New Toy: Nokia N800.
March 29th, 2007
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…
How good is the WLAN? The 9300i always needed to be at least 5 meters to the access point
Is pidgin now working?
WiFi range on the N800 is comparable to, if not better than that of my MacBook.
Pidgin also works fine, it’s available for install via the official maemo repository now…
Thanks for the info!
Btw: I Have a Macbook (1. gen) too, the WLAN is good!
Try that on your iPhone
ok, sure I will.
mooncatventures.blogspot.com
I’m interested in th N800, but I’ve seen several reviews that say the video playback from SD card can be choppy. Is that true?
Jeremy,
It can be choppy, it depends on what bit rate the video stream is encoded at. Very high (HD) quality won’t play back well, but anything encoded at iPod resolutions should be ok…
The good news is they (maemo & community) are constantly working on improving the perf with new OS and media player releases. The new revision of Canola looks promising…
Love the review..
I have only had my N800 about 8 hours so far.
Not a great out of the box toy, but wow with a couple of hours, I can see where this will let me leave the laptop home a lot more…
You show CISCO VPN, care to share which method you went with, I can not seem to get the CISCO GUI to work…
Hey Ryan,
Re Cisco VPN, I just installed the vpnc and vpnc-gui apps via the application manager. It worked perfectly for me then (to access email/servers on my last employers network) but I no longer actively use it since I changed jobs.
What problem are you having? You mention it won’t work, have you configured it with the correct auth credentials?
(you’re right btw, the n800 grows on you, more so with time…)
John.
Hey Michelle,
Don’t be afraid to let us all know how you get on setting all those apps up on your iPhone! I suspect you might not get so far but I’d be delighted to be proven wrong…
John.
CISCO, thanks for the response…
I got it working… I am just really rusty in linux.. had to add the libraryÅ› before the install then the VPN-GUI installed clean…
So far I love this N800 and Op System… Added a bluetooth keyboard and once I finish up some of the shortcut keys I wont need to bring ny laptop everywhere…
I stand by what I said before, this is a really blah system out of the box, but once you add what ÿou¨need, it is pretty impressive.. A Outlook sync would be about the only major thing I can see still missing…