The N800 as a wireless internet-tablet with OS2008 (updated)

The N800 is primarily designed as a mobile internet tablet. It's clear from the  presence of wifi, a built-in webcam and the touchcreen all in a small portable factor with excellent specified standy time (9 days while holding a constant wifi connection). Here on the left is a picture of the N800 in action while reading the RSS stream of Vox's NokiaN95 group.

OS2008 (Linux-based) and the Maemo interface that are running on the N800 are oriented towards browsing and communication. The home desktop screen has three software buttons on the left. In the pictures the main two functions are visible in the topleft of the screen: browsing en communications. The third icon, is the icon for additional applications. They are 'hardwired' softbuttons. Below those buttons you can see several icons of opened applications and at the bottom the icon for showing the window list. You can open applications while keeping the navigation bar (on the left) and toolbar in view or go fullscreen. Switching can be done by button press or through a menu.


OS2008 a diamond with rough edges

Linux has run in the past on slower Intel processors and less memory than the N800 currently has. OS2008 has everything to be an excellent internet platform with all the niceties of a good UNIX platform. Excellent taskmanagement, smooth pre-emptive multitasking and stability. The hardcore geek can get behind the graphical facade through an xterm shell and do some manual tweaking. Using an internal memory card you can even enable 128MB of swap space for the device, allowing it to swap passive memory of inactive programs to disk, freeing more RAM for the active applications. This is a technique with a similar effect as demand pages has on the latest nseries phones. With it enabled the OS runs much smoother and is less prone to balk when opening to lots of applications. However excessive memory use by an active and ill-designed application can require so much memory that it starts using swap space for active memory, making your system dead slow.

OS2008 has an excellent package system where you can choose to download only Nokia served software or run any kind of 3rd party software. Anything from commercial origin (Skype/Gizmo i.e.) to the unstable lonely hacker's untried and untested software is possible. OS2008 gives you the freedom to choose your own level of trusted software. There is a  growing collection of software applications available that will run on the N800 and N810 extending the features of the tablet well into the lower software range of EEPC/UMPC. The Linux desktop environment KDE is ported including the wordprocessor application and the spreadsheet application. Installation however is not for the avarage click-and-doing user.

OS2008 has a touchscreen finger-keyboard and a touchscreen pen-keyboard. The difference are the keysizes and the amount of screen occupied by them. You can configure a preference which keyboard should pop-up when activating an inputfield. However it does not work flawless. Nevertheless OS2008 really shines here and there and yet there are some annoyingly rough edges present. Lets take a close look at the main possibilities: Webbrowsing and communications.


Webbrowsing

Web browsing is excellent, and the bigger screen and faster speed gives the N800 a significant edge over a smartphone like the N95. YouTube works flawless and you can tap the full screen icon to go really full screen. Most other flash-oriented video players work well if the bitrate or cpu demand is not too high. It's performance makes you beg for bluetooth mouse support and tv-out or VGA. Somethings however are not completely perfect.

Embedded videos do not always scale proper and badly designed java-scripts can cause problems, especially in scaled webpages. They can obscure some text that otherwise would be readable or the buttons to click an ad away are not reachable. CPU-intensive javascripted pages can take a while to load and run, longer than on the PC but very acceptable. Yet in fairness even on the desktop PC my webbrowser can have troubles with some badly designed web pages, locking Windows for a couple seconds. Flash-based pages like Nokia's Nseries are larger than the N800's screen resolution and are unscalable nor can they be panned. Making it an annoyingly useless page.  The N95's mini-page overview is in such cases a much needed but missing feature for quick panning and browsing a web page.  And of course embedded Windows wmv video's do not work.

The N800 does not have a mini-qwerty keyboard and uses a on-screen keyboard to enter data. Blogging sites often have java-scripted editors to write blogs. Each letter in such an editor is considered a single input window. As a result the pop-up on-screen keyboard does not to work properly with these and is rather unpractical. Vox is an excellent example. A bluetooth keyboard however is not plagued by this problem and will allow easy editing as well as the N810 I suspect.

