Nokia N800 Internet Tablet

Right now, Nokia's N800 is an awesome geek toy. With the right software, though, it could become the next generation of PDA, combining a fully Internet-enabled, handheld communicator with an OS that makes it easy for developers to port over existing desktop applications.

The N800 is more or less an upgrade to Nokia's 770, a Linux-based "Internet tablet" that was essentially a proof-of-concept product to get Linux geeks excited about programming for handheld devices. It worked. The "Maemo project" for porting libraries over to mobile devices, which started with the 770, has helped the entire open-source mobile world, inspiring and aiding initiatives such as Trolltech's Greenphone and the OpenMoko Neo1973.

Aside from being a standard-bearer for the open-source mobile movement, the N800 is a dandy little tablet. The device connects to the Internet either through 802.11b/g Wi-Fi (I had no problem with both WEP and WPA2-secured networks) or using a Bluetooth mobile phone. At just the right size for a coat pocket, though too big for a pants pocket, the device has a built-in stand that props the tablet up on a table.

The N800's interface is pretty simple. You do most of your interaction with the touch screen, occasionally turning to the five-way cursor pad or the hard Home, Back, and Menu buttons to the left of the display. Above the screen are volume controls and a little button which kicks an application into "full screen" mode, getting rid of the display-hogging application dock. This dock sits on the left and lets you jump to the Web browser, IM/e-mail client, and applications launcher.

Start up the tablet, and you get a view full of Webby widgets including (at your discretion) a clock, Internet radio player, Google search bar, RSS reader, and contacts list. Still, more widget options would be nice. For instance, where are the weather and the sports scores?

I'm happy to say that the onboard 128MB of memory is enough to operate several Web and e-mail windows at once. The N800 doesn't run out of memory all the time the way the 770 does. There are also two SD card slots, one on the bottom and one under the back cover, that support cards of up to 2GB each. These slots, however, are the one sour note in the N800's design: They're not spring-loaded, so it's very difficult to get a card out of the bottom slot once you stick it in. Fortunately, you can use a standard mini-USB cable to transfer files between your PC and the cards stuck in the device, and transfers move at fast USB 2.0 speeds.

The little N800 is oddly addictive. It's much faster and more stable than the 770. The desktop-quality Opera 8 Web browser handles Flash 7 and JavaScript, though Java applets and Ajax extensions seem beyond its ability. Writing e-mails is a pain, though, as your choices are an on-screen keyboard and rather picky handwriting recognition. Nokia got one thing very right here: Along with the typical tiny onscreen keyboard, the n800 also offers a gigantic one you can poke at with your fingers. I avoided the whole issue by using a Think Outside Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard, which worked fine without even requiring drivers.

I found the N800's 4.1-inch, 800-by-480 screen insanely sharp. It will probably be too crisp for some older folks, as text gets really, really small. In addition, there's a cute little pop-out webcam that lets you do video instant-messaging. It's not meant for taking pictures, but I thought I looked decently dashing in snapshots of myself.

Music sounded loud through the built-in speakers, and you can also use standard headphones or wireless Bluetooth headphones, if you so choose. I didn't have a great time streaming music, though. Though the N800 comes with an UpnP application that will stream songs from your PC wirelessly over Wi-Fi, songs tended to pause and rebuffer at inconvenient places. I got about 4 hours' use of the tablet in media playback, which is on a par with what Nokia promises.

Despite packing sophisticated hardware, the N800 lacks all sorts of key software needed to bring the platform into the mainstream. Some of the omissions are typical of open-source–focused projects, but others are totally inexplicable.

Let's start with the inexplicable. There's no way to sync the N800 with a PC or Mac, nor can you sync calendar or contact information. To me, that's unbelievably annoying. Similarly, though you can drag and drop music onto the device via mass-storage mode, it doesn't sync directly with any popular PC music jukeboxes. And, as happens too often with mobile devices, there are no instructions, software, or help provided to figure out how to encode video so it will play on the N800.

The N800's other problems are typical of the Linux world. IM support is, right now, restricted to "open" but less popular systems: Google Talk and Jabber. There's no AIM, MSN, or Yahoo! Messenger.

E-mail is also "open" only—POP3 and IMAP accounts work fine, but there's no Microsoft Exchange support. Want to read or write documents? You can do text and PDF, but not Microsoft Office. Media can be played from MP3 or AAC files, just not DRM'd stuff, and there's no guidance on how to encode video for the device. The N800 does have a cool voice-over-IP program in Gizmo—but most people use Skype.

I've heard the N800 developer community is working on these problems (for instance, porting the truly cross-protocol Gaim client to the N800), and they can't work fast enough, in my opinion. We do live in a world of powerful proprietary corporate standards, and for the N800 to become a truly versatile communicator, it needs to support them. The lack of third-party applications hurts even more because the N800's method of installing apps is so smooth, beautiful, and easy for both users and developers. Users just go to a "Tools" menu to find an "Application Manager" with a list of downloadable apps ready to go from various places on the Net. Developers can work with traditional, desktop-style Debian packages too.

The lack of software puts the N800 in the usual odd spot for an "Internet tablet"—a neat piece of tech with no killer app. It has a far better screen and Web browser than, say, a Palm TX or HP iPAQ rx5915, but those two devices have thousands of programs available for them; the N800 runs just about 15.

For a Linux hacker, the N800 sure is a dreamy device. It's a small, affordable, flexible, stylish, fun mini-Linux PC that works well with a Bluetooth keyboard. But for everyone else, it's a bit of a puzzler, merely a next-generation PDA waiting for the software to make it sing.

Benchmark Test Results
Battery life (max backlight, Wi-Fi on, video playback): 4 hours 3 minutes

Compare the Nokia N800 with several other PDAs, side by side.