Nokia N800 Internet Tablet

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Nokia N800 Internet Tablet

Editor's note: Ratings have been adjusted with respect to newer devices that have entered the market.

We received a fair amount of criticism when we gave the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet a mediocre 4.9 rating, as a lot of you found it to be a very useful and solid device. Perhaps we missed something or perhaps it was because we reviewed one of the early units sans software upgrade, but we just weren't that impressed. However, as Nokia unveiled its next-generation model, the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, at the Consumer Electronics Show 2007, we were pretty excited about what we saw and were ready to give it another try. We're glad we did. With the understanding that it's not meant to be a replacement for your PDA, smart phone, or laptop, the N800 is perfect for on-the-go Web browsing with its travel-friendly design and its excellent browser. It's perfect for reading the latest news at the local coffee shop, without having to fire up the ol' laptop or struggling with a cell phone's poky browser. The N800 also features some nice upgrades, including a sleeker design than its predecessor, a built-in Webcam, and improved performance. Will it appeal to a mass audience? Probably not. We think it's still a bit too geeky and relies on the presumption that you have Wi-Fi access. However, for gadget hounds and techies, the N800 is a fun and useful device for those who want to stay connected. The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet is available now, for around $399.

A slimmed-down design
The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet underwent a nice little makeover, lightening up its once all-black casing with a sleek silver face and shaving off a bit of thickness and weight (2.9x5.7x0.5 inches; 7.2 ounces). The device is slim enough to easily slip into your bag, but it's probably too big to comfortably fit it into a pants pocket. Holding it in your hand, you might notice it's a little top heavy for reasons we'll explain a bit later, but it has a solid construction. Also, if you get tired of holding it, Nokia has built in a convenient kickstand so you can prop it up on your desk. It's located on the bottom of the device, and all you have to do is pull it out toward the back.

With the new kickstand, you can display the Nokia N800 for all to envy.

On front of the Nokia N800, there is a gorgeous, wide-screen, 65,000-color display. It has a 800x480 resolution that produces vibrant colors and sharp text and images; it's also a touch screen so you can input information with your fingertips or the included stylus. We noticed it had a tendency to hold smudges, but it was readable in sunlight. And although Nokia got rid of the hard cover case found on the Nokia 770, the company does include a soft protective case to save the N800's screen from scratches. The home screen itself can be a bit confusing for first-time users of its various subsections and icons that aren't clearly identified. We recommend you give the user's guide a quick read before using the device. Once you get the lay of the land, you can edit the layout of the home screen to create a scheme that works best for you, and the background image and theme can be changed.

The Nokia N800 has an absolutely gorgeous screen. We were less in love with the cramped controls to its left.

If you want to forgo the touch screen navigation, you can defer to the Nokia N800's tactile controls. To the left of the screen, there is a four-way directional keypad with a center OK button, an Escape key, a Menu button, and a Swap key that lets you switch between different applications. The last three controls are hard to press: They're slippery, clumped close together, and set flush with the device's surface, so it takes a conscious effort to hit the right key. Also cramped are the keys on top, which include the buttons to zoom in and out, switch to full-screen mode, and power on and off. They're not only close to each other, they're tiny, so take care when pressing them.

On the left spine is one of the coolest features of the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet: a built-in Webcam for video calls. Just press in the circular section found in the upper edge (thus, the heavier feel up top) and the Webcam will pop out. You can also rotate it 180 degrees to capture different views. The right side holds the stylus, the power connector, and a 3.5mm stereo audio-out jack that accepts standard stereo headphones.

The Nokia N800 has two expansion slots: one on the bottom of the unit beneath the fold-out stand and one behind the battery cover. We were ecstatic with the dual slots and the fact that they can accept cards up to 2GB, but the locations of both are slightly inconvenient in that you have to move parts to access them. What's worse is that there is no spring mechanism to eject the card on the bottom of the device, so you better have some nails, otherwise your SD card might be in there for a long time.

Nokia got rid of the aluminum cover found on the Nokia 770, and they include a soft carrying case with the N800.

Nokia packages the N800 Internet Tablet with the aforementioned soft case, a USB cable, a travel charger, a wired stereo headset, a 128MB Mini SD card with extender, and reference material.

Feature-packed and fancy-free
The allure of the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, of course, is the on-the-go Web access. True, you can do this with a smart phone, a PDA, or a laptop; however, we found the benefits of the N800 are its superior Web browser, speed, and portability. We'll go into these points more later on, but first, some technical logistics. To connect to the Internet you have two choices. You can use the device's integrated Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) to hop onto an access point, or you can pair the N800 with your Bluetooth-enabled phone and use your cellular network. We were able to do both without problems: Our review unit easily found our test access point, and we were also able to pair it with the Nokia N80ie using T-Mobile service.

