More Nokia N800 Thoughts
If you want to get a good overview of the experience of a Nokia N800, watch Ted’s 28 minute video. At the end of it, you’ll see him doing a video call with me. Some points I brought up in the video that are probably worth mentioning:
- Yes, the Nokia N800 runs Linux, not Symbian.
- While it’s hard to tell from the video that Ted took, the Nokia N800 has more than adequate video quality under the circumstances.
- Yes, I’d love to see SightSpeed port their application to the Nokia N800.
- The browser on this thing rocks. It’s not perfect, but it is very usable.
- I think the N800 behaves a bit better than my Symbian-based phones do. This is probably due to the fact I push my phones to their breaking point and then some. The Nokia N800 has a lot more horsepower and resources available to it.
Something that occurred to me earlier today was that I used to have a “pocket” device: an Axim X30. Still have it, but it’s basically been relegated to my gadget box. One reason I stopped using it was the browser on the device didn’t work so well. Getting usable software was another issue. The browser on the Nokia N800 blows away the mobile IE browser.
What seals the deal for me is the UI of this device. I just like it better. It’s not Windows, it’s not exactly a Linux desktop, it’s something different and unique. For me, the true test was handing the device over to my wife. She wanted to look up some movie times online. I whipped out my Nokia N800–she’d never seen it before and wasn’t even phased that I pulled a new gadget on her–and brought up Fandango. She didn’t like the information I was telling her, so she used the device for a few minutes and did a different query and determined, nope, there wasn’t any good kid movies to watch nearby. The only thing I had to show my wife was to “close” the popup windows in the browser. Other than that, she was able to figure it out.
I am really liking this device, the more I use it.
