It’s been a couple of months since the Nokia N800 became my main handheld squeeze, so I’ve had time to grow accustomed to its charms and come to terms with its limitations. I thought I’d list some the not-so-obvious strengths and weaknesses, for the benefit of anyone considering buying the N800 or its big brother, the N810.

Strengths

  1. Button interface. In addition to the standard 4-way pad that you’ll find on pretty much any handheld gadget, the N800 has several clever buttons that I haven’t come across on other devices:
    i. task switch (roughly the equivalent of a Windows Alt-bar)
    ii. menu bar (for a dropdown menu of options)
    iii. full screen
    iv. zoom in
    v. zoom outThe first 2 buttons are handy because they make it possible to navigate through many applications without touching the stylus. At first I completely ignored the other 3 buttons, partly because they are hidden out of sight on edge of the N800, but mainly because the other handhelds I had used before didn’t have a zoom feature. It turns out that the ability to zoom in on the text you’re readying is pretty useful when you’re peering at a 4″ screen, something which somehow never occurred to me before (or to Microsoft).
  2. E-mail. My e-mail experience with the N800 was a roller coaster. I was delighted to find that its browser supported the full GMail interface, as opposed to the sparse mobile version of GMail used by most PDAs. Unfortunately, it was painfully slow. So I tried pointing the N800’s built-in e-mail client at GMail’s MAPI interface, and was delighted to find that it was much faster. Unfortunately, it has intermittent connection problems with GMail, a known problem which is, as of this date, without a fix. So I tried one of the more popular add-on applications for the N800, an e-mail client named Claws, and I was delighted to find that had solid support for GMail’s flavour of MAPI, including folder synchronization. I’m still delighted — Claws is one of the best e-mail clients that I’ve seen on any platform.
  3. HTML Notes. Like the button interface, this is a simple feature that I didn’t appreciate at first. I was somewhat impressed that the built-in text editor (called Notes) supported simple formatting like fonts and bullet lists, but I avoided using them because I didn’t want my notes to be saved in some oddball file format that couldn’t be opened on my other devices. It took me awhile to realize that the file format it uses is, in fact, HTML — the most widely support file format under the sun. An HTML-based Notepad is a great idea, and yet another feature that I wish my other handhelds supported.

Weaknesses

  1. Power management. This is the opposite situation to HTML Notes — a feature that works great in other handhelds but Nokia somehow managed to screw up. Palm got this right about 10 years ago — a Power button that immediately saves the device’s state and powers it off. I don’t know if Nokia had trouble getting Linux to support this, or they thought they had a better idea, but instead of pressing the power button you simply leave the device alone and it automatically goes to sleep. Unfortunately, it’s a restless sleeper, and when you turn it back on hours later you often find the battery has been drained.
  2. Video. Right now, the N800 can’t handle most video files without using a PC to transcode them to a proper resolution and frame rate. The built-in media player is hopelessly slow with any video file that hasn’t been transcoded, and (to my surprise) the usually reliable MPlayer stutters its way through many video files. This problem may simply be an unavoidable downside of the N800’s generous 800×400 screen resolution. For me this isn’t a big deal — Nokia provides a transcoder that makes the process relatively quick and easy — but some might find the process cumbersome.
  3. Application support. The problem here is actually the new operating system that is available for the N800 (and standard on the N810), OS 2008. It isn’t binary compatible with its predecessor, OS 2007, and a lot of applications either haven’t been ported to the new OS or haven’t been as well tweaked. This problem will presumably be solved over the next few months.
  4. On screen keyboard. This is another simple thing that works fine on all my other handheld gadgets, yet Nokia managed to mess up. The keyboard only pops up when you are in an input field, meaning you can’t use keyboard shortcuts for things like selecting files or copying text. What’s worse, the standard keyboard shortcuts wouldn’t be usable anyway, since there is no Ctrl key.

The bottom line — I still love it, warts and all. I’m amazed that for $200 the N800 gives you a bundle of features that costs $500 in smartphones and PDAs . (The N810 adds GPS and a slideout keyboard, but at steeper cost). My notebook PC now goes for weeks without being used at home. If it wasn’t for the power management problems I’d consider ditching my Windows Mobile device for the N800 too. Kiitos, Nokia!