First Look
My first reaction taking this thing out of the box was “wow”. It’s small and very solid. Clearly well constructed. All metal – not that cheap chrome-coated plastic that ends up looking shabby after a few months. Turning it on brings another “wow”. The screen is very bright, and extremely pleasant to look at (The resolution is 800×480 which is a great deal more than the iPhone, for example). It comes with a handy vinyl (faux leather) slip case you can use to keep it clean.
What is this thing good for anyway?
The n810 is *not* a phone. It won’t take your SIM card. So, comparisons to the iPhone are interesting although not really applicable. What then, can it do? Well, it has an internet browser (using a mozilla browser); an RSS reader; it has wifi; it has GPS and a mapping program; It has an email application (using POP or IMAP4); a chat program (gtalk, for example); it has (or is supposed to have, in the very near future) Skype; it has a webcam (for video chat); you can watch movies (using most codecs) and listen to music. Basically, it does all the stuff a “smartphone” is supposed to do (except the mobile phone part), a few things your laptop can do, plus GPS.
Internet
Whenever the n810 is able to connect to an unsecured wifi hotspot, it will. Otherwise you have to give it a password, of course. Browsing is reasonably fast. The touch screen allows you to scroll with your finger. You can go totally fullscreen using the button on the top of the device, where there are also buttons to zoom. Zooming works well although it takes up to 5-6 seconds to refresh the screen, which can be annoying. As mentioned before, the screen is very bright, the text is very sharp — web pages are really pleasant to read on this device. Watching Youtube videos works very well also.
Browser Limitations
My principal interest for this device was the possibility that it could play VR panoramas. As it has Flash 9 installed, I was quite sure it would work. Well, it doesn’t. There is also no Java installed on this device at this time, although I am guessing it will be possible to install it sometime soon. Google maps does not work on this device either — it simply does not load at all. I cannot say why, because javascript obviously works. The processor should be able to deal with it, and there is enough RAM. Yahoo maps does work on the device.
GPS and Mapping
This seems to be a basic rule: internal GPS doesn’t work as well as a dedicated bluetooth GPS device. My sirfstar3 bluetooth GPS device (it’s tiny and the battery lasts 16 hours) works great, finds a fix quickly and under challenging conditions (indoors). The internal GPS on the n810 has trouble getting a fix (often taking a few minutes), and doesn’t keep it for long indoors.
The Nokia n810 uses the Nokia mapping program, which seems to be something that Nokia is betting heavily on, as they acquired Navteq last year for $8.1 billion. The program is still buggy, however. The Central Europe map set loads ok, but the eastern US map set for some reason doesn’t show the streets (!) most of the time. Zooming in and out sometimes fixed it. Sometimes doing this I’d see the street appear for an instant after pushing the zoom button, only to see it disappear again. The mapping program itself is meant as a navigation tool, but not an authoring tool. It’s not so easy to set a waypoint, and not possible to create a track. It is not possible to export waypoints (as far as I could tell). So the extremely useful process of geotagging your photos using your GPS track is not possible with this software, which is very frustrating…. especially considering my favorite GPS program, nhGPS, has existed for years, and can do this stuff easily. These are simple problems so it’s very possible that they will be fixed by Nokia in the near future…. I hope!
Skype
Skype is not available yet for the Nokia n810. It will be soon, they say. This is the second exciting aspect of this device (after VR) that I wanted to try. The fact that it isn’t available yet makes me optimistic – it means they’re fine-tuning it to make sure it really works well. Nokia is clearly on our side here, giving us a device that will help people avoid paying the phone companies whever possible 🙂 When skype is available for this device, you’ll hear about it here.
RSS Reader
It works great. It comes with a few RSS feeds to get you started. They’re easy to add. I added the 360 Cities RSS Feed with no problem. It loads fine, images too.
Email
The email application is quite easy to set up. I got my gmail account set up on it within a couple minutes using IMAP. I can see the benefit of having this device for reading emails, but I don’t want to write emails on anything but a full-size keyboard.
Battery
The battery is surprisingly small, but it seems strong enough to power the device for a day of use. I have not watched movies on it all day, but for everything else, I have not managed to drain the battery completely after a day’s use.
Conclusion
The Nokia n810 is a beautifully constructed machine that has an amazing set of features packed into it. It’s far more capable at most things than the desktop computer you had just a few years ago, and it fits in your shirt pocket. It has a few bugs which should be addressed, and a couple features aren’t available quite yet. If you are someone who commutes or is on the move, this thing could be an excellent addition to your pocket: load some web pages and RSS feeds, read your email, make skype calls, do some text chats, watch movies, listen to music, and keep track of where you are. The mapping program needs some more features (people MAKE maps in addition to LOOKING at them!!) and the GPS seems a bit weak. If you want to read and not write so much, then this is your gadget. A 1-10 rating? I’d give it an 8.
