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From:Nokia
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#308 |
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77 of 81 customers found the following review helpful:
 Very capable Internet device in a small form-factor, 2007-04-08
Let's say you've bought into the notion that "the Internet is the computer." Much of the information you use in your daily life is either online or is accessible from there; you're wired to the max at work and at home, you've got a Wi-Fi equipped laptop, maybe you've also got a BlackBerry or PDA, and in short you are, IP-wise at least, extremely well-connected.
You succumbed to an early case of iPhone lust, but then you started thinking about it: Do you really want your mobile telephone, your iPod, and a small-form Internet tablet all in the same device? What's the battery life going to be like on that bad boy if you're using it for all three purposes? Do you really want a single point of failure for all three functions?
I already have a nice, rugged, compact cellphone that pulls a great signal and, you know, makes and receives phone calls. That's truly all I want out of a cellphone. It does those things just fine.
I doubt that anyone is going to improve, any time soon, on the form factor, the ease of use, or the bang for the buck of Apple's 8GB iPod Nano. Even Apple.
And I certainly don't have a burning desire to get sucked into an expensive monthly data-rate plan on a two-year contract with AT&T as a precondition of spending $500-700 on an iPhone when it comes out.
But, you know, the "Internet device in the small-but-usable" form factor is still very attractive. Cellphone screens are just too small for extended Internet use, but there are times when you don't want to be lugging a laptop around with you.
The clever Finns at Nokia have an answer to this dilemma: the N800 Internet Tablet.
If you're usually near a WiFi hotspot (in New York City, I'm rarely more than a hundred yards from one, and my office and apartment building are thoroughly saturated) this might be the device of your dreams.
The N800 runs an embedded variant of Linux (really), gets its Internet access via WiFi (although it's also capable of matching up with your Bluetooth-enabled cellphone), weighs about seven ounces, is roughly three inches tall by six wide, and half an inch thick. and has a nice, bright wide screen for your webular activities, plus a built-in webcam for still pictures and videoconferencing.
To put the size specs in perspective, it's about half again as big as an Altoids tin, but thinner. :-)
It ships with the Opera web browser; a dedicated RSS reader; e-mail and chat clients; a media player (audio/video) and a host of similar tools; you can also download all kinds of third-party software for it already, including Gizmo (and soon, Skype) if you'd like to use the tablet as a Voice Over IP (VOIP) telephone.
The resolution on the wide, bright touchscreen is an astounding 800 x 480; if you have a pair of middle-aged eyes, built-in switches on the top of the device makes zooming in and out for easier reading a breeze.
Data entry is in three modes: handwriting recognition, which works okay, and two different sizes of virtual keyboard, one that works well with the included stylus, and one that works well with my fat fingertips.
Rated battery life is about four hours of constant use or ten days of standby; in practice, due to Nokia's excellent power management features, I can use the device on and off all day long without recharging, and that's all I really care about.
The only downside, so far: there are very competent text editors, and even a port of the GNU spreadsheet application, but there is currently not any way to edit (or even reliably read) Microsoft Office documents on the N800.
With improved browser support coming, however (a port of Mozilla Minimo is actively in the works) offering access to online applications like Zoho or Google Docs, this problem will soon be solved.
I've had my N800 for about a week now, and after putting it through its paces, it has earned itself a permanent place in the manbag.
And now that the FAA has given the greenlight to WiFi on airplanes (some US carriers may be rolling that out as soon as early 2008), this will be the device that I whip out if I want to get a little work done in my coach seat.
23 of 24 customers found the following review helpful:
Great Tech Gear, 2007-03-20
I am very pleased with my N800. I was thinking about getting a smart phone but for the same price I have a dedicated multimedia and Internet device with much better resolution and text entry. It is priced much cheaper than the UMPCs and this is still more mobile than those.
I am not one for convergence (yet). I would rather have a compact cell phone I don't mind beating up, a tiny MP3 player I can bring to the gym, and for everything else, there is the N800. What it lacks (detailed contact & schedule stuff) I can get from Google, though it would not be available offline.
Browsing is very good (but not excellent). 800x480 resolution is great for the size. Not all web pages will fit of course, but there is an "optimized" view mode that improves how the panes are sized on some pages. Full screen mode is also very good, and if you only have one page open this is the way to go. Wifi connection is always very good on the device.
Surprisingly I use this Internet tablet in offline mode a lot. It is a nice device to play games on. The video is not quite there yet, but they are working on optimizing both Flash video and file playback. As it is, the video is choppy but still pleasing to have available on this device.
