Gadgets and Gizmos

Nokia N810

Nokia N810 Internet Tablet is lineup from the Finnish handset manufacturer. Featuring a large 4.1″ touch screen with 800x480 pixel resolution and based on Maemo, a Linux based user interface, Nokia’s Internet Tablets are slowly progressing from a geek toy to a consumer device. The N810 retains many of the hardware features of the N800, such as a built-in VGA resolution camera for video calling, hardware buttons for zooming in and out on the interface, and a 3.5mm audio jack.

The Nokia N810 tablet is being touted as a new phase in portable internet communication. Whether you are near a Wi-Fi hotspot or have your Bluetooth-capable mobile phone, you can take advantage of the N810 to make internet calls. The N810 features a slide-out QWERTY keyboard with touch-screen interface. There’s also a VGA camera for video conferencing. In addition, out of the box it lacks many of the features a lot of you are accustomed to in a handheld. It doesn’t come with a calendar, for example, and the N810’s address book is there to let you send people email or instant messages. You can’t put a street address into it.

The N810 may be about the size of a Palm TX, but it includes something the TX doesn’t: a keyboard. Because of its generous size this is one of the easiest to type on portable keyboards I’ve used. The primary disadvantage of the N810 running Linux is the lack of third-party software. There’s some, but if you’re a Palm OS or Windows Mobile user accustomed to thousands of titles you’re in for an adjustment period.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that all the applications written for the desktop versions of Linux will run on an Internet Tablet; these have to be modified for this specific version of the operating system, and in most cases scaled down to run on a smaller screen and slower processor. Someone has to be interested enough and skilled enough, to port a desktop app to the N810, and it’s not a trivial task. The N810 comes with a basic application for handling email.

This is probably the weakest software package on the device, though. You can set it to download your email on a schedule, and it supports POP3, so you can get messages from most of the consumer email services, like Google and Yahoo. It also offers IMAP support, but I found this to be so poorly implemented and painfully slow that I can’t recommend that you use it. The N810 is the first Internet Tablet to have a built-in GPS receiver, allowing you to use it as a navigation device.

This is slow but accurate. Getting your initial fix can take several minutes, so try to get in the habit of turning on the GPS as soon as possible, even before you’re in your car. Also, it doesn’t perform very well in places where you don’t have a clear view of the sky, like when you’re surrounded by tall buildings. The N810’s browser supports technologies like Flash and Ajax; it can handle a much wider range of sites than most mobile devices. For instance, we set Net vibes as our homepage and enjoyed the ability to catch up on the headlines from all of our favorite sites in one place. We also had no problems loading and updating Face book or Flickr. The new Yahoo Mail wouldn’t load properly, but that’s because it requires a higher resolution display.

In general, pages loaded fairly quickly over Wi-Fi. It took 20 seconds for the N810 to completely load the New York Times, but we could start scrolling in 12 seconds and reading the top headlines in seven seconds. It also took the same 20 seconds for our iPhone to completely load The New York Times, but we could start reading and panning within 7 seconds. With a 400-MHz processor under the hood, the N810 performed reasonably well when we had Skype, Rhapsody, and the Media Player open. Things got bogged down after that, and we were greeted with a pop-up window to close one or more programs when we tried to load the RSS reader. The N810 isn’t designed for hardcore multitasking, but having 2GB of onboard memory certainly helps.

Nokia rates the N810 for 4 hours of battery life with continuous usage and the Wi-Fi connection active. When we used the N810 intermittently for a day of surfing, streaming music, and GPS navigation, it lasted a little less than 24 hours. Occasional usage had us reaching for the charger after a day and a half. Overall, it’s an attractive, thoughtfully built piece of hardware.