chlettn

1.2 Display
The display blew me away after switching it on the first time ? it is very bright, evenly lit and sharp (remember, I still use my N70 and don?t think the screen is all that bad ), it is simply amazing imho. And the size is very good, if it were much smaller than the 4.13? (92mm x 55mm, 220 DPI !!!), diagonal, I think the resolution would be almost too high to browse without having to hold it within 20cm or so too read everything at 100% zoom (yeah, I have to wear glasses and I?m short sighted ? so maybe other people will disagree on that ).
The downside of the display is that it only supports 65k colors ? which you can see best on pictures with almost unicolored motives like blue skies (you can see a few discrete blue color steps instead of a perfect gradient).
Of course the screen fades in the sunshine ? it is important to set the display brightness to the maximum if you want to use it
Overall, I think it is a great screen, and I?m sure it has changed my view regarding browsing on mobile devices forever ? anything below 800 pixels width is just too little imho ? which I will demonstrate later on with a few examples).



1.3 Loudspeakers & headphone jack
The N800 features stereo speakers, which are housed beneath the ?dotted? parts of the front cover.
They are very loud, and the quality is simply great ? and I really mean great. If you don?t listen to bass-centric music only, it can easily act as a small ghetto blaster
The integrated 3.5mm headphone is very nice too, makes all audio applications so much more usable than for example the proprietary Pop-Port of the N70. I found the sound quality using headphones quite good, absolutely usable as a music player. The only thing that bothered me is that there is an evident basic noise when NO music or sound is played?

1.4 Buttons
The N800 features a few hardware buttons: a dpad with a central selection button, a dedicated back button (that usually brings you back to the last view, last webpage etc.), a menu key (that calls the applications menu and is very useful in fullscreen mode), a ?home? key (which brings up a application switch menu when pressed for a short time and brings to the main screen and back with longer presses).
On the upper side, there are 4 buttons: zoom in & zoom out buttons with the dedicated fullscreen-button (very convenient imho) and the on/off key, which is used to switch between offline-/normal mode, locks the keys (or locks the whole device with a security code, which can also be done automatically after a certain time goes by).
Overall, all of them worked nicely, but I think that they are not really useful for fast-paced action games. No problems in normal usage though.

1.5 WLAN Reception & Setup
WLAN worked without any problems for me. The reception is very good imho ? as good as my HP Pavillion dv6000 laptop and much better than my sisters no-name laptop. It even manages to find more networks in my surrounding than my HP , so, not bad at all.
Setting up a WLAN connection is dead easy as well, as you?re guided by a little wizard, if you want to use anything but an unprotected network. The main networks you?re going to use can be saved too.
The N800 also supports UPnP, which I will cover later on.
Bluetooth works without problems as well. Even though it features BT2.0, A2DP isn?t present as far as I know, I have no compatible headsets for trying that out though. A nice Bluetooth feature is that you can browse the files of remote devices (such as my N70) and even stream music files directly via BT, or look at the pictures of the handset without having to put its memory card into the N800. Very nice overall, but not really usable for listening to music, as each file needs to be buffered for a few seconds before the playback kicks in.

1.6 Memory cards
One great thing about the N800 is that it has 2 full-size SD card slots. In the current firmware version, SDHC isn?t supported yet, but there are unofficial kernel hacks for that already (be careful with them!), which enables you to use 2 8GB SDHC cards . I guess that future revisions will enable this feature officially.
Out of the box, 2 2GB cards are supported, and a 128MB miniSD card with an adapter is included in the sales package.
The slots are compatible with micro- & miniSD with adapters, normal sized SD, MMC and RS-MMC (with adapter), which is great if you have a few cards of one of that format already lying around gathering dust (and who has not? )
Both slots support hot swapping, but the internal one requires you to remove the battery cover to do so.

1.7 Camera
On the left hand side of the N800, another secret waits to be found: a pop-out VGA camera for video conferences via VoIP. It is a nice addition, but don?t expect anything quality wise ? it suffers from heavy noise in less-than-ideal lightning conditions. And to quote a friend of mine: ?Great idea, but due to the positioning of the camera, the person on the other end of the line will always think that you look right by him/her when you look at the screen.? It?s a nice gimmick, but not much more imho.

