Nokia N810 Internet Tablet Review

Thanks again to WOM World for the chance to review the N810. It was a wonderful pre-Christmas surprise that I enjoyed greatly.

The Hardware
The N810 is a very slick mobile device, in more ways than one. The design is much improved over the design of the N800. However, the smoothness of the material and the curvaciousness of the tablet make the N810 quite slippery. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the N95-3's rubberized back. Or maybe the N810 and future Internet Tablets could use a similar coating of some non-slip surface.

To jump right into the quirks of the device, the d-pad placement could not have been worse for people used to the 770 or N800 tablets. There should have at least been a secondary mode of navigation to compensate for the keyboard being closed most of the time, which is how I naturally wanted to use it. However, it did force me to have to use the keyboard more. The slide out keyboard is nice, but I had no problems using the virtual keyboard on the other two tablets. So, to me it's more of a waste of space and materials that could have been something more useful, like TV-out functionality, a nice camera, additional memory card slot, or even a larger battery. Speaking of memory cards slots, I think it was a bad move by Nokia to switch from having two SD slots in the N800 to just one MiniSD slot in the N810. I guess GPS and hardware keyboard were more important for this tablet.

The screen is excellent. Very clear and responds to touch quite well. I like that the stylus and top edge buttons on the N810 are more like the 770 this time around. I also really like the micro USB change (now if only we could use it to charge and power the device). The little LED indicator is a cool addition. Makes the device very futuristic looking at night. The speaker placement was a bit odd, but works well enough for such a feature packed tablet. Of course the screen lock switch was a good move, and shows that Nokia is listening.

The Software
The UI is really nice and the 2008 OS is a heck of a lot more responsive. I don't miss the Opera browser at all either. This one never crashed on me even one time while I surfed the web and used other applications. As for the Application Manager, it still doesn't like me for some reason. Had a bit of an issue installing some apps, and never got Canola 2 Beta to install at all. Good thing the built-in media player was superb. I even enjoyed a couple downloaded shows and forgot for a moment that I was watching them on a mobile device.

I really like the theme transparency features and the ability to resize home applets. I notice most apps load much quicker also. Never really got GPS working for some strange reason, but then I didn't have much time to delve into what supposedly is one of the greatest additions to the Internet Tablet line. Overall, the UI is much more finger friendly than ever before, and that's good enough for my needs.

Final Thoughts
The N810 experience is certainly an awesome one, and these tablets are becoming more and more like ultra portable computers than ever. However, I hope Nokia moves more into a direction where hardware keyboards are replaced with a virtual keyboard with haptic feedback and accelerometers are integrated much like the N95. The potential is phenomenal for these Internet Tablets, and I look forward to what Nokia brings next to this fast growing world of mobile computing.