The Nokia N800 internet tablet landed on my desk today, and having previously tested the N770 I was a little excited to see what had changed and/or improved. More importantly, would I now find a use for the device, when last time around I was left mystified as to how useful it would be for my day-to-day use.

Back to the 800x400 pixel widescreen, and you will not be disappointed, unless you are a fussy bugger like me, as the backlighting is not very even, with noticeable dark patches down the right hand side. To make up for this shortfall, the screen is really nice and sharp, with colours that are really vibrant. The clarity of text is pin-sharp, which is great for viewing websites and emails. The coating on the screen is impressive too, it seemed really scratch resistant. The gloss finish is not what I would say is really high gloss, so reflections are not really a problem. Brightness is adjusted via and on-screen slider, and for most of my tests and use I found the setting to be good around the halfway mark.

Buttons on the top include one for powering the unit on and off, plus a +/- zoom button, which is great when surfing the internet. There is also a full screen button, which does what you would expect, it hides all other on-screen icons and just shows the web page you are viewing. If you are playing a video back, then this same button hides all the Media Player controls and plays the video full-screen.

Playing back some media files was also surprisingly good. MP3 files played back really smoothly, with the built-in speakers doing a good job. Other formats supported include AAC, WAV and WMA. Video playback was really clear, though with some content a little jerky, though I put this down to some files being encoded with a higher bit-rate than the N800 was designed for. Overall though the playback was more than acceptable, almost on par with the Sony PSP, but not quite as good an experience. I did notice a considerable improvement when playing back video files from the high-speed Transcend SD Card. We had two versions of SD card to test, an 80x and a 150x card. Both performed admirably, with the 150x showing quick save times and helping the N800 deliver the video files with less stutters. Video formats supported include MPEG-1, MPEG-4, AVI, and H.263. Streaming internet radio (M3U and PLS) is also supported and a nice feature, though I could not seem to set internet radio as a wake up alarm, which would have been great.
You can also view photos on the device (BMP, GUF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF) and the screen really does a grand job. Remembering that this is not a dedicated image viewer, the quality really will impress.