Nokia N810
Thursday, February 7th, 2008 
Originally uploaded by Tom Raftery
I finally had the chance to play with the Nokia N810 for a while and here’s my appreciation of the device:
The good: ultra portable, ultra connected (wifi, bluetooth, usb2, gps) with a real keyboad and a great 800×480 screen. Geek approved: it runs Linux and is open, so, many apps like Skype, Pidgin or OpenSSH are available. The Ruby and Python language can also be installed. The browser is Mozilla based so web2.0 browsing works.
The bad: the thumb space for the directional pad is a bit limited on top, maybe they should have made the keyboard slide down a few more millimeters. I haven’t had good luck with the gps, it took forever to acquire satellites indoor. I don’t have much experience with gps devices so I don’t know if it is just not very sensitive or if it is normal not to work well indoor.
The ugly: I was anxiously waiting to try the N810 mostly for one application: Google Reader! Even more since I saw a post about Google Gears being ported to the N810. Well I’m sad to say that the experience is not good… Google Reader is very demanding on the browser and on the N810 it is simply unusable. Big big deception. Of course the mobile version works but it is a line-printer type interface ;)
In conclusion it is definitly a device I would get… Hoping the browser performance would get better… Or maybe alternate faster browsers will be available eventually.