1.8 Battery life
The N800 uses a 1500mAh BL-5C battery. I usually set the screen to a third of the maximum brightness, and found that it lasted between 3.5 and 4h while browsing continuously. With brightness set to full, it won?t last much longer than 3h with continuously activate WiFi & display usage.
In offline mode and lower brightness settings, 6-7h are easily possible though, with is quite OK for me (my laptop hardly lasts 1.5h, so, in comparison it works very good imho ) - but it could be better, and might in future firmware revisions

1.9 Sales Package Content
-N800 Internet tablet
-2 styli (one spare)
-a soft leather pouch
-a charger (the N800 uses the new, smaller charger connector)
-a 128MB miniSD + adapter
-a miniUSB to USB data cable
-a stereo headset
-manual etc?

chlettn

2. Software

2.1 Included

2.1.1 Desktop / Home screen
The home screen of the N800 offers some space for so-called applets ? which are a sort of widgets. Out of the box, it offers a Google/Wikipedia search field (you can?t add other services, unfortunately ), a RSS reader overview, a clock (can be digital and analog), a quick access to web radio stations, a contact applet and the so-called web shortcut (which allows you to display a picture and open a webpage after tapping it ? a waste of space imho).
Additional applets are provided by the FM radio app (the N800 features FM radio hardware, but no app to use it out of the box), the GPE calendar (apart from a contact app, the N800 offers nothing for PIM out of the box?) & Canola (only a quick start shortcut). I?m sure there are others, but that?s all I found until now.
You can also change the theme and the background image of the home screen.
A nice touch is, that the N800 senses if you use the stylus or your finger, and changes the size of the Pop-Up menus and other things accordingly. That also how you get to the different on-screen keyboards ? a very nice idea imho.






2.1.2 Text entry
The N800 features 3 different methods for entering text out of the box: a small on-screen keyboard that is used with the stylus, a full-screen keyboard that can be used with your fingers and handwriting recognition.
Both of the virtual keyboards work very well, but I find myself using the full-screen virtual thumb-board all the time as it is really convenient, even if you?re going to write more than 2 sentences ? the only thing I?ve had slight problems with is that it is quite responsive and you sometimes hit the same key twice instead of once.
The handwriting recognition, on the other hand, is pretty much unusable imho ? even after I trained it by entering each character I use three or more times, it still misses 30% or so?
All of these methods can be used in conjunction with a prediction algorithm.

chlettn

2.1.3 Browser
The browser is very nice ? speedy, renders everything just the way a normal desktop browser would, handles flash (it slows the device down for a bit on heavy flash-sites though, but can also be easily switched off) etc.
For all but a very few pages (I heard that it doesn?t work with GoogleReader), I?ve had no problems at all. Note that YouTube and other streaming flash video pages, while they do work, are pretty much useless right now ? you won?t get much more than 2-3 fps, but at least the sound part plays quite OK. Apparently this is one of the main areas for improvement in the next firmware revision (which is due in a few weeks afaik), as Ari Jaaksi & InternetTableTalk mention. If they manage to make it usable, would certainly add some appeal to this device for a lot of people.
Zooming in and out of web pages does work very well ? it happens pretty much instantaneously and is very convenient when you fail for the 3rd time to hit a tiny link
It can save passwords/usernames for different pages as well.

One thing it really lacks imho is a link to the RSS reader ? the browser and the reader work as two pretty much independent apps, which is something I don?t really understand?

Other than that, there is nothing much more to say about this browser ? simply image the browser you use on your PC, and you?ll see that there is not much difference in terms of pure surfing between it and the N800?s browser. And if they manage to make it more stable (it crashes fairly frequently, unfortunately), it would be even better.

