Nokia N800

Here are my first impressions of the new Nokia N800 Internet Tablet (from Nokia, Finland). I've owned the old 770 tablet for 12 months, so this is a quick comparison with that gadget.

New features.

• Webcam. Popping it out starts the video phone application, which is a nice touch.
• Stereo speakers. Better, and louder than the mono speaker 770. Makes the N800 a very useable portable Internet radio.
• Built in stand. Compliments the above two features.
• Two SD memory slots. No longer restricted to a single RS-MMC slot. I added a cheap (£20) 1GB SD card immediately.
• Faster processor and more RAM (128MB cf 64MB) makes browsing the web much faster and less likely to result in a browser crash. Everything seems more responsive.
• Audio player has support for Real Audio streams, so it's easy to use the N800 with BBC radio streams - on the 770 this required the video player and was more fiddly.
• Headphones (well bud things) with microphone, so don't have to use the built in one.
• Headphone (and power) socket on short side rather than on long side, so it's easier to use headphones with the gadget in a pocket.

Dislikes.

• No hard cover. This is a shame, as I rather liked the way closing the cover switched the 770 off - except when I wanted it to stay on :-(
• The power and zoom/volume butoons on the top are now tiny and look cheap, which is a very odd change. The buttons on the 770 look, and work, much better.

Overall I'd say that the N800 is probably worth owning if you want a small gadget to surf the web via wi-fi. Of course this is what both the 770 and N800 were designed for, but the 770 seemed to struggle at times with many web sites. Don't let the size and shape fool you, this isn't an advanced personal organiser, it comes with no suitable software, though you might find something useable to download - see http://downloads.maemo.org/