Nokia N800 announced

[Posted January 8, 2007 by corbet]

Nokia has announced the availability of the N800, the much-rumored upgrade of the Linux-based 770 tablet. "Building on the success of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, the Nokia N800 introduces faster performance, full screen finger qwerty keyboard, easier continuous connections through Wi-Fi or via Bluetooth phone, integrated web camera as well as a new elegant design." There is a page with some photos available.

to post comments

Why so small?

Posted Jan 8, 2007 16:10 UTC (Mon) by justme (guest, #19967) [Link] (3 responses)

Since it's already bigger than wallet/blackberry size, why wouldn't they just increase the size to, say, notebook size? Would this make the LCD/touchscreen too expensive, or kill the battery life?

Otherwise, I like where they're going with it.

Why so small?

Posted Jan 8, 2007 16:37 UTC (Mon) by tomsi (subscriber, #2306) [Link]

I guess that both price and battery life will suffer.

Personally, I think the size is about right. It is small enough to take with me, but large enough to be usable. And unlike the UMPC gadgets, it reasonable priced, have longer battery life and is free from windows.

For those of us who have a slimdevices squeezebox, it can be used as a fancy remote - instead of using a normal PC (laptop).

Tom

Why so small?

Posted Jan 8, 2007 17:43 UTC (Mon) by rossburton (subscriber, #7254) [Link]

Because if it were a laptop, it would be a really bad laptop (300MHz ARM, 128M RAM). The point is that this slips into your bag or coat pocket easily and you don't notice (not like the average laptop) so you can carry it around with you.

Also, laptops are not useful in the bath, whereas I've used the 770 + lastexit and Opera to catch up on RSS whilst listening to music. I won't do that with my laptop...

Why so small?

Posted Jan 8, 2007 18:20 UTC (Mon) by broonie (subscriber, #7078) [Link]

It's a surprisingly effective form factor: while it is bigger than a mobile phone or similar it's still easily portable in a pocket (so much easier to carry than a notebook). The win from the additional size is a much bigger screen than you'd get on a phone, giving you web sites rendering much more as they would on a full sized computer than on a constrained device like a mobile phone.

Nokia N800 announced

Posted Jan 8, 2007 17:18 UTC (Mon) by richo123 (guest, #24309) [Link] (5 responses)

Interesting to see the last photo: A geek-like model (?) with a copy of the O'Reilly Linux Kernel book in the background. Linux geeks as a demographic group?

Nokia N800 announced

Posted Jan 8, 2007 17:52 UTC (Mon) by egoforth (subscriber, #2351) [Link] (2 responses)

I wonder what subcontext we can take from the monitor which shows that he is using Internet Explorer and Outlook under Windows XP.

Nokia N800 announced

Posted Jan 8, 2007 21:21 UTC (Mon) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (1 responses)

By the way, look at the joystick in the background. Is it an office? A home office?

He reminds me a sysadmin at one of my previous jobs. That guy administered Linux servers but used only Windows for desktops. He would often stay late to play Half Life over the net. If only he had a better salary, he would buy all the latest and greatest gadgets in existence.

Nokia N800 announced

Posted Jan 9, 2007 9:28 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

It's symbolic image. Advertisors like crap like this.

The image is designed to make your eye sweep around the image, like a swirl. Lots of movement makes it seem more dynamic. Notice the 2nd handheld device in the corner. This is specificly set there to prevent your eye getting trapped by the corner of the image. It sort of 'deflects' your eye up and into the lcd display. A common trick, you need something to prevent the viewer's eye to drift off the table.

It's a big Windows machine with nice LCD and Microsoft's software.

The way his eyes are pointed and his posture indicate that he is shunning the large Windows desktop and is excited about the much smaller Linux/Nokia-based email and web.

You suppose to sit and look at the combination of the joystick, the stack of CDRs and the Linux hacking book.

Probably esigned to appeal to Linux hackers who are going to hoping to further Linux's penitration into the market place. The CDRs indicate new install cdroms. The Windows desktop with Linux hacking book indicate a neophite Linux developer. So this is focused on people who beleive that growth in the Desktop market is important.

(It's known that Nokia is using easy aviability of these devices to attract community, so this advertisement is directed towards people like you)

The joystick indicates fun, but it also very likely to be a phallic symbol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phallic_stage
"The phallic stage is the third of Freud's psychosexual stages, when awareness of and manipulation of the genitals is supposed to be a primary source of pleasure."

That sort of thing is very common. They want the advert to operate just under your consciousness.

Excitement, fun, growth. (think about it)

Nokia N800 announced

Posted Jan 8, 2007 18:28 UTC (Mon) by mces (subscriber, #27668) [Link] (1 responses)

They apparently edited the image of the book in order to remove O'Reilly's name and the small picture box above the title. They also modified the book's title by deleting the words "Understanding the". However, the book image is still easily recognizable. It looks like they spent some time on this small element of the photo...