Just to give you a feeling of what the browser will show you, a few examples:








2.1.4 eMail Client
The best things I can say about it is, that it does what it is meant for (sending/receiving eMails) and the setup is quite easy.
But apart from that, this is the first real weakness of the N800 ? the mail client is slow, lacks some small, but very important things (why can?t I set ALL of my messages to ?read? status with one click?), and on top of that, crashes often.
This app needs some serious work before I?d really use it, at least as an IMAP client (maybe it?s better for POP3 ? I haven?t bothered to try yet tbh)

2.1.5 RSS feed reader
Another so-so app. Works at is should overall, but is slow for content-heavy feeds like Engadget or similar blogs (with images and everything). And it only shows the newest few posts from a feed (and worse, all of them one page) ? I?m sure that most people like it that way, but I really love the way Opera?s desktop browser handles feeds. Once you open the feed menu, you see a list of the feed headlines on one side of the screen and the selected feed message on the right side. I prefer it this way, as it saves you time scrolling by uninteresting posts (and that takes some time with longer posts, believe me?). It would also be great if the N800?s reader would cache the text of the newsfeeds for a longer time (up to a certain amount of memory) and lets you search inside all feeds.



TBH I haven?t used the in-built chat & GoogleTalk VoIP service at all, as I know no one who uses GoogleTalk and don?t have an account (and was too lazy to ask somebody for the afaik needed GMail invitation) ? once Skype is available for the N800, it will become vastly more useful for me though (I almost wish that I could do this test a few weeks/months later, when Skype and much more 3rd party apps are available)

chlettn

2.1.6 Utilities
Notes: nothing spectacular, a simple notepad app. Let?s you customize the font, colors and so on though?
Images: a simple gallery app, nothing out of the ordinary.
File manager: well, it is what is - it?s works as it should and lets you browse the files of connected Bluetooth devices and UPnP servers.
Calculator: has everything a normal calculator has, but don?t expect to calculate quantum-physical problems with it
Sketch: think Windows Paint and you?re right there.
Clock: shows a nice, drag-able world map to set a second clock for another time zone, and allows recurrent (once, daily & weekly) & multiple alarms with descriptions and different alarm signals. Works like a charm.



PDF reader: works OK, renders pages as it should and is quite fast - BUT I haven?t found any convenient way (apart from using to context-sensitive menu, which takes a second or so to open?) to flip the page while in full-screen mode if the page is anything but zoomed to fit, and that lowers the value of this app a bit imho.
Media player: the inbuilt media player is OK, builds a library of all your media files (music & video) and thereby offers you a convenient way to access the your media files. But in the end ? once you?ve seen and experienced Canola, I don?t think anybody would want to go back to the inbuilt solution

2.1.7 Games
The N800 comes with four games: Chess, Blocks (a Tetris clone), Mahjong and Marbles. I haven?t learned to play Chess yet (yeah, I know that I should ) and I haven?t really tried Marbles, but Blocks is nice (uses the device in portrait orientation) and Mahjong is as addictive as ever. All of these games are done nicely graphics-wise and even have some sound effects. Nothing spectacular, but solid time-killers, if you need one






2.2 3rd Party:

2.2.1 Adding 3rd party software
Adding new software is quite easy: all you need to do is to add a so-called repository in the application manager ? add the URL of the repository and the name of the distribution (?OS version?, the current one is called ?Bora?, older ones ?Mistral?, ?Scirroco? etc.). Then you can update your app list and simply select, download and install the programs the repository(s) offer. A few further advanced open-source projects offer even easier one-click installations as well
The InternetTabletTalk forums and the Maemo app catalog are great places to find new repositories.

The only thing that slightly annoyed me was that if one repository is somehow erroneous, the application catalogue update fails. So far, so good ? the only problem with that is, that if you add a few repositories before trying to update your catalogue, it doesn?t tell you which repository causes problems?so you have to find out by trial-and-error?

chlettn

2.2.2 Canola
http://openbossa.indt.org/canola/
I can?t understand why Nokia doesn?t sponsor the Canola team and ships the device with it ? this media player is very nice and way ahead of the inbuilt one usability-wise. It kind of reminds me of the Windows Media Center with its animations and usage. With that on board by default, the N800 could easily be marketed as a great PMP as well, which might attract another user base and thus, more people than a ?simple? great internet tablet would.
It offers a very convenient, completely thumb-based UI that looks nice, is skinable, and works great. It can also be used as a streaming client for UPnP.
The only small gripe I have with it is that you can?t choose anything else but the currently selected option of eg. a song list with your finger, instead of taking further advantage of the touch screen?but apart from that, this is one killer app imho!





