Nokia N810: Touch & Go

In a previous post this unabashed Apple user wrote that he would be passing on the iPod touch and opting instead for the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, sight-unseen. Now, after actually using the thing for about a week, I’m not so sure…

For productivity the N810 beats the iPod touch hands-down — despite my particular unit having a bizarro QWERTZ keypad it was still orders of magnitude more usable than Apple’s virtual stand-in. And though the N810 is not a phone per se, Skype comes pre-installed — just be aware that you won’t be able to use it for video calling with the tablet’s front-mounted camera.

For media consumption there’s less of a clear winner here. The iPod obviously benefits from being a part of the iTunes ecosystem. The N810 makes do playing standard MP3s and streaming audio, notably a slick Last.fm client called Vagalume.

Continuing its proud tradition of Mac support, Nokia has ported its Internet Tablet Video Converter Tool to OS X. Results were okay, but paled in comparison to the specific output requirements for the iPhone & iPod touch. Codec fanatics can see details of the Nokia version here, and compare and contrast to what HandBrake can do here. I’ll just say that the iPhone/touch-friendly video had none of the motion artifacts that I saw on the Nokia.

Where the N810 leaves iPhone & iPod in the dust is the very moment it steps up to don the role of l33t hax0r sidearm. And that’s where this n00b found it the most frustrating.

Elsewhere on the web tablet gurus have displayed their mad Maemo skillz by installing such entirely useless things as the Windows 3.1 OS; truth be told, this guy bricked WOM World’s N810 for an entire weekend almost immediately after grabbing this screen.

Getting the beta of Google’s smartphone OS up and running is proving to be an unofficial litmus test of Nokia tablet mastery. I’m clearly not worthy, but if you think you’ve got what it takes then step on up!

And if not you can live vicariously through my Flickr photo and screen grab set.

Why Is This Man (not) Smiling?

Don’t get me wrong here — I’m thrilled to be an official S60 Ambassador and have been a whore for swag ever since my days on Speaker’s Corner.

But surely you can understand my slight disappointment at opening up my delivery from DHL this week to find my Ambassador’s Welcome Kit instead of the N810 Internet Tablet that Nokia is sending me to trial. Even worse, my faulty assumption caused the actual N810 coming my way to be redirected back to Nokia, a mix-up that’s entirely my fault.

My contacts at Nokia have promised me the very next N810 that becomes available, but it doesn’t look like I’ll get to hold one in my trembling hands until after my birthday. Oh, well…

There’s a Palm in my Nokia!

… And I couldn’t be happier!

Thanks to the magic of virtualization — and the thoughtful folks at Access who’ve released a free Palm (sorry “Garnet”) emulator for Nokia Nseries tablets — my vast library of Treo apps from days gone by can be pressed into service once again.

Downloading the Garnet Virtual Machine couldn’t be easier; I just pointed my tablet’s browser to the Access site and installed it directly from there. The only other necessary step was to dump some .PRC files onto my Nokia’s memory card and voilà — as you can see in the screen grab above, they get automagically loaded into the VM’s launcher.

And this is what the Garnet VM looks like. The Graffiti pad works just as you’d expect, and would make a nice option for stylus input outside the VM, in case anyone from Access was reading this and wanted to license Graffiti to Nokia, hint hint…

HotSyncing to a regular computer is even possible, though just as you’d expect Mac users are left out in the cold on this particular feature. Also, because there is no HotSync app in the VM there is also no place to input your Palm user name, and thus no way to authorize third-party apps and avoid the shareware nags in Astraware Games and the like. There doesn’t seem to be any appreciable performance hit, but there doesn’t seem to be any sound support, either.

Still, the ability to run Palm apps at all instantly makes my N770 tablet twice as useful. Now if I could just find that old copy of Dope Wars…