Nokia N800 announced

Posted Jan 9, 2007 10:16 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Probably a combination of making the title easier to read and avoiding any trademark issues.

Lacking support for open media formats

Posted Jan 8, 2007 18:20 UTC (Mon) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link] (5 responses)

Too bad Nokia's approach is (looking at the specs and first comments from the users) still not to support open media formats like Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Ogg Theora. They have apparently deliberately removed support for those from GStreamer,

I'd like to them to actually stand behind open standards, even if it's in the patent-problematic field of media formats. So nothing spectacular to see here, considering also all the closed parts of the platform.

Of course they're supporting some open source projects which is nice, but the internal conflicts are there: "yes we support open standards and they are very important" (stated by Nokia in many places with regards to eg. telecommunication standards) vs. "no we don't support any open media formats but we do support scrambled-and-play-restricted proprietary formats". Not to mention lobbying done by Nokia for software patents.

Basically it's probably just that Nokia in its current state cannot change its course any faster, and of course the final outcome is not clear. Either this maemo thing has to continue making Nokia a better company (from openness point of view, even taking risks to stand behind something that is believed in), or someone else has to do better than maemo.

Lacking support for open media formats

Posted Jan 9, 2007 4:25 UTC (Tue) by shapr (subscriber, #9077) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a separate gstreamer plugin package that supports Ogg for the Nokia 770. I assume that package can be easily ported to the N800.

I would also like to see built-in support for open formats.

Lacking support for open media formats

Posted Jan 10, 2007 11:34 UTC (Wed) by tajyrink (subscriber, #2750) [Link]

I know there's a plugin, but it doesn't matter much - if it's not supported, it's not supported. I can get Ogg playback on Symbian devices too, but if I purchase hardware I want the vendor to support formats I'm going to use. That's why I'm not buying iPods, either, even though there are working replacement software packages for it. That said, N800 is more for Internet browsing (with closed source browser :) ) than for media playback.

Lacking support for open media formats

Posted Jan 9, 2007 14:47 UTC (Tue) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link] (2 responses)

First: http://maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog2006#head-1b...

Second:

I do not work for Nokia and I don't develop for this device, but I like it very much. I know little about Nokia and only heard about a few of their development activities. From that, I assume the following:

Nokia does not have a clear strategy in this. Nokia experiments, and they do it in a GOOD way.

They have started several projects, some of them open source, put some money into them and now they watch what happens. That's why they support Minimo, KHTML and yet still use Opera, all at the same time. They are betting on several horses.

Hildon and the 770 were an experiment to see if open source developers will pick it up and use it as intended - as a developer playground.

This was successful enough to come up with the N800, which I still do not consider an end-user device.

It is interesting that Nokia considers open source developers important enough to build this high-quality hardware (the 770 is a /very/ good device if you look at its hardware) and all the infrastructure the open source community needs.

You can consider them evil for expecting "us", the community, to work for free. You can consider them good for giving us one of the most interesting and most open Linux devices ever. You can consider Nokia evil because of their stance on software patents (and I do not like that at all). You can consider Nokia good because of their support for several major open source projects.

They experiment. Most likely there are even some groups fighting with each other inside the company. All in all, I like most of what Nokia does in this regard.

And yes, you can easily install OGG for this device.

Most open Linux platform ever

Posted Jan 9, 2007 17:31 UTC (Tue) by mrfredsmoothie (guest, #3100) [Link] (1 responses)

You can consider them evil for expecting "us", the community, to work for free. You can consider them good for giving us one of the most interesting and most open Linux devices ever.

Please.

While I agree that the n770 is nice hardware, and the n800 looks slightly nicer, it's just ridiculous to assert something as assinine as that it is "one of the most open Linux devices ever." There are several software components (like _everything_ to do with battery management except the very low-level support in the kernel) and undocumented hardware components which remain proprietary, which Nokia seems very hesitant to document/release and without which the device functions extremely sub-optimally.

While I remain somewhat hopeful that Nokia will rectify this situation, it's been over a year already and if their apparent pace continues, it'll be quite some time and a whole bunch more hardware releases before any such claim of the "most open Linux device" has even a ring of truth.

Most open Linux platform ever

Posted Jan 9, 2007 17:43 UTC (Tue) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link]

You're right, I was exaggerating.

Nonetheless, Nokia has build a, well, very open device and is keen on building an actual developer community around it. (I used to own a Zaurus and was disappointed by the lack of actual developer support for it.)

Need flash to read about it...

Posted Jan 8, 2007 18:39 UTC (Mon) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] (6 responses)

If I want to read the "full list of Nokia N800 features", I need to install a flash plugin.

Hmm, I think that already tells me that I don't want one of these.

