More Price Cuts

[threegee]

Just noticed the Nokia N810 price slashed to £130 - less than half the £280 odd it was selling at a few months back.

This generally indicates that Nokia has a new model entering production. In this case a "Maemo 5" one with a much faster CPU and graphics support in hardware.

Worth Buying at £130?

Is the tiny tiny N810 worth buying at this price? It depends what you want it for. Nokia launched it with the slogan "It's what computers have become". But the truth is that it's what PDA's have become, because the ARM chip at its core is little more than powered the PDAs of a few years back.

Although it has WiFi and Bluetooth it needs to connect through a phone for Internet on the move - there's no 3G or HSDPA module. It's far better than a smartphone or PDA fo pocket internet browsing and e-mail, and the slide-out keyboard is almost usable. It also has built-in GPS and you can get the maps over WiFi for free. But the GPS takes just as long to acquire as the average GPS featured mobile phone - often five minutes or more to lock in. In my limited tests of this feature I found the indicated position to be spot-on; as good as anything I've ever used.

Instead of a Netbook?

To use it effectively day to day you need to invest a lot of time, and if you have room for a small netbook in your bag or case you'll get a lot further a lot faster with email, word processing, etc. Like all Nokia devices of this generation it is short on RAM memory and this can't be expanded. This can result in long pauses in response, and sometimes it's just alltogether quicker to reboot it than wait for it to sort itself out. It has one flash ROM memory socket (unlike the larger keyboard-less N800 which has two), and this does support High Capacity SD flash cards. But the bad news here is that they chose the miniSD type rather than the now much more common microSD. miniSD can be hard to find at the right price and in the larger capacities. 4GB is all I've been able to find recently, and they aren't anything like as cheap as standard or even microSD.

As a Personal Organiser

It's not the best personal organiser as there is no one bit of (free) software that does it all. And so, if you want more than a basic address book you'll probably need to install more than one utility. But then it was never meant to be a pure personal organiser. That said this isn't App£e or Micro$oft, and so the software (and updates thereto) are all free!

Battery and Connectivity

The battery life is quite reasonable considering the size of it. Like Nokia phones it seems to vary enormously from day to day. But it's not the same battery as used in the N800, E61 phone etc. being much smaller.

A mini USB lead lets it plug into your computer and you can transfer user files without transfer software on most modern operating systems; just like an mp3 player really. Yes, it will play mp3's, and there's a nice little utility that you can install to download YouTube videos so you can catalogue them and carry them around with you. If you are in to Linux you can hack into it, even home network over WiFi to make it visible to your other computers. Most users won't want to break into the operating system, but this isn't frowned on, and lots and lots of technical information is availabe for the so inclined.

Extras

It comes with a car holder and car power lead. There's an acceptable slip cover that's good enough to protect it from scratches in your pocket, but not from being sat upon. A spare stylus - they're not easy to get - a disgrace for such a high profile manufacturer as Nokia!

The Bottom Line(s)

In summary if you're thinking of using one instead of a portable computer (however small) then forget it. If you want to carry something around in your top pocket for occasional access to the Internet and email that beats your smartphone hollow - indeed that works with your phone - then grab one at this price whilst they last. It's also still has a high cool factor to impress people that have never seen an Internet Tablet before.

Link to Offer: http://www.expansys....18&sbadd=158518