Playing with the N800

Besides, it's a cool new gadget.

The N800 is, naturally, a Linux-powered device. It has an 800x480 screen, two speakers, and a pop-out camera. There's a headphone jack, a USB port, and two SD memory slots. The device can communicate wirelessly via 802.11 or Bluetooth. Also provided is a stylus which is used for most interaction with the device; there is a built-in storage slot for the stylus which should help to prevent loss, but it's still nice that Nokia thought to provide a spare as well.

On the connectivity side, the N800 developers have done some nice work. On the first boot, the tablet offers to pair with a Bluetooth-capable phone and set up a GPRS connection automatically. Anybody who has been through the process of setting up a Bluetooth/GPRS link on a Linux system knows that there can be a certain amount of pain involved - and that's before trying to get any real work done over such a painfully slow connection. Having GPRS Just Work is a nice bonus. The tablet also handles WiFi connections easily.

After that, however, a new N800 user might well feel at a bit of a loss. The startup screen includes a Google search bar (the usage of which is entirely straightforward), an RSS reader window with no subscribed feeds, a contact manager window (with no contacts, obviously), and a "Discover Tableteer" window which, when "tapped," opens a web browser on a remarkably static and unhelpful Nokia page. Digging through the menus yields a simple email client. Anybody expecting something that feels like a normal Linux system will be disappointed; there's not a whole lot else there. That can be changed, of course; we'll get to application installation shortly.

The tablet comes packaged with a user's manual, in PDF format, in a large number of languages. The user will not encounter this manual until he or she happens to fire up the file manager and look in the right place, however. The "Discover Tableteer" window does not do much to help a beginning user find this useful document.

Text entry is done through a keyboard which appears at the bottom of the screen; individual letters are approximately 2mm square. In practice, the letters are not hard to hit, and, with a bit of practice, one gets good at entering text quickly. Learning the simple gestures to minimize trips to the shift keys helps a lot. There is another mode where the keyboard expands to fill most of the screen; in this mode, the stylus can be put aside and text can be typed directly with the fingers. It works, and can be nice for extended text input, but your fat-fingered editor had a hard time using it as a real QWERTY keyboard. Finally, the tablet does support handwriting recognition, but your editor has not really had a chance to play with that mode yet.

The web browser is the proprietary Opera application. It works reasonably well for the most part, making good use of the limited display space. Your editor has found it to be not entirely stable; it occasionally hangs and must be restarted. Dragging Google maps around does not work. Pages generally render well, though; the browser is good enough for the sort of work one would want to do on a small tablet device.

Your editor tried the Minimo browser as well. It does not seem to render pages as nicely as Opera, based on some quick tests. It is also far less stable; your editor managed to crash it almost immediately. Still, Minimo will stay on the system in the hope that it gets better; your editor would much prefer to run free software on this system.

There is an application manager which can be used to install more software onto the tablet. The bad news is that it has little to offer out of the box. The good news is that one can go to maemo.org to look for a rather wider variety of software goodies for the device. The bad news is that the majority of those applications, as of this writing, say "missing install" and cannot actually be installed onto a tablet. The good news is that there's still quite a few useful tools available. In short order, your editor was able to equip his tablet with essential utilities like xterm and an ssh client.

The really bad news showed up with some of the other interesting packages, such as vim and gnumeric. The application manager will happily download the packages before popping up a window which says:

Such a message would perhaps have been acceptable ten years ago on some distributions. One would not expect to see it on a Debian-based system in 2007. There is no excuse for an "application manager" which is unable to handle dependencies anymore.

The N800 includes a (proprietary) Flash player and a media player as well. As many others have noted, the tablet comes well equipped to handle patent-encumbered formats like MP3 but it cannot play an Ogg file. One can make an argument for minimizing the size of the base system on a resource-limited tablet, but there's no easy way to fill in that gap afterward either. It would appear that installing an Ogg player, at this point in time, would involve downloading the development kit and building the application from source.

In general, the N800 feels a little like an unfinished product. Nokia has created a nice piece of hardware, based (mostly) on free software, and appears to be hoping that the development community will help turn it into a fully capable device. The company's practice of selling tablets to developers at a sharply-reduced price is clearly intended to help make this happen. One can only hope that Nokia succeeds here; the company has done what we really need it to do: made a open, Linux-based device. We certainly have the ability to make it do interesting things from here.