Storage options are great. It has two SD slots, and there is already a hobbiest kernel release that adds support for SDHC. I two 4GB cards, one SD, one SDHC and there are 8GB cards out as well.
The real kicker for me is the upcoming GPS kit they are releasing. If the cost is not too much then this will be a great unit to have on the road. It will include a mounting bracket and car charger.
The biggest con is the battery life. You shouldn't need to use this unit more than a few hours at a time though. I switch to offline mode to play games so it usually runs for more than 3-4 hours. If you will be using this for a while on trips, maybe to play video/music, you will need a spare battery. Also, the webcam is really just a novelty. For me it is little more than a show-and-tell feature, others might use it. Right now it is only usable for N800 to N800 communication, but I'm sure someone is unlocking it for casual photography. The image quality is low.
For the geeks out there, you may be happy to hear this runs a modified Debian distro of Linux. While some parts of the system remain proprietary, Nokia has open sourced as much as possible and reused free and open source software wherever possible. There is a very active community surrounding these Internet tablets, releasing a lot of customized software, free for download. Unfortunately this isn't an easy system to tweak for the non-techies, but if all you need is the Nokia-supported updates then there is a very simple Windows updater you can use.
If this fits your lifestyle and gadget needs, it's a great device. Compare to the iPhone, the smart phones, and all those other nifty things. There's something for everyone; for me, this is great product.
1 of 14 customers found the following review helpful:
N800, 2007-03-08
The N800 it is very complete, the only thing that it doesn't do is making calls, besides that, 5 stars
12 of 13 customers found the following review helpful:
Excellect, 2007-03-08
At the very least the n800 is a souped up PMP. The screen is very sharp, and I am unopposed to watching lengthy videos on it. The third-party applications are very cool. I currently have an emulator for the original Nintendo running on it -- play Mario on the road. Canola is a very aesthetically pleasing and functional media player. Perhaps best of all is that the software (standard and third-party) will improve with time, as new releases are made available. I expect one later this week. Oh, I almost forgot about the built-in speakers, which work _very_ well for their size. I'm listening to them now (Bonobo -- Animal Magic). I also use it as an alarm clock. I like waking up in the morning, turning off the alarm, then browsing the web in bed (check weather, email, news, etc). Suh-weet.
A couple points that I'm not so hot on are the following. The email client: this is unwieldy, but it is easy to access webmail via the browser, so this isn't a big problem. Text input is faster than a cell phone, but significantly slower than a full-sized keyboard. The RSS feed-reader could use a tune up, but it works.
In the end the pros greatly outweigh the cons.
13 of 31 customers found the following review helpful:
 Great potential, Spotty instructions, and pretty useless without wifi, 2007-03-02
First of all, if you don't have regular access to WIFI (or a Bluetooth phone, though I understand this is fiddely), don't bother buying this device. Out of the box, it is basically a portable web browser and nothing else.
Second, the instructions which come with the device are a joke. One foldout sheet (how to install the battery ...), and a large book of what looks like generic cautions, warnings, and required regulatory messages in multiple languages (the stuff you don't need). There is a PDF available online though.
Third, after doing several Google searches, I came up with a few "hints" about software available. Perhaps there is a whole hidden internet only available through the device.
A few nitpicking issues.
1) the "external" SD card slot is not spring loaded. I had to use a knife to get the SD card out. So much for using the device as a high-res photo viewer to view pictures just taken with a digital camera.
2) the instructions didn't even mention the internal SD card, but you have to take the battery out to get to that slot.
3) the "pen" keyboard is at best awkward. It does try to "guess" what you are typing, perhaps saving you a few pen strokes. The "finger" keyboad takes up most of the screen, and you have to switch between letters and numbers (and the spacebar isn't available on the number keyboard). The handwriting recognition seems to work well with well formed letters. This is not a tool for writing the Great American Novel, or even composing a non-trivial email, unless you have all the time in the world to hunt and peck.
4) You have a choice of USB connection (the sd card(s) appears as drive(s)) or interaction with the device, not both at once. I wish there was some way to to do "USB networking", but there isn't. Transferring data to the device is as slow as transferring data to any flash media.
5) Very noticable start-up lag. This is not an instant-on device.
On the pluses, I downloaded some web pages to the SD card and they looked beautiful. The type is small and readable, and pictures look great!! When I turned it on, it found several WIFI channels in the area - unfortunately none available to me.
If you have WIFI and are looking for a portable web browser, it's a great choice. With the right software (and perhaps an external keyboard), this could be a great PDA, even perhaps a laptop replacement. For now, it's a very expensive web browser.
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