small screen. This means that in its default state, some of the text you read is a bit small. However you can zoom in easily with buttons right on the top of the device. This tends to give you horizontal scroll bars though. To handle this you can choose “Fit width to view”. This helps, but sometimes mangles the layout of pages. I don’t mean to make a big deal about this though. For most actual use, most pages are fine, and a quick zoom in is adequate to be able to read small type. Pages render surprisingly quick, and Flash seems to work pretty well. Of course, you gotta realize its limits. I wouldn’t try to run a really cpu intensive Flash app on this thing, and I ran into a couple of pages that had a lot of Flash on them, which really slowed things down. But it plays most Youtube videos just fine, for instance.

The email app is pretty basic, but works fine. I have it set to just download headers (the default). I then weed out the spam (no spam filter included), and then select all and get the contents. Seems to work pretty well. It’s great for answering all those emails you plan to get around to eventually, when you are on the train or whatever.

The Internet radio app comes with a directory of stations, but will play just about any stream out there. There’s also Shoutcast and LastFM clients out there, if you are in to those.

I’ve done a little IMing on it. I installed Pidgin, which is like Trillian or Adium – aggregates all your chat services. Haven’t tried Skype yet. Note, the video does not work in Skype yet. Might eventually. Not sure. You can do a video chat through the default chat app, which I think uses gTalk. Again, haven’t gotten arount to this.

Connecting to Wifi is as painless as doing the same thing with a laptop. Search for connections, find one with a decent signal that is open, or you have credentials for, and connect. You can save connections and it will automatically use them when it finds them. When I get home or to the office, it’s already connected and telling me I have new mail before I even get my coat off.

Video looks really nice on it. I haven’t watched a lot, but have a few episodes of Lost converted and ready to go. I don’t have any music on it, as I already have a perfectly adequate 60GB iPod for that. I wouldn’t really use this as an all purpose mp3 player anyway. One thing I like about my iPod is that I can reach in my coat pocket and find the click wheel, stop, start, change volume, skip to the next song, etc. all by feel. There are no external controls on the n800 for that kind of thing, except, I guess volume. Other than that, you have to pull it out, unlock the screen and use the stylus to control stuff.

As far as memory, I think it has something like 256kb internal and comes with a 128kb chip. It takes just about any kind of memory with converters, but natively fits SD cards. Also supports the high density cards. I got an 8GB card on ebay for $40, which works like a charm. It has two slots, so I can easily have 16GB on it. Officially it supports up to 8GB cards (times 2), but I’ve heard it will work with 16GB cards, which, if true, means you could get 32 GB going on it.

Of course, the obvious comparison is n800 vs. iPhone. I wouldn’t really go there with it though, because the iPhone is a phone, and the n800 is not. A better comparison is the iPod Touch. The Touch is pretty cool and I won’t knock it, but the one thing I think I like about the n800 is how open it is. It runs Linux, which means it’s pretty damn open. There’s an active developer community coming up with new stuff for it. Check http://garage.maemo.org. Hell, there are even versions of Doom and Quake running on this device. You can open up a Linux terminal and start navigating though the system. It even has Python 2.5 on it. I just had the terminal open, running Python interactively. Do that with your iPod Touch?

On the other hand, the iPod Touch is a lot thinner, and is built to operate with your fingers. You can do some stuff on the n800 with your fingers, but for the most part, you’ll want to use the stylus to home in on those small buttons and icons. The Touch also comes with more memory built in. Then again, whatever it comes with, that’s it. The n800 you can upgrade as you need it.

When you connect your n800 to your Mac or PC, with the standard USB cable, what shows up are your SD memory cards. You drag your files into them just like a USB memory stick and eject them. That’s that. No special software required. Of course, that means that if you need to sync files between your computer and device, you have to find your own solution for that. So far, just drag and drop has worked great for me.

I got my n800 on ebay, barely used, like new, for under $200, plus $40 for the extra memory. But I’ve seen them brand new for just over $200. The n800 comes with OS2007 installed, but you can (and should) upgrade to OS2008 (free). As mine was used, the previous owner did the upgrade before selling it.

Another device you might check into is the n810. This is the newer model. It will run you around $479 new. It has a slide-out real keyboard (n800 has on-screen kb) and built in GPS. Other than that, from what I’ve read, the devices are identical internally. They all run the same software and apparently at the same speed. Oh, the 810 comes with 2GB internal memory, but only one external slot. Unless the GPS or real keyboard does it for you, I’d save the money and go for the 800.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m sure I’ll be mentioning more things as I discover new cool apps or uses.