A computer geek's dream machine?

You've probably already seen the specs: 400MHz ARM processor, 128-Meg RAM, Wifi, Blue-tooth, USB (both host & client modes), stereo sound (with speakers), 800x480 touchsceen (that works outdoors too BTW), flip-down mini qwerty keyboard, MiniSDHC slot (when used with an 8-Gig SDHC, it brings the total flash storage to over 10 Gigs), camera & microphone, headphone & microphone jack, and last but not least a GPS receiver.

Note that this list did NOT include functionality as a common mobile phone. A surprising feature omission from a company like Nokia, but I think I understand why. For a hint, look what happened with the otherwise wonderful iPhone.

The N810 has enough power to do Flash-9 stuff, which includes YouTube videos, a Mozilla "gecko" based (think Firefox) web browser that can properly interact with most websites, and the ability to (barely) playback (format converted) full length movies with great picture and sound. Also included is an Email program, and an on-screen rss reader.

The feature that really sold me however is one that hasn't been mentioned yet: A Linux based OS supported by an open source development community and is encouraged by the manufacturer. Let me explain why this is important to the end user:

Proprietary products are typically solely supported by its manufacturer, and with at best a hand full of other 3rd party "partners". This support often costs money if it adds extra functionality. Typically after a couple of years, the manufacturer moves on to newer products and loses interest with the now obsolete product you own. At this point software development, improvements, bug fixes, etc. slow to a halt. Somehow many people think this is okay.

When a product gets released where open source development is allowed, development explodes after the product is released, then accelerates through the "true lifetime" of the product, which is for as long as the product's customers are interested in having it around.

The result is that software is developed for the product that goes far beyond the capabilities that the original manufacturer ever intended for it or ever wanted to support. This support does not cease when the company moves on. Oh yea, and all this is typically free.

This what is happening with the Nokia Internet Tablet series of products. The N810 is simply the latest of this series at the time of this writing.

Here are some examples of what I am talking about:

1) The N810 comes with a decent GPS mapping program, but its creator wants a costly subscription for extra functionality. Meanwhile several other free GPS mapping programs have been written for it, the most popular being Maemo-Mapper, which automatically downloads its maps from the Internet from free sources like OpenStreet, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft. This includes those satellite photos you can get from Google-Earth and Virtual-Earth too! Very cool!

2) The N810 didn't come with any "office" software. Of course you can always use Google Docs if you are connected to the Internet, but you can also grab the free Gnumeric program to work with your Excel spreadsheets, and hopefully soon, they will get Abiword working for your MS-Word documents like they did the earlier Nokia Internet Tablets.

3) Want to view remote desktops? or even export the N810's desktop to a computer? There is free software to do it. View remote X apps too. Also Secure Shell (server & client), VPN, various VoIP phoning, web servers, webcam server and other media servers, NTP time, it's all here free for the downloading. Want "root"? You've got it.

4) There are lots of picture gallery programs, various media players, games including Doom & Quake plus emulators for older "classic" game machines, and various other accessories like calculators, clocks, notepads and system maintenance utilities you can also load up this system with. If this still isn't enough, the free PalmOS emulator then allows you to run a lot of those PalmOS programs too. There is even an old MSDOS emulator. Yes you can load older Windows in the emulator but it will be too slow to be usable.

5) A lot of hardware was made to work on this thing too: USB & Blue-tooth keyboards, Wii game controllers, other GPS devices, a USB video device, other USB storage devices, and some blue-tooth enabled phones provided they will allow it. The "Carman" project has some hardware working with it that reads the OBD-2 data from your car's computer for a nice display.

If this isn't enough, just check back in a few of months on this product because the list will be at least twice as long. Who know what we'll be using these things for then? That is the beauty of open source community development! Starting to get the idea?

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Now for the downside of all this open source stuff: Everything seems to be a work-in-progress. Typically this is what that means to the end user:

1) Little, no, or obsolete documentation on much of the software. Often you can do some intensive searching on the Internet to find what you need to know, other times you'll just have to figure it out on your own, but www.internettablettalk.com is a great resource.

2) Some stuff doesn't work well, is incomplete, crashes a lot, but mostly is just awkward and confusing to use.

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So what this means is that with the N810 you need to have some patience, curiosity, and some free time to fully enjoy this device. A working knowledge of Linux OS, especially Debian based ones helps a lot too.

I'm a self professed Linux geek, so for me this is a dream machine. Your mileage may vary.

Here are some additional random pros and cons on this device that you might have heard elsewhere too:

Web browsing can be sluggish at times [UPDATE: It's much better now with the Diablo OS update], but is said to be better and more complete than with other mobile devices.