Still, I'm a bit curious about it. Has anyone found any readable feature list?

Need flash to read about it...

Posted Jan 8, 2007 20:54 UTC (Mon) by dpavlin (guest, #9121) [Link]

Direct link to specification: http://web.nseries.com/nseries/v3/media/sections/products...

Need flash to read about it...

Posted Jan 9, 2007 14:07 UTC (Tue) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link] (4 responses)

" If I want to read the "full list of Nokia N800 features", I need to install a flash plugin.

Hmm, I think that already tells me that I don't want one of these."

So, the website uses Flash, and that makes you think that you don't want the device in question? Um, isn't that kinda... you know, dumb? Well, suit for yourself. I have the 770, and I love that thing. The N800 seems to be even better: they fixed every single shortcoming the 770 has.

Need flash to read about it...

Posted Jan 9, 2007 16:55 UTC (Tue) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] (3 responses)

Can you view the N800 web page using your 770?

(i.e. does the web browser on the 770 support a new-enough version of flash to view it?)

Need flash to read about it...

Posted Jan 10, 2007 13:27 UTC (Wed) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link] (2 responses)

I can check when I get back home. I know that I can view the 770 product-page just fine with it, and it uses flash. Youtube doesn't work, however. Youtube does work on the N800.

And what does 770's Flash-support (or lack of it?) have to do with the goodness or the badness of N800? They are two different products. And I still don't understand how flash on a website makes the product worse. Would N800 be better if the product-page didn't use Flash? How so? Would it make it faster? Would it increase the battery-life?

Need flash to read about it...

Posted Jan 10, 2007 17:30 UTC (Wed) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link] (1 responses)

> I still don't understand how flash on a website makes the product worse.
> Would N800 be better if the product-page didn't use Flash?

No, of course not. But I honestly can't read the web page to find out more about it and I don't think many people would buy something like this "blind". [Thanks for the HTML link dpavlin, how did you find that?]

Making a web site accessible is also something that gives me a good impression about a company - pervasive attention to details is something that can be influenced by a corporate culture.

Need flash to read about it...

Posted Jan 11, 2007 9:07 UTC (Thu) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link]

Well, it's not like the Flash-site is the only place where the data is available. Before purchase you would propably read a review or two, and those would most likely mention the specs.

oh, I forgot to test the website with my 770, I was quite busy yesterday

Nokia N800 announced

Posted Jan 8, 2007 22:31 UTC (Mon) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

the look of this thing reminds me very much of old fasioned transistor radios.
http://www.tvhistory.tv/Sony_Transistor_Radio_Exhibit.JPG

(and ipod)
http://www.robertopiecollection.com/Application/images/Bu...

It's the transistor radio of the 21st century compared to the big wifi sets we use as computers. :-)

Small, cheap(ish), low resoulution, but portable.

Nokia N800 announced

Posted Jan 9, 2007 8:05 UTC (Tue) by climent (guest, #7232) [Link]

I believe the look was deliberately selected to be a bit retro. I like it ;)

Nokia N800 announced

Posted Jan 9, 2007 14:31 UTC (Tue) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link] (1 responses)

I own a Nokia 770 and am selling it on ebay right now.

For those who haven't used the 770, here's my own quick review:

Pros:

+ very, very light
+ very, very good screen
+ uses standard Nokia batteries and chargers (a major plus!)
+ runs a Linux distribution very similar to Debian, incl. apt-get (which I like very much)
+ fast enough for most online activities, the recent OS upgrade made it a bit faster, too
+ runs typical scripting languages like Perl and Python
+ fast enough for video playback (using it to watch my DVB recordings while on the subway, playback is OK but should be smoother)

Cons:

- it is quite confusing to find concise information as a user and as a developer, there are several websites, forums, mailing lists, developer sites, but no central info repository and no "how to get you started" guide. I still do not understand which distribution I am using on the device when, why and for what.
- applications have very differing UI philosophies
- the UI has some weird principles and wastes quite a lot of screen estate for overly large UI elements

All in all, it is very useful device for people who know Linux and I plan to replace my 770 with the N800. Some of the new hardware changes are major improvements: SD-Card-Slots, more CPU power, more RAM, a microphone - all very welcome! I would have preferred a GPS receiver over a camera, though.

But some of the new UMPCs are tempting, as well. The Medion RIM 1000 has been announced and looks like a great machine to run Linux on, as well. Comes with DVB receiver and GPS. It's 3 times the weight of the N800, though, and does not use cheap replacement batteries, either.

Nokia N800 announced

Posted Jan 12, 2007 14:44 UTC (Fri) by dufkaf (guest, #10358) [Link]

N770 has microphone too, it is that 'reset hole' next to charger connector. However there is one audio related improvement - N800 has _stereo_ speakers :-)