UMPC has a brief review of the browsing experiences with Mozilla on N800 (via ThoughtFix).

internetTablet blog reports that the new browser is:

• Built on top of the latest version of Gecko engine
• Has full ajax support (supports Google maps – street view and Google docs)
• Supports rss feed preview.
• Supports Firefox and Mozilla add-ons
• Allows to view SSL certificate details

Read more on Maemo pages.

via Ari Jaaksi

Update 2007-07-06 14:39: Thoughtfix has a nice review of the new firmware.

I should admit that I didn’t believe in the internet tablet concept in the beginning. I simply couldn’t imagine why would I need a device like that if I already have a laptop to use when I’m at home/in the office and a multimedia computer when I’m on the move. That is until I got an N800 of my own and used it for a few weeks. Now it is always in my briefcase, on my table, or in my hands.

My judgment of N800 is a bit biased, since I work for the company that manufactures. Also the use cases that are important to me are not typical for average consumer. My house and my office are covered with wireless internet, I’m often working on the move or just waiting in check-in/security queues or just for connection flight.

There are quite a few really good and comprehensive reviews of N800, like e.g. this one by ThoughtFix. So I decided to concentrate on the use-cases of N800 and try to answer a question why there’s a niche for Internet Tablets concept.

A surprising number of reviews gave thumbs down for 770 and N800 devices. Don’t get me wrong, I strongly believe that criticism is good for Nokia. There are many things that can be improved and deserve to be complained about. However, sometimes it is just a misunderstanding of the concept that causes dissatisfaction with a product.

There are two issues that are mentioned most often as drawbacks of Nokia internet tablets.

• Lack of GSM phone capabilities (goes hand in hand with comparison to iPhone)

This is a perfect illustration of the fact how strongly Nokia brand is associated with mobile phones. Transition of Nokia to a internet/software company is not going to be easy, partly because the existing brand is so strong.

Internet tablets are not phones – they are not supposed to be. Comparison to iPhone is thus not completely valid.

These devices are targeted at different user groups and serve different purposes. Nokia Internet Tablets are about spontaneous internet use (in all its forms), everything else is second priority.

• Lack of Calendar and other PIM applications and lack of synchronisation with PC

If we are thinking about living in Web 2.0 world, we have to accept that all PIM applications are located online, not on the local device. And after all – PIM is not the core of the Internet Tablet. There are web-based calendars, web-based contact lists, etc – N800 just provides a convinient way to access any of these services.

CNET editors’ review captures the essence of N800 quite well: “It’s not meant to be a replacement for your PDA, smart phone, or laptop”.

Internet tablets are about consuming the media, not so much about anything else.

…a spoon of tar…

I don’t want to say that N800 is flawless. There are certain things that really disappoint me.

• browsing experience

Embedded Opera 8 doesn’t properly render Google Reader pages. That is my favourite RSS aggregator and I am really disappointed. Rendering of the page is quite weird and the degree of weirdness changes over time (probably as Google guys are changing the implementation).

It is possible to install Minimo browser that does the job properly. It renders some pages better than default Opera browser, but can sometmes crash. So while it is possible to read pages you want using two browsers it doesn’t provide for the best possible user experience.

(Hmm, just wondering if this in in Linux DNA – you can get anything to work, if you are prepared to spend enough time to hack it and forego on user experience

Another issue is that realplayer clips embedded into web pages do not work – a standalone player has to be launched (if site design provides such possibility)

Flash files playback is too slow – so watching YouTube becomes a troublesome experience.
There’s a way around it though – thanks to MacSlow for pointing out a way to improve YouTube experience using Orb for conversion. http://macslow.thepimp.net/?p=106

These flaws in browsing experience are really a shame – on internet tablets browsing is one experience that should be perfect.

• default email client

Lets you wish for much better performance and usability. The _default_ client could’ve been much better.

• video and audio playback

I had a 2Gb memory card on my N93i. When I put it into N800 I expected that all MP4 videos recorded with N93 and N93i will play there. Unfortunately the frame rate of the playback was close to 0, so I had to delete all videos.

Music files (mobile optimized AAC files ripped from CDs using Nokia Music Manager) didn’t play either, so I had to delete them and rip the CDs again – into regular MP3s.

N800 being an Nseries range device, unfortunately is not supporting all the same media formats. There’s still room for improvement.

Even though these are just three not-so-perfect features, they are fundamental to internet tablets functionality (internet and media consumption), and thus even smaller flaws there are seriously degrading the overall experience.

…and other ingridients

After using N800 for about three months and trying a lot of different software during this time I ended up with the following most important use cases where N800 really serves its purpose:

• spontaneous internet use (browsing, e-mail, instant messaging, internet telephony)

N800 provides a better alternative to mobile phone because of the larger screen and easier text input.
Whenever using laptop is an overkill – N800 comes into play. Checking mails while having a morning cup of coffee at home,
talking to my family using GTalk while waiting for a flight, chatting with friends on IM while sitting in a cafe downtown. These are not situations where taking out and booting up a laptop is optimal solution.

• reading books

There are plenty of e-books available. It is much more convenient to carry an N800 around than two-three books in your luggage. Mobile phones have too small screens, and laptop is an overkill for reading books. I still occasionally pick up a paperback in the airport though, despite having a good library on my internet tablet

• watching movies

Up to four DivX movies can fit on a 2Gb memory card, providing enough entertainment for a long train or air trip.
DivX player user interface could’ve been friendlier, but once you start watching a movie you don’t think much about it.