Battery life can be short depending on what you are doing. Turn on the GPS, Blue-tooth, power something from USB, and run the screen at full brightness while watching a movie with the sound at full volume and the battery will go down real fast - a couple of hours or so. Use it as an MP3 player with the screen off it it will go for a long time (10 hours maybe), leave it in standby and it will last for days. In general it is much better than a Laptop computer, but not as good as most mobile phones.

The N810 is a little pricey. It is often said you can get an Asus EEE-PC for the same price, but then you can't put one in your pocket.

Repeating again, this thing is not a Phone (unless you normally use Internet based VoIP services). An Apple iPhone is a phone, and has a great user interface. It is a little smaller too, but the iPhone is a closed platform except for mostly UI tweaks. Although it is a target for a lot of hacking, counter measures from Apple are also common.

You can only put a single Mini-SD card in it for storage above the built in 2-gig + 256-Meg internal storage. A Mini-SD is not the same as a regular SD. They claim that you can only put in an 8-Gig card, but I wonder if that is true since the HCSD standard goes much higher than that.

The speakers sound pretty good and loud for what they are (very tiny).

The touch screen seems tough. I haven't been all that careful with it an don't see a scratch on it yet. [Update: I finally did, get a tiny piece of sand under your stylus and leave a tiny scratch. Still I am very satisfied with the durability]

The built-in little stand is handier than you think. Nice touch!

The battery charges slowly, but is faster if the unit is off or in standby [Update: see below].

The USB port is a special "micro USB" connector, so don't lose that adapter cable! You'll need to buy an F-F USB-A turn around adapter too if you want to plug USB client devices into the N810.

I bought a flexible "role-up" full sized USB keyboard for the N810, it seems to work fine. Other people use Bluetooth ones with success.

I tried plugging in my USB DVD burner and it didn't know what to do with it. There seems to be no iso9660 support. This could easily change someday.

Other USB flash memory devices work fine.

The N810 can browse Window's shares (NFS shares too, I'm told) but it can't (yet) serve Windows shares to a network. sFTP works if you install SSH however. You can also plug the USB cable (in client mode) into a computer and the internal 2-Gig and the miniSD card will show up as a USB storage device on your computer.

Although it comes with an Automotive mount for GPS use, this mount is NOT a window mount, but it probably needs to be for best GPS reception. Nokia does sell a good window mount that can be used: HH-12.

The file sizes of the applications for this thing are tiny! I haven't completely figured out how they do it. At first I thought I would have trouble fitting all the apps I downloaded for it into the original 256-Meg root file system flash memory, but I did and still have about 40% of that space free. Amazing!

This thing uses the Debian APT system. This means when you want to add a program, you bring up a special browser that retrieves the latest list of applications from the Internet, you select one you want and it proceeds to automatically download and install it. This same program will un-install programs too. It usually works very well. Unlike true Debian, the software is NOT all at one place. You have to browse the web for "repositories", then click to install them in your APT-Sources-List so that they will show up in the special browser. This can get messy. Fortunately this whole process is mostly automated by this special program package browser so it is actually very easy. Currently the package browser doesn't give many hints about what is going on other than stalling out when something goes wrong, so many times I've had to run the command-line 'apt' program manually to figure out what the problem was.

The overall quality (and weight) of this thing seems high. Hopefully that results in years of reliable service.

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I've only owned this thing for a couple of weeks now and feel accomplished in learning this much about it. There is much more to learn and perhaps a few things reported above are inaccurate. Certainly in time this review should become obsolete so if you are reading this a few years from when I wrote it, you should verify my findings because things are likely to be much improved by then.

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[UPDATE] So Now I've had this thing for a little over a month. Since this time a lot has changed:

1) The N810 now has a WiMax version that was designed to work with Sprint's network.

2) The N810 just got a minor OS upgrade. It broke a few 3rd party party software titles, but most of it is working again now. The good news is that future upgrades will be a lot easier, also both web browsing and movie playing (especially the Flash-9 YouTube stuff) works a lot better. It' very nice actually. GPS locks are faster with AGPS capability too.

3) Apple released the new iPhone. These things now have GPS's on them too. They also improved the previously inferior Internet access on them. Although the new price of $200 is being advertised as a price reduction, when tethered with the more expensive service contract, it actually costs $50 more than the old iPhone/service-contract combination. Still, it is a very nice and competitive product.

4) My earlier battery-charging issue is much better too. I had previously been using an aftermarket charger designed for other Nokia N series phones. It wasn't providing enough current for speedy charging. With the factory charger, My charge rate compares with the advertised 2-hour time published from Nokia.

Finally I would like to add the "open-source" advantages does seem to be working well here. Hardly a day goes by without there being some sort of update/improvement showing up as a free download. Hardly a week goes by without there being some brand new (and free) program that is made available.