Nokia's N810 internet tablet has a slide-out keyboard and GPS for navigation. Is that all it needs to keep us from breaking out our laptops and smartphones?
Review summary of the Nokia N810:
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 The Nokia N810 gets a lot right, it's true. You won't find a better Web browser on a device this small, but it still isn't a perfect experience, thanks to lagging performance. Calling with Skype is great, but you'll still need a cell phone for tethering on the road, and doesn't that defeat the purpose? The maps program is great, but GPS performance and underpowered processing couldn't keep up. Also, though the device is plenty capable, it doesn't come with many apps to harness its robust system's potential. We'd like to say all it needs is a cellular radio, but really this device needs to be faster in every way. We'd like to see apps pop open instantly, and YouTube videos play smoothly. And we'd happily trade the keyboard for these improvements, and go back to typing directly on the screen. Release: November 2007. Price: $420.
Pros: Great calling, surprisingly, with Skype. Best internet browser for any device this size. Lots of internal memory and an external slot. Fantastic screen, especially for videos.
Cons: Buggy. Doesn't come with much pre-loaded software. Slide-out keyboard isn't better than previous, onscreen option. Did we mention buggy? GPS doesn't live up to expectations.
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Full Nokia N810 Review:
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Design - Good
The Nokia N810 seems to update the design of the N800 only slightly, until you slide out the full QWERTY keyboard underneath. The device is simple and elegant, with a touchscreen just over 4-inches diagonally, and only a couple buttons on the face, a "Swap" and "Back" key. Along with the keyboard, the device also hides a 5-way navigation button and a menu key under the slide, though we think both of those keys deserve a place front and center on the face. We did like the new "Zoom" button up top, the difficulty accessing zoom features was a complaint we had with the N800.
The screen is delightful. It is very bright and colorful, as we've come to expect with Nokia's N-Series devices. At 800 by 480 pixels, it's better than VGA resolution, and makes for great video viewing, especially in widescreen. There is also enough room to spread some widgets around the home screen, and still keep a sidebar and a toolbar for open apps and dedicated menus. We'd still like to see it extend farther to the edges of the device, but it gave us plenty of room nonetheless.
The keyboard is another story. The keys are very stiff, with little travel, and are stuck fairly close together for such a large device. Also, they are not discrete keys, and even with a bit of rounding on the top, felt very flat and crammed together. The top row also butts up against the cliff of the slide, which made typing more difficult. Surprisingly, we wish Nokia would have just stuck with the onscreen keyboard from the N800. That was much more pleasant to use. It was larger, and we liked that it knew when we were using our stylus or a finger.
Calling - Very good
Did the N810 get a cellular radio in this generation? No, but it does come with a Skype client, and that, along with Google's Talk client, is what we used to test internet calling. Skype worked very nicely. We had trouble installing it at first, but once it was on our test device, it was a great calling option. Over a Wi-Fi network or using our Palm Treo 755p as a Bluetooth DUN modem, Skype calls sounded very good. Whether we used the microphone and speakers or the included headset with mic, calls sounded better than we'd expect from a cell phone. Perhaps an interesting option for this phone would be to include a SIM slot for 3G data, but retain the Skype client for VoIP calling, because this combo seems to work nicely.
Messaging - Good
The e-mail client on the phone was a little bland, but still plenty capable. We loaded our Gmail as an IMAP account, and it picked up messages very quickly as they came in. Unfortunately, we had some trouble getting messages to load, and often the device would endlessly try to download the message body without success. A restart fixed the problem, though.
Because this isn't a phone, there is no built-in SMS and MMS client, which is a shame, though with it's Linux underpinnings we wouldn't be surprised to hear such an app is in the wild. We also would have liked a good instant messenger client, with AIM, Yahoo and MSN support, but the only apps we found easily supported Jabber and Google Talk, which we don’t and rarely use, respectively.
But the most troublesome aspect of messaging on the N810 is the keyboard. The keys feel more like those you'd expect to find on a nice smartphone, like an HTC Mogul, than an internet tablet. We wanted real, nice keys, with some width and travel, and a surface that was easy to grip with our fingertips. The N810 keys don't live up to our expectations, and as we said earlier, we much preferred the onscreen keyboard for typing, though it didn't afford us a view of our whole messaging screen. That onscreen keyboard is available on the N810 when the slide is closed, but it seems a waste.
