As mentioned in my last post, I have a new favourite gadget: the Nokia N800. After a two-week honeymoon, it has officially won me over.
I originally picked it up hoping it would make an ideal e-book reader, and suspecting that it would, instead, turn out to be another amusing but unreliable Linux toy. The price was the actual deciding factor: for whatever reason the N800s have recently dropped considerably in price. In Canada TigerDirect and Dell have been selling them for C$230, and I heard that Buy.com were selling them for US$170 at one point.
What I’ve found is that the N800 is:
a) a great portable movie player
b) a pretty impressive portable web browser
c) the best portable e-book reader that I’ve come across so far
d) an amusing and mostly reliable Linux toy
Its strength as a movie player comes not from the built-in software, which can’t handle video files that aren’t formatted for a small screen, but from the fact that the venerable MPlayer is available as an add-on. Years of tweaking have made MPlayer capable of handling pretty much any video and audio format on pretty much any Linux device.
Out of the box, the N800′s browser is based on Opera 7, which is pretty versatile but was unable to handle my Safari acid test. If you upgrade the N800′s firmware to OS 2008, you’ll get a new browser based on the Mozilla engine. The Mozilla magic makes it able to handle Safari and every other web site that I’ve tried including those that require AJAX support: Gmail, Google Reader, and even Zoho.
I’m so used to mobile browsers automatically opting for the mobile versions of these sites that I was surprised and somewhat bemused to see that the N800′s browser tries to play with the big boys. In fact, it insists on playing with the big boys, since there is no apparent option for having the browser automatically identify itself to web sites as a mobile device rather than a PC. Trying to read web pages formatted for 15″ monitors often isn’t easy on the N800′s 4″ screen. Cranking up the zoom and turning on the “Fit to Screen” setting makes the text readable but sometimes results in some overlap, as shown in the screenshot on the left. Also, pages that do background loading, like Google Reader, cause the N800 to be noticeably sluggish. However, these minor annoyances aren’t enough to drive me back to the mobile versions of these sites, or to return to using a Pocket PC.
My first impressions of the N800 as an e-book reader were mixed. While it can load even complex Acrobat documents like the digital Popular Science with acceptable speed, it doesn’t natively support documents with any of the DRM-laden “secure” formats typically sold by e-bookstores: Acrobat, Microsoft Reader or Mobipocket. Acrobat and Microsoft Reader are probably a write-off, but fortunately there is an impressive Palm emulator available for the N800, Garnet VM. This emulator is an offshoot of the ongoing effort to move the Palm OS to a Linux platform. While the emulator limits you to the Palm’s native 320×320 resolution (see the screenshot), I was impressed by the fact that it installed and ran Mobipocket flawlessly with DRM-encrypted eBooks. As an unexpected bonus, the VM supports the N800′s D-pad, and it even shares its clipboard with the N800′s OS so that you can paste text back and forth.
Underneath it all is Debian Linux. A command line terminal is included and, unlike the one for the GP2X, is actually usable thanks to the screen resolution and on-screen keyboard. Naturally, with Linux comes a extensive base of open source software, from Nokia’s Maemo repository and plenty of 3rd-party sites.
Despite all this, my Windows Mobile Pocket PC is in no danger of being cast aside for the N800. At half a pound and 5.5 inches the N800 would stretch pretty much any pocket. PIM and office applications are available both in Linux and Palm flavours, but I much prefer Windows Mobile’s built-in apps. Also, I don’t quite trust the N800′s power management enough to rely on it when on-the-go: when it works it’s surprisingly frugal with battery power, but I’ve had a few experiences where the battery drains when not in use.
A couple of weeks have allowed me to only scratch the surface of what the N800 offers. Apparently USB Host support can be enabled with a simple script, and I’ve only dabbled with the other tricks that a usable command line makes possible. I’m sure that I’ll have more to say about the N800 in the future.