The Nokia N800 rocks. I picked one up two weeks ago and I’m more than happy with it.

The pluses:

  • Great design, great form factor. The build is Nokia quality.
  • Vivid 800×480 display.
  • Great WiFi network connectivity and easy bluetooth phone pairing.
  • Both Opera and Minimo browsers.
  • Several email clients.
  • Canola media player.
  • Cisco VPN client.
  • VNC client (and server!).
  • ssh client (and server!).
  • Remote Desktop Client.
  • UPnP streaming client.
  • Mplayer client.
  • Gizmo Project (VOIP) client.

Try that on your iPhone!  One other positive comment has to be around the user community - both maemo.org and Internet Tablet Talk seem to be busy which bodes well for future development for the platform.

There are minuses but importantly most are software issues (and are hence addressable)

  • No obvious contact/calendar/task list sync app.
  • RSS feed reader usability sucks - no OPML import.
  • Flash video framerate still isn’t quite there, even after installing the latest IT OS 2007.
  • GAIM doesn’t seem to want to install.
  • The virtual bluetooth keyboard (XKbd-BTHID) doesn’t seem to want to run.

The lack of a decent flat rate data plan from my mobile provider (O2) continues to restrict my usage but perhaps that will change in the near future.

Now I’m just waiting for the GPS Navigation Kit to be released…