2.2.3 ScummVM
www.scummvm.org / http://770.fs-security.com/scummvm/
Another great app ? the ever present ScummVM. If I take a look at the compatible OS?ses and devices, I get the feeling that just about any device that can be hacked into accepting 3rd part apps and offers somewhat enough processing power for it, is supplied with a port of this app
ScummVM is an emulator for lots of different games by Lucas Arts and others like Monkey Island 1 ? 3 ( they?re still great), Maniac Mansion, Beneath A Steel Sky, Broken Sword 1 & 2 etc etc?another must-have app imho.




2.2.4 Xournal
http://henryykt.googlepages.com/xournalforn800
At first, this looks like another notes-application, only this time more geared towards hand-written notes & sketches. You can even display normal lines like in an old-school exercise book
But what REALLY made this application stand out among a lot of note-taking apps was that is able to open PDF files, lets the user scribble around on them and then, save the ?piece of art? again in a PDF file. This is fantastic for me, as we get all of our university scripts as PDFs and I tend to loose sheets of papers

chlettn

2.2.5 XTerm
http://maemo-hackers.org/wiki/OssoXterm
In the end, it?s ?just? the normal XTerm ? but it is fun to tinker around with it on the N800, I don?t know why ? I guess that?s when the geek in me gets the upper hand

2.2.6 FBReader
http://only.mawhrin.net/fbreader/
A very cool eBook reader ? supports a myriad of file formats, and has about a hundred settings for just about anything one could need.
It allows you to read in just every screen orientation you can imagine, and in portrait mode, the high resolution and size makes the N800 a great eBook reader.




2.2.7 GAIM
http://gaim.sourceforge.net/ / http://downloads.maemo.org/product/maemo-gaim
GAIM is the well-known multi-protocol IM tool ? and it really supports a LOT of IM protocols (ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ?) and works nice ? it does what it is meant to do without any problems and is convenient to use, so, a must-have for most people imho.

2.2.8 FM-Radio
http://downloads.maemo.org/product/fmradio
The N800 features the hardware to listen to FM radio stations, but has no program to do so out of the box ? this little tool (which works as an applet as well) remedies that.
You can save different stations and it provides an auto-search function, so, apart from RDS (which Nokia apparently doesn?t want to use, for what ever reasons?) it has everything you expect from a simple radio. Sound quality was, well, FM-radio-like

2.2.9 Other apps (GBA emulator, Memopad+?)
There are lots and lots of different programs and tools, and as the N800 becomes more widespread, the amount of available apps rises just about every day. Just take a look at http://downloads.maemo.org/ for an overview (and remember, that there are many repositories apart from that catalogue, so this doesn?t feature every compatible app).
There are PIM solutions (GPE Calendar & ToDo), a spreadsheet app (Gnumeric), a GBA (VERY slow right now) / MAME / NES emulator, an emulator for a scientific HP calculator (if the in-built one isn?t sufficient for you), lots of small games (Bejeweled, a Doom1 port, ?) and a very convenient weather applet. And about a hundred other things

3. Changes I'd like to see

General:
-I'd like to check the current charging state while I'm charging.
-Make it more stable: especially the feed reader and the e-mail client need a makeover. This is even slightly more important, as I haven't found a way to reproduce crashes (and thus, no workarounds as well...)
-add a 'open new application...' menu option to the task menu, so that you don't have to leave fullscreen mode to open a new app.
-add a 'close window' option to the main context menu level in all apps when in full-screen

Bowser:
-maybe add 'mouse' gestures as in the desktop version of Opera supports.
-add a shortcut to quickly scroll to the top/bottom of a page.
-add an 'never save password' option to the respective dialog.

PDF-Reader:
-add an easy way to switch pages in full-screen mode.

