PlexNex: Nokia N800 Tablet: Nice, but Not Ready

The Nokia N800 opens the Internet (ta)Blet category with a durable impression. We'll see soon if the team and the developer community can mend the short-comings quickly.

Nokia N800

The Good

Honoring the look & feel of an early 1970s Japanese transistor radio (rather than ephemeral retro, to me this is good, classic design -- snide, tasty & attractive), the N800 has a nice impressive heft. I would have quite often dropped a lighter device; this one gravitates into the palm while I tap on the screen. Fit & finish is not Bentley Turbo but still very nice...a solid Nissan (no hand-stitched leather, but leather nonetheless); and it feels a higher-quality device than its price-tag would superficially suggest.

Graphics resolution & window-render is lovely. There's a nice solid audible crunchy click when you execute screen touches (either with your fingernail or the encased stylus).

Removable mini SD | SD | micro SD storage options. Even iPod doesn't have removable storage.

My favorite thing...

Audio quality is WAY GOOD (with a good set of headphones). Nokia have not skimped on the digital-to-analog converter chip in the device. A major smart move to make this thing a constant companion (versus clutter in the wasteland (drawer)-of-boring-devices).

Podcasts and Internet radio streams -- I tuned in hi-res to my favorite station (WKCR FM, New York) and was hearing Phil Schaap doing his immortal program "Bird Flight" live from my hotel in England. This is when you recognize how the 'Net shrinks the world.

Supported file formats:

Audio: AAC, AMR, MP2, MP3, RA (Real Audio), WAV, WMA
Image: BMP, GIF, ICO, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, SVG-tiny
Video: 3GP, AVI, H.263, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, RV (Real Video)
Internet radio playlists: M3U, PLS
Documents: PDF
Web: HTML, Flash 7

The Bad

The horror is that Opera doesn't render the style-sheet of my Gmail Inbox correctly, making columns too narrow; result is that text wraps too much and e-mail is difficult to scan. For me this is a deal killer: (I was going to buy the N800 but will now wait).

Some software not ready yet: Skype, in particular! [Note: back in January, Skype was expected "by midyear".] And I want to use this as a recording device for interviews.

One or two crashes within 15 hours of use (not bad actually).

Only one or two menu intuition issues; I was otherwise up and running very easily. Programming bookmarks is the usual headache of running a new system in.

The form-factor is very small and, overall, difficult for me to read (I'm a 4-eyes and had to squint). This rules out heavy use for me, so the device as an e-mailer & browser gets relegated permanently as a complementary device. (It may be that anyway even for the non-visually-impaired.) For example, it was tiring for me to read a long e-mail.

WiFi access is not easy to achieve for me away from my office (in New York): it's not San Francisco where public WiFi access is becoming ubiquitous and I don't have a T-Mobile or Verizon account for hanging at Starbucks. And WiFi is a costly extra in hotels -- which is a major pain in the ass. So accessing the 'Net with N800 remains touch & go. In certain places and in Scandinavia, such problems are minimal.

The Ugly

The Nokia N800 will be a really nice Web | Mail | VoIP phone | MP3 player when it's ready and when Opera gets its shit together. That's not yet, but I will be among those who will continue to use my great old one-note cell phone until my killer apps appear complete.

While playing well in the open source press, the fact that N800 is Linux is nice for Nokia's development costs (low) and time-to-market (fast) but irrelevant to the user since the developers have done such nice integration work with the software. (If the integration were poor, then it would have been a negative story.)

The no-muss no-fuss "(ta)Blet" for under $400 -- as a category -- is a revelation; and the Nokia N800 defines the space. Sony & Microsoft are foolish putting Vista in a small device like the OQO (starting at $1,499) or the Sony VGN-UX280P Micro PC ($1,899) -- it's feature over-kill for something you twiddle with your thumbs, and the market will reject them on difficulty of use (being overwhelmed by small buttons) and cost.

Comments

Opera:
Yes, even on my PC, Opera renders GMail weird.

Hotel WiFi:
Marriott hotels generally have it included in the rate. Plus their frequent-guest program is pretty good.

Posted by: W^L+ | April 26, 2007 at 02:20 PM

Have you seen the latest update? Skype was indeed available by midyear (barely), and there has also been a beta release of a Mozilla-based browser called microb which has been a lifesaver for me: it works with my Wells Fargo bank account!

The device is getting better and better... obviously destined to be a Long tail success. ;)

Posted by: Texrat | August 10, 2007 at 07:36 AM