The webbrowser shows an RSS icon if the page contains RSS feeds. Clicking it allows the RSS-Reader to add the feed. The desktop applet of the RSS-Reader can auto-update the RSS feeds, scroll the latest news and open on request reader to read the summaries. If desired, one can have the RSS-reader then open the native web browser for accessing the original article.


Communicating

The built-in software has support for Video-calling, VoIP and messaging. Natively GoogleTalk, Jabber and SIP are supported. A upcoming enhancement package that currently is available for beta-testing will additionally support AIM, ICQ, IRC, MSN, Yahoo and some local linked XMPP protocol. The last will most likely support using the N800 as a baby videophone. GoogleTalk is said to support video-calling between the N800/N810 but not to PC-clients. Addtionally Gizmo and Skype are available.


SIP

I tested SIP with my SIP-provider and after doing the required firewall configuration it worked quite well. Altough a bit hidden, there is a menu to generate DTMF tones, something that Fring on my N95 lacks. This allows you to operate all the touch-tone operated menus in someones voicemailbox or  those annoying support-lines. It works well handsfree as with a bluetooth headset. Speaker sound level is less that of the N95, but sufficient unless you are watching the tv or listening to the radio at a good volume. The larger distance between the speakers gives a much better stereo effect than the N95. Watching a divx-movie really is a pleasure.

Skype

Skype only does VoIP, it seems stable and reliable, using about 7 MB of RAM. Voice quality is good, although the network speed and processor are slower compared to the PC. On difficult connections a lower voice-quality might be caused earlier than on a fast PC which can use a more cpu-intensive compression and broader bandwidth internet connections. Skype easily penetrated my double firewall setup and did not need any additional configuration on the routers. Messaging works well, weblinks are transferred and can be clicked on the N800 to open the webbrowser. Sadly no beep sounds when a message is sent by one of your contacts. Also file transfers are not implemented. Hopefully these will be coming as well as the much wanted video support in the N800/N810 community.


Gizmo

Gizmo  is using SIP to negotiate a connection. Gizmo like regular SIP requires some configurations on my firewalls which is easily done if you take a look at their forum. However Gizmo sadly is not very compatible with the N95's SIP implementation. Messaging works well both ways. Calling from regular SIP (from the N95 i.e.) to the Gizmo client on the N800 works well too. However in the other direction the N95 crashes the moment you click to accept or reject the call. Even using the Gizmo software on the N95 does not solve these problems since it actually uses the native Nokia SIP stack.  Not a bad thing since in my experience the Nokia SIP stack is more stable than Fring's, mostly :-(. Videocalling to the N95 is not supported either. Video calling between Gizmo on the N800 and the 4.0 Desktop PC Gizmo client for Windows should work... works. Voice and video-connection could be made after all the right firewall tweakings. Earlier attempts failed, unclear was why, nothing changed but time between both the two tries. The N800 produces a blocky but acceptable videostream and there was the occasional packet loss causing regular drop outs in parts of the video image from the PC to the N800. This seems a software problem from the beta-software on the PC since file transfer, video calling and a text chat session were possible at the same time without a change in the problems.


Messaging

All the different messaging clients seem to do their work. Yet the finger touch-keyboard is not supported by messaging clients and you are forced to use the pen-based touch-keyboard. Most likely this is disabled because they occlude a large portion of the screen (where you contact's messages appear). Thisis very annoying. Finger typing is far more relaxing and easier than pen-based. The smaller letters makes you really squint..

I had a quick view at Pidgin which seems to have messaging support for anything but Skype. It not only does messaging and file transfers it also opens the hotmail webpage for you when you have a new mail. Best of all it supports the touchscreen finger-keyboard as well and it works great!


Mail

Mail supports the regular POP3 and IMAP4. Sadly you can only access your inbox and not the subfolders, preventing you to sort, move and copy mail to them. Even my N95 is capable of this. Attachment and HTML posts are well processed. Remote linked images in the mails are not downloaded. So far so good. But strangely I could not find the menu-item to download the in-linked images and show the e-mails in full glory. Attachments work well indeed and are automaticaly opened by the media player or relevant applications. There are no filters and other goodies. Mail is simple and very limited but it works.


