Personally, I’ve always had an affinity to Nokia – My past 3 phones itself being the 3310, the 7260 and currently I’m using the 7390 of the L’Amore series.
When I was given the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet on loan for a some weeks thanks to Supriya of Text100, I took to it like fish to water.
At first glance, it’s a really beautiful gadget with its grey blue exterior. Switching it on, it did not take too long to get used to the interface. Even though it uses a linux operating system, it was pretty easy that anyone who knows how to use a handphone would be able to handle it.
Being pocket sized, I find myself carrying this gadget often and especially to events when I could do live microblogging using twitter or plurk.
It has to be clarified though, that the N810 is not a handphone. There is no slot for a sim card. Thus I was perplexed on how to connect to the internet on demand. But I am pretty sure that it was possible, as I’ve seen youtube clips of people being able to connect to gprs maps using the device.
Hence, the only way that I could connect during this review was to rely on wifi connections. But so far it hasn’t been much of a problem for me as I have wireless connection at home and fortunately for me, wiress@sg was rather reliable at the places that I patronized.
And though the N810 is sometimes compared to the popular UMPCs, I feel that it would be like comparing it apples to oranges as they are both in different leagues.
One of the notable part of the N810 is that it shares a developers website where you could download softwares coded by people who uses the maemo platform, which the N810 uses. I love open source! It was a nice touch to be able to find additional softwares like games as well as applications like pidgin so that I was able to chat on msn and gtalk.
However, one bugboo to take note of is that at this point of writing, N810’s latest operating system – The Diablo OS2008does not support Pidgin. Personally, I find it a shame as instant messaging was a function that I use very frequently.
And another thing that bugged me was that although it played youtube videos well, trying to play clips on the more graphics intensive vimeo was laggy, making it uncomfortable to view.
Regardless what I liked best about the N810 was the sound quality. Both the speakers and microphone was excellent as I could hear and speak with no problem at all. Thus it was a joy for me to use the skype function on the N810, which probably what will make me miss the N810 the most.
What would make it better would be if there were a video-conference function in skype. And at this point of time, there is none and I don’t think that there will be in the future.
The device being small, I could just chuck it next to me and lie down comfortably on the bed while talking to Cartcart. His voice was comforting that inevitably, I’d be fast asleep a few minutes into the conversation.
I haven’t been doing any late night skyping anymore since returning the review unit. I’ts not easy to lug my desktop to bed!
Anyways below is a quick overview on the interface as well as its different functions :
An overview of the Nokia N810 from rinaz on Vimeo.
My apologies for the quality of the video. It was 4am at the time of recording and I was plagued with the flu. But such a sexeh voice I have there! 😛
Have you used an internet tablet before? What do you think of it?
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I really like the gadget. I wonder if I can weedle someone into getting it for me.
wah, i want one!
Mintea
Maybe the bf? Or your sisters? Hehehehehe!
Musxart
Did you manage to try it out? *curious*
it looks so good. i tried yours for a few mins. LOL… plus the extra stuffs you showed me on that gadget….. whee..
Looks like a pretty useful tool, although a little on the heavy and bulky side. After I am done with my E61i, I was thinking of either upgrading to E71 (lovely size and tactile feel) or this. Having Skype is a great plus too…
Musxzart
I dont even remember the ‘extra stuff’ … Errm … sounds very suspicious 😛
Walter
Heavy and bulky? Really?
You have to remember though, that the N810 isnt a phone, so you cant make regular phonecalls on that. But its a spiffy internet tablet 🙂
I forgot to mention that if the skype was able to support video conferencing, it’ll be even better still.