Multimedia - Good
The multimedia experience is mostly unchanged from the Nokia N800, and unfortunately it wasn't so great to begin with. The audio and video players are robust and can handle a nice range of file formats, but working with the players wasn't so pleasant. For music, we synchronized the external miniSD card we popped into the device with Windows Media Player, since Nokia doesn't bundle a media transfer app. This took a couple minutes to transfer one album of WMA tracks to the N810 via the microUSB cable (included), which seemed like a long time to us. Then, the music player didn't find our tracks automatically. To get our music to play, we had to use the N810's file manager to move our tracks to the included memory. After all our applications, there was only about 350MB of space left on the device, but that was enough for our tests. Once tracks did play, we were disappointed to find them stripped of album artwork.
Videos were a much better experience, thanks to the N810's wide, crisp screen. Our pre-loaded clips of a Mission Impossible 3 trailer looked quite snazzy on the device, and we wished we had longer movies encoded as .mp4 files. Unfortunately, Nokia doesn't include any software for creating such files, and doesn't even point you toward a portal for movie downloads. This is a missed opportunity, and one that Archos was wise to pick up on launching their fifth generation devices.
Web browsing - Very good
We couldn't find a Web site that the N810 couldn't handle. The browser has even been improved since the last generation of the device. While the N800 had trouble using Flickr's Batch Organize features, the N810 handled everything Flickr could throw at it, and ate up YouTube and MySpace for lunch. Though the device doesn't come with any productivity software, we were pleased to find that Google Docs opened as smoothly on the N810 as it does on our desktop.
Unfortunately, once videos start loading, and the pages get crowded, the experience changes a bit. The device can hardly keep up with rich media sites, like the Major League Baseball homepage, and stuttered quite a bit navigating these pages. At first, YouTube videos seemed to run smoothly, but if we opened more than one app at a time, or if our connection lagged a bit, we got a lot of stops and starts, and a very low framerate. Better than its predecessor by a nice margin, but the N810 still can't match a desktop PC for browsing, or even a UMPC, for that matter.
GPS - Good
GPS is one of the major enhancements on the N810, but we found the navigation experience to be disappointing. As with the Web browser, a crowded navigation window caused quite a slowdown, and with all of the Points of Interest that pop up here in Lower Manhattan, the window often got plenty crowded. Occasionally, the map program simply quit, and the device asked us to close the window. From this point, starting fresh often didn't help, the device needed a restart to run smoothly again. When we dropped the number of POIs, things got better, but it still wasn't great.
Ironically, maps loaded just fine over Wi-Fi, but were pretty sluggish over our Bluetooth DUN connection. Since we don't have Wi-Fi in the car, this doesn't bode well. The GPS sensor took a very long time to find us. It was cool watching the satellites pile up in the satellite viewer, but even with a few apparently in sight, it took almost 10 minutes to find our current location on our initial run. From there, the device tracked us well.
Nokia's Maps program looks great, and it's navigation was spot on, but with the performance problems, we don't see this device replacing standalone Portable Navigation Devices (PNDs) any time soon. This is too bad, because that's exactly the market the N810 should be gunning for. With it's wide screen and internet options, it could have been a great navigational tool.
Odds and ends
The Nokia N810 seemed to be a buggy device. Our first review unit had trouble installing Skype, and our second came with the app preloaded. The first time we plugged it into our laptops, both the internal card and our external miniSD card showed up fine, but we got a "No Disk" type of error from Windows that popped up continually until we unplugged and restarted everything.
And speaking of Windows, some of the issues we had were decidedly Windows-like. Some times clicks simply did not register, even though we got audible feedback from the device. This was especially true when we left the stylus in its bay and tried to use our fingers. Windows usually didn't close on the first try, especially if the processor was working hard on some task, and we had to click the "X" box multiple times. The worst part, though, was the crashes. Often we had to close out of programs that became unresponsive, usually the Maps program or the Web browser, and a few times we found it necessary to restart the device entirely when an app simply wouldn't open, as happened with the Mail app a couple times during our tests. A Linux device should exude reliability and stability, especially if this device is trying to steal market share from the Windows-based UMPC market, which is already a fairly small crowd.
Price and availability
The Nokia N810 is available now and can be found online for as little as $420.
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