Handwriting recognition:
-add a seperation line to make distinguishing capital/normal letter input easier
-Or even better, change the system to something similar to the UIQ Jot system (full screen entering, dedicated areas for upper-/lowercase letters and numbers instead of hard-to-recognize lower- & uppercase characters)

RSS Reader:
-open links in a NEW browser window, and don't recycle an existing one!
-don't show links of already 'discarded' feed messages in the applet.
-take a look at the RSS Reader inbuilt in Operas Desktop browser...

eMail App:
-add a 'mark all as read' option!

Keyboard input:
-create different 'click' noises for typing a letter/number/etc. and unrecognised taps on the screen.
-disable the ability to drag marked text around - I found it annoying rather than helpful without any system-wide undo function.

Hardware:
-add some dedicated multimedia buttons (play/pause, stop, foward, rewind, start media app) to the right side of the tablet. They could also be VERY useful when using various game console emulators
-return to the cover solution of the 770. And maybe provide an HTC Advantage-like keyboard cover as additional accessory?

Other:
-the provided pouch is nice, but the outer material should be 'slicker' to make it easier to slip the N800&pouch in and out of a pocket.

A little outlook of the things to come:
The next minor OS update will give us better flash video streaming performance (and general better video handling), better battery life and bug fixes according to Ari Jaaksi. And the next major update will add Skype and lots of other things, like better Web2.0 and media file support.
And there might even be a WiMAX internet tablet sometimes in the future

Useful links:
http://jaaksi.blogspot.com ? Ari Jaaksi's blog
www.internettablettalk.com ? like the forum for internet tablets, a great community.
www.maemo.org - official site for developement, app catalogue and other related stuff
www.nseries.com/n800 - the official N800 page


4. Conclusion

I guess the N800 doesn't appeal to everybody...

It is too big to replace, for example, an iPod, even though it is quite capable as a media player. It's too big to be easily pocketable. Also, it lacks any form of PIM software out of the box, so it can't be used as a PDA (and even with 3rd party apps, it still lacks any synch capabilities) , which some people will expect from such a device.

But I really like this device - I really like it. I already miss it (I will have to send it back tomorrow)
It does what it is meant to do very well, and due the openness of its platform it's a geeks wet dream
For some usage scenarios, I could even imagine that it could replace a 2nd or 3rd laptop in a household (maybe in conjunction with a Bluetooth keyboard).. and few addiional programs like AbiWord and Gnumeric)...imho it's the UMPC done right

Hopefully you enjoyed the review (my first!), and if you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!

chlettn

Jo, thanks!

Yeah, Canola is simply amazing - and UPnP worked like a charm too

Aidan

chlettn, wow,that is some review I must say,very well done for your hard work and effort.I'm definatley picking this up sometime in the future,you've done a great job convincing me,even if that wasn't your intention

chlettn

Aidan James, thanks!

I've never been a fan of a "multi-gadget" approach until about 2 weeks ago - I've always wanted to have one device to do it all, but I have to say that a combo like the N76 (or another small phone) and the N800 got very attractive during the test...

Shivam

Ooooh, great detail, nice find.

amd

wow, it's really great review.

chlettn

As I've written before, this is an independant project, and with all the animations and so, I think it looks very nice imho (and there are themes too if you dislike the standard theme), especially considering that it is a free open source project...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v0Mu-LlZ84 a video by ThoughtFix of Canola in action.

TheAncientMariner

chlettn, great review! nicely done, you should do more.

KARSANOVA

Hi chlettn cool review but I think you made a little mistake i.e N800 comes with BP-5L: Li-Polymer Battery (1500 mAh)..............doesn't it.

chlettn

KARSANOVA, oops - yeah, you're right! Thanks for pointing it out - I'm going to correct lots of small errors when I've got time in the evening (posting and partly writing a review in the middle of the night is not the best idea, I found out )

timrw

chlettn, Thanks for this review. I've been scouring the web for more information about the N800 and you supplied a good deal of intelligence that I haven't seen anywhere else.

chlettn

timrw, thanks a lot!

Jo

i just noticed my post disappear ._.

BrightSpark

chlettn
nice review . if i remember correctly, you had seen the n770 going cheap, so you seemed quite tempted.
i recognise almost all those apps that you've mentioned.

Ac|D

chlettn,great review!

Razer

WOW.Thats one of te Best Review I have seen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!