The Nokia N810 review

Posted on April 19, 2008
Filed Under Nokia, Reviews, Symbian, Unboxing

Nokia next lineup, the N810 Internet tablet. Way to go Nokia for thinking differently. The N810 is Nokia third stab at this unique catergorey called internet tablets, the first was was the 770, then the N800 and now the N810

Building on the N800, the N810 has some new tricks up its sleve. The biggest is the addition of a slide out keyboard.

Lets look at some specicifcations first.

Display
High-resolution 4.13″ WVGA display (800 x 480 pixels) with up to 65,000 colors

Processor
TI OMAP 2420, 400Mhz

Memory
DDR RAM 128MB
Flash 256MB

Storage
Up to 2GB internal memory
Support for compatible miniSD and microSD memory cards (with extender).
Supports cards up to 8GB. (SD cards over 2GB must be SDHC compatible.)

Battery: Nokia Battery BP-4L
Continuous usage (display on, wireless LAN active): up to 4 hoursMusic playback: up to 10 hours
Always online time: up to 5 days
Standby time: up to 14 days

[ The N810 unboxing ]
[ The N810 pictures ]

The N810 has some interesting point that I will focus in on.

The internet tablet name and its real usefullness on the intertnet is in question. The N810 reolsution is still somewhat small for a real internet experience. Every thing feels a little to cramed. Rememeber, the
800×400 screen still has to take up space for scroll bars and other navigation elements, so thing get a little tight.

The N810 has wifi and gps and bluetooth, but still no 3g capabilities. Why they left is a big ding against the N810. Sorry but in the US, wifi hotspots, even in downtown Chicago, is still not enough coverage. Teather to a 3g phone is possible, but not what I want, since my phone will burn battery too.

The wifi perforamce is decnet, and connection to my home network saw no issues. Bluetooth transfers worked as expected.

On to the interface. This is where I got pretty disappointed. I had high hopes for the N810, and was let down. Lets put it this way. If you going to have a touch screen device, build an interface that supports the touch screen.

A few points here.

Eveything in the OS is touch enabled, but the OS interface does not take that into account. An example is the scroll bars in the web browser. There too thin to grap with your finger. The N810 does come with a pen, but if your going to offer input via touch, why would I use a pen?

There are different themes that can be applied to the OS interface to change its style. Still these do not offer much improvment in the lack of touch designed interfaces.

The touch screen itself if resessed below the frame of the face, so even using your finger to close boxes becomes dfficult.

I belive Nokia intentions were to use the pen as the input tool in addtion to the keyboad. Thats fine, just not what I was expecting for this device.

Overall I find it hard to believe that this catergory is still alive in Nokia. I know there is a strong group of followers for the tablet series and some developmnet of third party applications, just don’t see a market for such a device.

I would like to thank [ Wom Wireless ] for getting me the review N810.