Friday, December 21, 2007

Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

I got the new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and must say that this thing rocks! The processor speed has been bumped up to 400mhz and the browser now completely supports most AJAX and Flash sites including Google Docs and Flickr.  I love my iPhone but the N810 makes an excellent device to carrry around instead of a notebook with it's 800x480 resolution screen and builti-n thumboard..  Add a bluetooth keyboard and it can virtually replace a notebook.

SANY0001.JPG

I love my MacBook but let's face the facts. It's hot and has a crappy battery life of 2-3 hours. The N810 is pocketable and you never really shut it off. It just goes to sleep. It does VOIP through Gizmodo and Skype, makes a great IM client with the built-in keyboard and I can remotely access computers with VNC, Remote Desktop and ssh via the terminal application. The built-in thumboard makes applications like terminal and VNC practical now for real work.

Multimedia is not as good as the iPhone. The iPhone has a 600mhz processor and dedicated video subsystem. It can easily playback movies that I have encoded in full DVD resolution for my AppleTV. While the N800 has a higher resolution screen, it lacks the horsepower to properly playback full resolution DVD movies. That being said, properly encoded movies play just fine and the built-in speakers are stereo while the iPhone only does mono. The N800 also can access the Rhapsody "all you can eat" music service wirelessly. You can't download music from the site onto the device but you can queue up songs from you library and stream them just fine.

The N810 also includes a built-in GPS chip and has WayPoint navigation software built-in. This software is less than stellar but you can download and install Maemo Mapper for free. It also comes bundled with a car cradle and stand for use as a car navigation system making this a very nice car computer. Time will tell if developers capitalize on the built-in GPS for other applications.

Overall, the N810 is an excellent device with great build quality. It's another stellar device from Nokia. I wish they would market this device differently. Calling this an "Internet Tablet" is misleading. This is a full-blown pocketable computer running LInux.

Blogged with Flock