Nokia N800 Internet Tablet

The N800 is an evolutionary step above the older model, the N770. It features a (rumored, faster 320 Mhz ) TI CPU, two SD slots, 128 MB RAM, 256 MB flash storage, 4.1" 800x480 touchscreen, WiFi, Bluetooth, 3.5mm headphones jack and mini-USB port. On the top of the device you will find the zoom buttons, the fullscreen on/off button and the microphone while on the front of the device there is a 5-way joypad and 3 additional buttons: close application/window, application's menu and task-switch. On the left side there is a retractable VGA video-call camera. Below the device you will find a very practical kickstand, which is very nice if you are using your N800 to watch movies.

The screen has seen an upgrade is terms of quality. It still has the same res/size, but the screen is more clear and easy to read. Upgrade has seen the RAM (128 MBs from 64 MBs), while there is now easy to use swap support to the SD card when running out of memory (e.g. on some huge web pages). The speed of the device is also higher than in the N770, everything feels a bit faster now. The two SD slots (reportedly) support the SDHC protocol now and this means that you should be able to go up to 16 GBs of flash storage using the N800.

The battery life is pretty good too: it reportedly manages 10 days in always-ON standby (the device is actually ON, and with only a few hardware elements OFF), and it managed here about 5 hours of WiFi usage (screen in low backlight mode). It is my estimation (I only had the device for just a day and a half so far) that having the Gizmo or GTalk clients ON and leaving WiFi ON while in standby mode, you should get about 4-5 days of battery life which is better than the second best such device, the Nokia E61. My Nokia E61 has GSM OFF as I use it exclusively as a SIP VoIP device with GizmoProject and manages about 3-4 days of battery life (with WiFi OFF and GSM ON it can last 15 days as the E61 has one of the best battery lives out there, but WiFi is by design more power hungry than the GSM or Bluetooth antennas).

The software has seen an upgrade too, including Opera that now has Macromedia Flash support. Unfortunately, both YouTube's and Google's Flash videos are unwatchable because of the lower CPU power, and this is really a shame, because I bet the biggest reason why Nokia had to work with Adobe and ask them and port Flash to the N800 is because of YouTube... (update: speed is better in latest firmware) You can use a Windows server running Orb to stream Flash video in the .ram format which it plays back fine, but this is not easy to do and can not be expected from normal users to do so. Opera crashed twice while using Hotmail, but other than that it worked admirably.