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| Home >> Handheld & PDA Reviews: Nokia N810 Portable Internet Tablet | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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User Submitted Nokia N810 Portable Internet Tablet ReviewsDate: 2008-11-14 not as great as it looks the unit comes with a small, basic set of utilities. a web browser, email reader, and media player with no bells or whistles. but wait! nokia advertises hundreds of great 3rd-party freeware, games, and utilities. geek candy! nokia even provides links to them on the N810 browser's default home page. this is a clever game. nokia sells you an N810 because you want to personalize your N810 with great stuff. then you get your N810, start to install things, and warnings pop up. Like - "this software is NOT supported by Nokia and may damage your unit!". screw the warning. click through and install anyway. Then the free stuff doesnt work, wont install, or installs + doesnt work + wont un-install. Which OS do I need to make it work? Chinook? Diabolo? Which version? WTF is "sudo gainroot"? WTF is "red pill mode"? Where is my Linux admin manual? Eventually you WILL brick your N810 and you WILL need to send it back to Nokia for repair. if you are out of warranty, then you will pay for it too. my unit was 2 months old and in perfect physical condition when it bricked. i sent it in, under warranty, and Nokia replaced it with an old "refurbished" beater with a scratched screen and back. the last owner must have used a nail instead of the plastic stylus. if i wanted a beat-up unit, i could have gotten one on ebay for half of what i paid for my new one. so, my snarky advice is - [1]buy a used N810 with a scratched-up screen for less. after you brick it and return it to Nokia, that's what you will end up with anyway. get your name engraved on it before you send it in for repair so that nokia cant give it to some other luser. or [2]buy a new N810 but dont even think of installing anything on it. review the owner's manual, which you can download from nokia's website. convince yourself that you will be happy with the "factory default" utilities and nothing else. forget about all those great 3rd-party freeware, games, and utilities. Date: 2008-10-15 Great Little Geek Toy and PDA I purchased this after seeing it at a Linux user's group meeting I went to. I've been needing a PDA, particularly something that would keep track of my to-do lists for work and home. I love that I can tinker with it and customize the software packages to those that I want, but you need a little more technical knowledge than average to really get the most out of it. The web browser is great for the limited space, but it occasionally fails to show some pages. This is more due to the web's unpreparedness for mobile devices, though, so I don't fault the Nokia. It doesn't come with a to-do list application and some other minor things out of the box, but it was trivial to install them. I'm a little annoyed, however, that it doesn't include my metropolitan city (Phoenix) in the time zone list. The GPS functionality suffers from a poor receiver. It takes quite a while to sync up with enough satellites to know where it's at, and can frequently lose track of those satellites. Although I don't have one, it can connect to an external GPS receiver through Bluetooth, if available, and use it to get satellite information instead. For USB connectivity, it uses a MicroUSB connecter, with a provided USB-to-MicroUSB adapter. Although this conserves valuable space in the design of the device, MicroUSB cables are currently pretty rare. On that note, cell phones are starting to use this as their standard, so you might be able to find cables in those sections. To minimize the cables I carry with me, I found a MiniUSB-to-MicroUSB adapter at my local technology retailer in their mobile phones section. A standard WiFi connection can get you to the Internet just about anywhere nowadays. I don't have data on my cell phone plan, but it can also use Bluetooth to connect to a cell phone and use it for an even more mobile Internet experience. It runs on Maemo Linux, rebranded as Internet Tablet 2008, and the maemo.org website provides plenty of help and easy to use installers. For those who are interested, Maemo is a derivative of Debian Linux, which is the basis for the currently popular desktop Ubuntu Linux. If you're using maemo.org to acquire and install software packages, I've found that some of them, particularly the ones I'm most interested in, are broken in one way or another. Some of this is due to poor packaging, though. The following is for above average users or those that want to tinker with the inner workings of the software: For those who know Debian-based distributions, the command line package tool, apt, is available, but the root account is disabled and there's no documentation on the sudo password for the user account, rendering it pretty much useless. Installing the OpenSSH server package from maemo.org creates a root account, so you can log in remotely with administrator privileges, but I can't use su on the device itself without root privileges, which the user account doesn't have. The terminal shell is ash in BusyBox, and the paths aren't set right. This was annoying when I found ifconfig "didn't exist", but discovered I had to run it with the entire path, /sbin/ifconfig. There's no proper, graphical text editor in a proper package yet, but vi is there, which is more important for the command line junkies anyway. There are ways to fix all these little problems, which I know can be found from maemo.org and related sites; I just haven't dived into it so far. All in all, it's a great little device for people who want mobile Internet but don't want an Eee PC. Date: 2008-10-09 Excellent This is a very nice product for quick Internet access when you're away from a computer. I leave it on all the time, and the battery lasts 2-3 days without needing to be re-charged, and it's easy to carry around (much easier than a laptop) and always handy when I need it. Date: 2008-09-20 amazing gadget just to give you an idea on how awesome the nokia n810 im writing the review from it. its preloaded with lots of google apps so anyone with a gmail account i highly recemend the product. may people complained about the keys on the keyboard but after i got it i didnt get why, my cell phones keys are way smaller. well that about it its a great gizmo. Date: 2008-09-12 slow...freezes...not worth it.. Pro: 1) browser with flash support 2) keyboard 3) linux 4) Beautiful screen. Cons: 1) Slow. Slow. Slow. Don't know where to start. The browser is slow. To its credit, if you disable flash, the browser feels 2x faster but then again that's why people choose this over ipod touch right? for flash? if flash make the system slow as a pig, then it's a feature that subtracts from the value, not enhances it. 2) Stalls. When some programs needs/hogs CPU, "mail app" + "browser", the system/UI freezes/stalled for unspecified periods of time. Very very annoying. 3) Appears the device lacks enough ram or that the application are bloated or use too much ram. In any case, having even 2 programs running at a time, degrades the experience. ---- Overall, I had high hopes but was very disappointed. It could be much much more but there is not enough ram and most apps are CPU hogs causing UI stalls.
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