Nokia has had a big turnaround over the past few years. While I have always been a fan of their relatively simple older designs, they had a few year period where nothing they created really caught on. The last few years, however, have brought us usable keypad designs, faster processors, and a lot of listening to the user base. This has afforded them a healthy European marketshare, primary ownership of the most popular smartphone OS in the world (Symbian), and a huge line of multimedia ready products that have some way to communicate with the outside world, and usually, more than one.
I've owned quite a few Nokia products. My first was a 5190, a big GSM cell phone with a simple UI. I found the alternatives to suck a lot. Since then, I had a 3390, an 8190 mini phone, a 3650 smartphone, a 9300 Communicator, and my current phone, the 6682 smartphone. I also managed to snag the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet a year ago, and absolutely loved it. I wrote something up in my personal journal about it. The 770 was a cool little machine. It ran a Debian-based Linux distribution called Maemo, had a version of Opera, could run a lot of cool little apps, and communicated over Bluetooth or 802.11g wireless. The big wow factor was the 4" 800x480 display -- it had the perfect aspect ratio, you could browse most sites with ease, and the fonts were crisp and clear. The downsides of the 770 were simple: 64mb of RAM, 200MHz CPU. It dragged, constantly. Nokia released a new version of the OS for 2006 which improved it greatly, insomuch that it because more than usable, and I carried it everywhere.
For grins, I walked into a CompUSA a few weeks ago during one of their clearance sales, as all but one Washington location is closing for good within the next month. They had two N800's left at the time, and with some begging of my wife, I managed to pick one up for $329 plus tax. It was still better than the $399 new.
There are others who have reviewed this device who are far more eloquent and complete than I am, so I'll just say wow. The N800 has all of the things that made the 770 great: 802.11g, Bluetooth, the 800x480 touchscreen display, built in microphone, headphone jack, storage capability, and then takes it up a few notches. They replaced the single RS-MMC slot with two full size SD slots. With a kernel update, you can now put two 8GB SDHC cards in there for 16GB of total storage. They moved all of the ports to the side of the unit, to make it easier to stand up on its own to play music or passively browse the internet. The unit now comes with stereo speakers, though the size of the unit gives you an idea of the actual usable audio quality. Also, with regard to the 'stand up' functionality, the original 770 came with a separate stand, easily lost by the owner, while the new one has a built in stand that folds out from the sides. A simple 640x480 video camera is now included for video calling and taking really crappy pictures. And, last and probably least, they included FM radio functionality, seemingly for the hell of it.
The biggest set of features for me is the increase in CPU speed and memory. Nokia traded out the old 200 MHz ARM chip with a TI OMAP 2420 CPU at 330 MHz and increased the internal memory to 128mb. The numbers don't sound very high, especially when you compare it to the desktop or laptop in front of you, but it makes a world of difference in a mobile device. The tablet is infinitely more responsive than in the past -- browsing speeds and mail processing are very fast, application installs are quick, and the memory issues I (rarely) ran into have disappeared. There have been few compatibility issues pertaining to the increase of CPU speed and RAM. If anything, the old 770 applications have improved.
My only complaint about the new tablet is how they ended up doing the display. From what I understand, the N800 has to use a brand new display controller on the bus rather than the on-chip controller on the 770. While an external controller can be a good thing, current iterations of the software show that this isn't fully implemented in the video drivers -- video output is slower than on the 770. A theoretical example is video playback -- movie playback performance is only incrementally improved over the 770 as the processor seems to have to share the load of outputting video to the display, where the 770's controller seemed to just take care of it. Nokia released a new revision of the operating system that showed a big improvement in video playback, especially with Flash video, but it is still noticeable. Simple animations seem to really mess with it, it's almost like it has to resync far too often.
All in all, though, this is a solid device that delivers on the promises of a fully capable internet machine. With the hardware they've included, it looks like quite a bit more functionality is possible with a lot of new applications and tweaking to the operating system. I can't wait to see what happens in the next few months.
