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A Newer Toy(!!)

2007.10.24

My Nokia N800 showed up today.  I called NCIX yesterday afternoon to see if they could give me an ETA.  They couldn't, but somehow it was at my door before noon today.  Anyway, it was two weeks since my order, but when I ordered I knew it would be a week or two.

I've only had a couple of hours to play with it but it's already mostly setup.  I've installed GPE, MP3Tunes, the FM tuner, MediaPlayer, an SSH server, Gnumeric and more.  I've transfered my GPE data across from the 770 and I'm already almost done with the 770.

My initial impression of the N800 is that it's just about perfect for me.  The processor is quite a bit faster, the stand is perfect, the radio works well (though I'd missed the part about the headphones working as antenna.  Annoying but kinda neat.  The design is excellent, though I liked the buttons on the 770 more.  I think I will miss the 770's cover a bit, it was very sturdy but must have cost Nokia a few pennies to include.  If I could choose between the cover or the N800's stand, I'd take the stand. 

The speakers are much improved.  I'll likely use them for listening to tunes in the kitchen.  Not spectacular, but not worse than the MacBook speakers.  (Draw from that what you will.)

The only superfluous item for me is the rather lame webcam built into the N800.  I don't really need or want a camera in either this or my MacBook.  Such is life.  Maybe I'm just getting old.

Anyway, where the 770 always felt like it was struggling to complete every task, the N800 seems to be adequately up to the job.  It's still not as fast as the dual core MacBook with 2GB of RAM, but I wouldn't expect it to be.  It's quite peppy and is fast enough for it's job.

The Nokia 770 had recently completely supplanted my Palm collection.  The BlackBerry is still a faster input device, but the Nokia is niftier, geekier and has no over-priced data plan.  I still think that an old BlackBerry is the best straight-up PDA option on the market, but the Nokia Inernet Tablet is what my PDAs have moved to.

I was very excited to get the Nokia N800.  So far, this excitement seems justified.  It's an incredibly cool little device, and a worthy successor to the excellent Nokia 770.  I look forward to future developments such as ITOS 2008, but will wait until GPE is ported.