Strange day. Exciting, but strange.
I had a few blog posts drafted in my mind. But then the TNT guy woke me up.
He had a package from WOM World. In it, my laptop for the next two weeks.
What am I talking about, you ask? The Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, of course.
I know, I know, lots of people have done this before. There are a lot of reviews across the internets and so on. Even the 'laptop' moniker is not original. People have tried replacing laptops and whatnot with Internet Tablets and accessories (and tethered N95s). And hey, I don't even have a laptop. Nor will I, for the foreseeable future, at least. I don't believe in laptops. Not in most, anyway. I don't believe in anything that says "carry me around" and weighs 3 kgs or more. Portable? Then my TV is portable too, by such standards.
I love the concept of Internet Tablets. Here is something actually portable, with decent screen size and resolution, proper browsing and so on. I even did a test post from it earlier (if your feed reader caught that, sorry, I just couldn't help myself).
The question that is on everyone's mind, though, is "is the N810 a consumer-friendly device?". Like, not for geeks such as myself, but for your 'average Joe'.
This is what I'll try to answer during these weeks. From the moment I first powered it up, I handled it like I never did any gadget before. That is, not like I would, but how I think that 'average Joe' would. I didn't read the manual. I tried to forget almost everything I've read about it in the past months (except the maemo site).
There will be a series of posts on the N810. Each post will have an answer to the bolded question above. Even this one has it. The answers might be different because of the different focus of each post. Finally, after the N810 will be sent back to WOM World, there will be a short post about my definitive answer, after taking everything into account.
I will be writing about the N810 in spite of the fact that it's not an S60 device and therefore in spite of this site's primary focus. Why? Because I think that the coming years will belong to Tablets, MIDs, UMPCs or whatever you'd like to call sub-notebook solutions. Which is why this is important. And parallels can be drawn to S60. Both open operating systems (open source, in the case of maemo, and closed source, but "open to new features", in S60's case), both very customizable, both having loads of apps written for them.
Day 1. After more than 10 hours of playing with it...
Is the N810 a consumer-friendly device?
NO.
Out-of-the-box experience is good if you only plan on browsing, but if you don't it's less than ideal. Details to follow in the next post. Hopefully everything that is not working now will be fixed by then so I can also write about how to make (certain) things work.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