No PIM

First of all there is no PIM. Now an agenda function is not really required. it resides in my phone and I don't want 7 devices to beep me when I have an appointment. Especially if the N800 is used as a companion device for a mobile smart phone. However the option to sync e-mail adresses and phone numbers with the N95, or any NSeries device in fact, is absent. The software on the N95 to synchronize with another cellphone over bluetooth is useless here, no Java (ME)! There is however a limited capacity to get PIM data to the N800. You can send a single phone book entries from the N95 to the N800 by bluetooth, but not the complete phonebook. There is actually an import function for Outlook contact data. Yet it could not process my exported Outlook contacts folder. It said it was to large, only about a 100 addresses... For each SIP call you want to make or each e-mail you want to sent from the N800, you have to either type the adres manually or sent that contact's data by bluetooth. Particular in the light of it's communication features it's a big irritation.


Usage

I find myself putting the N800 on a small box at my desktop and using the bluetooth keyboard to write long e-mails and posts. Days can past without need to switch on the PC at home, except anything other than syncing my N95. A solution to hookup a larger screen and a bluetooth mouse a seems very desirable trait, a wireless solution to my TV would be also very interesting. The inability to go directly from an input field on the device to they finger touch-type keyboard is annoying. For some reasons on certain occasions the penbased touchkeyboard insist on popping up.

Conclusions

Summarizing. It is an excellent webbrowser tablet. OS2008 has good working VoIP support for Skype and SIP. Mail and messaging support is present but limited.Third party applications for mail are still mostly in beta. For instant-messaging Pidgin seems a very worthwhile program.

• The RSS-reader and web browser team work well together and support almost anything needed in that field. Problems can be caused by badly designed java-scripted pages and the ability to pan certain flash animated pages.
• OS2008 has native support for GoogleTalk, Jabber  and SIP, although an upgrade is already in the works to include more protocols.  Instant messaging works without file transfers and touchscreen finger typing, the pen is needed. GoogleTalk is said to support video-calling between the N800/N810 but not to PC-clients. Addtionally Gizmo and Skype are available. Skype works well even through firewalls, again without video or file transfers and touchscreen finger typing. Gizmo could gotten to work with VoIP and Video, messaging worked though without touchscreen finger typing. 
• Mail support is limited to reading your inbox folder. Attachments and HTML are well processed. HTML e-mail viewing is limited to inlined images, inlinked are never loaded.
  
• Synchronization of phonenumbers and e-mail adresses, bookmarks with n-series mobiles is completely lacking, yet an obvious and logical requirement for many of us.
  

Looking purely at the internet tablet part of OS2008, it gives the impression to be 70% finished. Considering the Linux background some rough edges were expected. Yet for the release of the N810 a  more complete solution from OS2008 was expected by me. If Nokia wants to keep competing with the new generation of MIMD as shown at CES2008 more upgrades are to be expected. The upcoming OS2008 Instant messaging upgrades are hopefully the first of a series of additions to the N800/N810 software. In the meantime one can find real gems in the current limited collection of free software in the N800/n810 community. Applications like Pidgin fill some of the gaps in OS2008 and Nokia released support software.

Nokia would do well to get a stable and finished video calling software, phone and e-mail adress synchronization and panning of flash pages. Additionally improve finger touch support, e-mail support. Bluetooth mouse support and an external screen support would be exceptionally terrific!

Also a much better integration between the N800/N810 models and their n-series mobile phones is required. It is at the barest minimum. There seems only to be one useful option: The ability  to use your mobile phone as a GPRS linkup to the internet. However if Nokia goes the distance for the firmware as they seem to be willing for the latest N-series models (N95, N95 8GB, N82...) they will surely find themselves with a community of loyal customers and keep OS2008 and the N800/N810 as the leading MIMD in the market.

As just said, there is a gap of missing features to fill. Yet with all its raw edges it is a very practical and useful device and I find myself going a full day without switching on the PC. Also the Linux core makes it a practical device with truly hidden depths. There are more comments to be made but I will reserve them for my next post. When I will take a closer look at the media capacities of the N800, the second M in MIMD. Expect me to comment on it's playback options, uPnP and its quite excellent typing speed...