Nokia 810

Author's product rating:   

Look & Feel
Durability & Robustness
Battery standby time
Value for money
Range of features

Advantages:	Large touch screen, nice quality appearance
Disadvantages:	No office applications, no built - in cellphone

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

The Nokia N810 is an ultra portable, highly attractive executive toy. I think that sums it up quite well because I'm not entirely sure which niche market it has its sights on.

Maybe I'm old school (or skool), but when I think of Nokia I think of great phones, easy texting and possibly even a half-decent camera. So this device confuses me because I keep asking myself... what's it for exactly?

The problem is that it doesn't have a cell phone built-in. It also takes longer than an Asus EEE to start up. Ok so it has a touch-screen display and a nice bracket to make it sit on your desk at a comfortable viewing angle, but do they really expect you to buy this AS WELL AS a bluetooth enabled phone? At around £280 it hardly seems worth it unless you're in the media industry. Yes it comes with a couple of demonstration music video clips and I was impressed by the smooth video and crystal clear sound (don't expect the internal speaker to annoy the neighbours though). Yes it has built in support for streaming radio over wi-fi but why not buy a dab radio instead and save yourself £200? I suppose you could use the mirco SD memory card slot to attempt to use this device to shame iPod owners to change their ways although they might laugh and comment about fools and money being easily parted.

Connectivity can be sourced from a wi-fi lan, a data call or packet data with the latter options presumably requiring the pairing of a bluetooth phone. There don't appear to be any obvious accounting options to keep track of how much data you download or any heavy usage alarms so you could be in for some shocks if you pair a phone up instead of using wi-fi. The best you can do is use the browsers options (magnifying glass at the bottom right) to turn off shockwave, real media playback and image downloads.

The device itself looks like it could have been designed by Apple. The highly polished aluminium case gives it a precision-engineered feel and it is surprisingly heavy for its size (pretty much the same size as any PDA). At the top left corner is a built-in camera yet strangely you have to download either the camera or video camera application to use it. I was not overly impressed with the results either as in the two pictures I took, one turned out extremely grainy due to low light and the other blurry due to lack of stabilisation. Part of the problem is the snapshot button is produced by the software so you have to face the camera towards your subject then hit a small submit-type button on the opposite side of the screen.

The keypad feels small but solid after you slide it out from the main body of the unit. The keys seem to be curved outwards in some sort of ploy to make it easier to hit the right one. Despite this the keypad does not feel particularly friendly to use.

The micro-desktop is also a strange concoction. The taskbar appears down the left edge of the screen with a bunch of status icons at the top right. The main panel displays a choice of applets although at one point I turned on the RSS feed and it overlayed the real player applet making both unreadable. Fortunately this can be fixed by dragging the applets across the screen and dropping them into empty space (if you can do it without accidentally clicking on the applets). What's really strange is if you click on the clock or calendar you are presented with a map of the world yet it doesn't let you change the current time. You can scroll the map around to your hearts content but you're stuck with whatever time is configured until you find your way into the date & time settings of the control panel.

The contacts panel gives you options to add an account for Google talk, Jabber or SIP although I've not yet had a chance to try out my freeworldialup account. Part of the problem is this device doesn't seem to handle wi-fi networks particularly well even if you up the power from 10mW to 100mW in the network settings. At this very instant I have it sitting side by side with an Asus EEE. The EEE is already connected and returning search requests while the N810 is still trying to get connected. It's got to our corporate login page but is taking its time; almost as if Nokia were punishing us for not using an expensive mobile phone tariff to connect. Also strange is the absense of any office productivity applications. Adobe's PDF reader is about all you get pre-installed.

Sliding the keypad shut brings up an on-screen keyboard jobby when you need to enter text which also has words provided by predictive text. You can use the list button (left of the space bar) to switch to handwriting recognition mode although it isn't immediately obvious that you have to click on the button marked "Abc1" if you want to enter a colon or slash character for a web address. Trust me on this one, it's easier to slide out that keypad instead, even if you do need to hold down the function key to access the numerics.

So why exactly does anyone need one of these devices? Well from the pre-installed list of favourite websites it looks as though they want us to have access to facebook, wikipedia and all our spam while out and about and to have our latest fix of RSS-served news wherever we are.

Using the built-in GPS we can even find out where we are and I'm happy to say that the device does come with a basic base map of the UK. I compared this with my Garmin Nuvi and headed outside to test. The N810 managed to get a position fix about twenty seconds faster than the Garmin so maybe that's the point of this device. The operating system is Maemo (a linux distro) which also appears to rely on busybox code. This means Nokia will be forced to release any modified busybox code to the open source community so maybe we will start to see some geocaching applications coming out for this device.

At this point I was struck by a sudden truth. I haven't had to use the horizontal scroll option on any of the pages I've used yet and looking at the browser options reveals I've got the "Fit width to view" option ticked. Ok so the web pages use very small fonts which will make them difficult to read for some people but maybe that's the point of this device. Instead of trying to create a pocket computer they've tried to get a surfing experience which is as close as you can get to using your home computer as possible in a portable device. Suddenly a lightbulb gets switched on somewhere and I surf off over to Youtube. This device has it's faults; but then don't we all? Would I buy one with my own money though? Well I don't think so. I'm still viewing this as an executive toy rather than my required-but-non-existent uber-gadget which would have a built-in cell-phone, a much better camera, more software, more memory and a utility to swap content via the card-slot.

Update 16th July 2008
=================

I've now had a little more time to use this gadget and I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that some websites still require horizontal scrolling to read the content. Also drop down menus can be problematic. The good news is if you go into the application manager, select tools from the list button at the top left of the screen, then select application catalogue, you get a list of package repository sources. Curiously the maemo extras one was disabled but enabling it gives you access to more content (some of which does not seem to work but a lot does). As a result I found a sound recorder utility, an MSX emulator, a ZX spectrum emulator and most importantly a version of wordpress blogging software which at least would enable you to write & store a letter or memo on the move. Although that keypad would rapidly become very irritating if you had to use the numbers 1 & 2 a lot as despite the small size of this thing, it's quite a stretch to press the function button with your left thumb and then press Q or W at the left side of the keyboard to get those numbers. Sadly this device also features a tiny, non-standard USB socket. You do get a data cable to connect to a PC in the box but you're not going to be able to plug in a standard keyboard without an adapter.

I don't have access to a bluetooth keyboard but if there's one that works with this device, try to get the seller to throw one in. I suspect it will make this much more usable and with the flexible viewing angles provided by the support bracket you would effectively have a tiny, two-piece laptop. I'd also suggest a visit to the maemo developers website to keep an eye out for a compatible open office package or at least a basic spreadsheet. Then again as I keep my data on a flash memory stick there's not much chance that I'll be plugging it into that tiny USB socket any time soon.