05 March 2007

Nokia N800 First Impressions

I was pleased to receive delivery of the new Nokia N800 Internet tablet on Friday, just before the weekend. It's a sweet device, smaller than I expected, but with some great functionality.

I won't add to the many reviews for it, but rather will focus on the items which I think are missing, and suggestions for improvement.

  • OpenVPN -- this client would be helpful for securing connections over WLAN, since WEP and WPA aren't really secure enough
  • Bluetooth for headsets
  • USB improvements -- when I connect the N800 to the Mac, it doesn't allow browsing of all folders -- it just shows the plug-in media
  • Definitely some sort of calendar/appointments/contacts database, with online synchronization with Gmail
  • A Samba client would be excellent, especially for streaming music from SMB shares
  • Some form of UPnP synchronization with music streaming servers on the local LAN would be nice
  • an app for taking still images or movies
  • the media player definitely needs plugins for codecs. It can't handle the latest MPEG video format used by my Sony camera (although the videos play fine with VLC and Quicktime)
  • the USB device seems to function as a server -- but I wonder if you can add external storage?
  • Connecting from a Macbook with Bluetooth works, but the N800 doesn't seem to have any useful services, to allow browsing or sending files, unlike other Nokia devices such as the N73
  • I'd love to see the N800 able to share an Internet connection (Ethernet) with the Macbook, via WLAN or Bluetooth. It seems to manage this with the Nokia N73 -- this should work, I think, if the Macbook can provide an IP address and routing/NAT, so I suspect this is do-able.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Useful input. Respect.

Some of the points of your list exist already even if not as part of the official software provided by Nokia (i.e. VPN). See http://garage.maemo.org and play with the extra repositories.

Some other can be done but you need to go nowadays onto dirty hacking and patching - definitely not for end user consume.

And I'd say all the rest are either officially planned or most probably in the works somewhere in the community.

You might find interesting this draft roadmap: http://test.maemo.org/support/roadmap.html