A Bargain I'm Going To Pass On...

I notice Expansys have a few Nokia N810 Internet tablets at £137 odd; a real bargain price as they are still selling around £250. This is the one with the real keyboard and built-in GPS.

N810 on the Nokia Website

Earlier in the year I'd have jumped at this, in fact £200 wouldn't have been a barrier. But two things make me put my credit card back in my wallet.

Firstly my N800, re-flashed with the same OS, and with the same size of RAM, runs out of memory with regularity. This is my one big beef with Nokia - the stingy amount of RAM they fit to everything! My Nokia mobile is the same, but not quite so much of a problem. This machine really needed 256MB from day one; even 192MB would have been an advance.

You'd have thought they'd have come up with a tiny RAM expansion for their smart-phones, but I suppose all such devices have to have built-in obsolescence.

Second reason is the new GPS I got a couple of months back. It's amazing for the money (< £80) and far more sensitive than the ones in Nokia phones. You don't have to wait five minutes for it to acquire the first satellite either. Review coming!

The N800 works quite well with a good external (bluetooth) GPS dongle, so accepting a machine with worse performance, only one flash card slot (and a micro SD at that!), and shorter battery life (due to the GPS drain) doesn't seem a step forward.

Batteries, ah yes, batteries; that's a third reason then! The N800 uses fairly standard Nokia ones, same in fact as the E61 phone. So no, not another model of Nokia battery - p-l-e-a-s-e!

Great bargain Expansys, but right now I'll pass .