The Nokia N800 employs the Opera 8 Web browser and supports plug-ins, JavaScript, and Flash 7, so right out of the box it lets you watch videos from such sites as YouTube and Google Video (see Performance for more). The browser itself is outstanding, as it keeps Web pages true to form while optimizing it for the device. You can zoom in or out on pages, and add and manage bookmarks. There's an RSS feed reader onboard that can pull the latest headlines from various news sources at user-defined intervals. As with the 770, adding new feeds is a bit tedious because you have to manually enter or copy and paste your desired URLs into the field. Still, the Web experience on the N800 is a great improvement over the likes of PDAs and smart phones.

To stay connected in other ways, the Nokia N800 has an e-mail client that supports POP3 and IMAP4 accounts. During initial setup, a wizard walks you through the steps for accessing your account. There are also advanced settings so that the device automatically retrieves your messages on a regular basis, plays a sound when new messages arrive, removes messages older than a specified number of days, and so on. For faster communication, the N800 does support instant messaging and comes with Google Talk and Jabber preloaded on the device. At this point, you might be wondering how you input text. Well, there's an onscreen keyboard that you can either peck away at with the stylus, or you can switch to the full-screen keyboard to stretch out your fingers. Alternatively, there's a handwriting recognition mode that lets you write text in a designated area. However, like most handwriting recognition technology, this is a bit awkward and requires a slight learning curve. If you're writing long e-mails, we think your best bet is to invest a Bluetooth accessory keyboard, such as the Nokia Wireless Keyboard or the Think Outside Stowaway Universal Bluetooth keyboard.

Make no mistake, the Nokia N800 is not a cell phone but you can make phone calls using Voice over IP. Again, Google Talk and Jabber are onboard to handle those needs, but Nokia also announced at CES 2007 that it is working with Skype to develop a new mobile Skype experience just for the N800. In addition to all that, the company is beta testing an application called Nokia Internet Call Invitation that allows you to invite contacts to VoIP and video calls via e-mail and IM. Nokia gave, well, we should say they tried to give us a working demo of the feature at CES but never got it to work right, so looks like they have a few bugs to work out.

How cool is this? The N800 has a built-in Webcam!

One of our gripes about the Nokia 770 was the lack of PC synchronization and PIM tools, and it seems this trend mostly continues with the N800. Though it's not meant to be a PDA or smart phone, this additional functionality would have been nice. That said, the beauty of the Nokia N800's open source platform is that it allows developers to create various software programs for the device. A visit to Maemo.org reveals a diverse catalog of downloadable applications, including PIM tools. We're also happy that Nokia added a contacts manager to the device itself. There's room in each entry for multiple phone numbers, e-mail and Web addresses, and a Jabber ID, and you can categorize them by group. Other utilities include a calculator, a clock, and a note and sketch pad. There is a PDF reader but no viewer for Office documents.

The Nokia N800 boasts two expansion slots, but removing the cards takes some effort.

The N800's media player is basic but functional. It supports a number of music and video formats, including AAC, MP3, WAV, AMR, RealAudio, AVI, 3GP, MPEG-4, and others. Unfortunately, there is still no love for WMV or WMA files, which is completely disappointing and may be a turn off for some. On the upside, transferring media to the device is a snap as it's a simple matter of drag and drop. You can also import playlists or create them on the fly, and there's a shuffle function. If you're looking for some fresh tunes, check out the Internet radio. Finally, the Nokia N800 comes with an image viewer and four preloaded games (Chess, Blocks, Mahjong, and Marbles), and you can always download more. All in all, there's 128MB of RAM and 256MB flash memory, boosted by the dual expansion slots, so you can have a vast library of multimedia goodness.

Browse away
Thankfully, the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet is a much better performer than its predecessor, the Nokia 770. Though there was a slight delay when launching the media player, the N800 had snappy performance. We had no problems opening up PDF files or images. As we noted earlier, the Web browsing experience was superior. Not only was there minimal scrolling when viewing entire Web pages, but they also loaded quickly.

Unfortunately, we weren't so keen on the multimedia performance. Music playback through the unit's speakers left much to be desired. Despite adequate volume, tracks sounded tinny and lacked bass, but sound quality was much improved when we plugged in a pair of Shure E3c headphones. Video playback on the N800 bordered on awful. We tried to watch some clips on YouTube, but the picture was jerky and never synchronized with the audio. We also transferred clips from our personal library, which performed better but still, the video was pixilated.

The Nokia N800 is rated for three hours of continuous Web browsing and up to 10 days of standby time. We found these numbers to be generally true, as we squeaked out about four hours of continuous use on a single charge.