• watching TV

Watching news programs whenever I want to, because I never can turn on the TV at the right time.

• listening to radio/internet radio/music

Just a nice bonus in addition to everything else. While reading, chatting or browsing there’s no need to use another device for music.

Here’s a list of applications that I installed in addition to the standard software and didn’t uninstall since:

• Media manager Canola – compared to the default image viewer/music player Canola is a killer app. It is a user experience how it should be.

• FBReader – Perfect for reading e-books. Supports portrait mode, allows customisation of colours, etc.

• Home screen plugins – Other Maemo Weather, Gmail

• Minimo browser - a backup solution for browsing the web. Unfortunately it is not stable enough, although it renders some pages better than Opera. Lack of flash support also prevents from using Minimo alone.

• Gizmo – Internet telephony at its best – supports chat and voice calls to multiple clients – Skype, Gtalk, MSN, Yahoo.

• Office – Abiword and Gnumeric. I don’t use them for creating documents, but they are really good for viewing e-mail attachments.

• mPlayer- for watching DivX movies.

In conclusion

Do you have to be a geek to use internet tablets? I would say – yes, at least for now, and at least a little bit.
But the trend set by Nokia 770 and N800 has a great potential to develop into a mass-market consumer internet device.

I was really skeptical about the whole concept of internet tablets in the beginning. But if you ask me now – would you buy a device like that – the answer will be “definitely yes”.

Thanks to all the reviewers:

“Thumbs down for the N800 from me” by MacSlow

“It Does Little, and Not Very Well” by Rob Pegoraro, Washington Post

“Nokia’s Marriage To Small Computers Still Has Its Problems” by Walter S. Mossberg, The Wall Street Journal

“My First Impressions of the Nokia N800” by Jose_R.A.M, mobileburn.com

“Nokia N800; A Real World Review After One Month’s Use” by MobileCrunch

Size, look and feel. I am a fan of transformer form-factor, so I was sceptical at first about the double-slider idea. First thing that comes to mind when looking at N95 is last-year model – N80. But when you take N95 in your hand – it is much lighter (only 120g vs. 135g for N80) and thinner.  Feel of the materials used for the cover is amazing – soft and pleasant. Numeric keypad despite of the small size is very usable due to the three-dimensional shape of the keys and good tactile feedback.

Display. Ratio of the display size to device size is a considerable improvement. 2.6", 16mln colors display is a pleasure to watch. It is now much easier to browse the web, read books, view office documents without having to kill your eyes.

Landscape mode. At last there is a full fletched landscape mode support. This is absolutely fantastic feature. I find it one of the greatest improvements in usability of Nseries devices. I admired the landscape mode from the moment it was first introduced in Nseries on N90 multimedia computer (only few applications supported it back then). N93 and N93i were logical development, but N95 is actually first non-transfomer multimedia computer that fully supports landscape mode.

Maps. Again, word "first" can be used here. N95 is the first Nseries multimedia computer with integrated GPS reciever. Maps application is surprisingly fast both to download maps from the server and to zoom in/out.Personally I found it difficult to use N95 as a navigator in the car because of a relatively small screen for that purpose and delays in locating sattelites. On the other hand I’ve been spoiled by an integrated navigation system in my car. But for navigating in the city when walking or cycling N95 works very well. Can’t wait to try it somewhere else than Helsinki.

Sound. Stereo speakers are spicing up an already very well equipped multimedia computer. Integrated application for setting 3D ringing tone effects is brilliant. N95 has a standard 3.5mm audio/video connector. It can be used for listening music with your favuorite headphones, as well as for connecting to TV. Headset that is delivered in the box with N95 consists of two parts – one with integrated microphone, control buttons and 3.5mm connector and another with very basic earphones. So you can just replace earphones with your favourite headphones and still have microphone and control buttons available.

Camera. Solution for the lense cover is very nice and way better than a lense cap on N93 that most of the people who haven’t tied it to their multimedia computers have lost already. Quality of the images is good enough to throw away an average pocket digital camera if it was bought a couple of years ago. I can’t agree that N95 is a total replacement for a pocket camera. N95′s flash light is too weak (it is a white LED) and it’s not performing well in poor light conditions. So there’s still some time before pocket digital camera manufacturers will ahve to find new niches on the market. N95 records videos with VGA resolution what is ofthen described with a marketing term "DVD-quality". Performance and quality of video recording are really good. A great usability improvement is a one step adding of background music and text screen before or after the video. There’s no need to launch video editor for that anymore.

Browser. Finally there’s only one browser application. WAP and WWW browsers have been merged. Also a number of improvements have been done to the browsing experience – support of fav icons, flash lite 2.0, password manager, autocompletion for form fields, toolbar with reload, minimap, popular links and search functions, saving images and complete pages for offline use. More about the new version of the browser you can read in an excellent article by Eldar Murtazin.

Settings. Settings application has undergone a complete renewal. It might be confusing at first to the old-school S60 users, but for those who take S60 product for the first time in their hands I believe it is going to be much easier to find the settings they need. Especially nice are the application specific settings collected in the main Settings application.

There are few disappointments as well.

• A minor inconvenience – my 2Gb mini-SD memory card is useless now – I had to get micro-SD card, because N95 is using this format. So prepare to invest into a new memory card, if you are a heavy media user, as I am. Default 128Mb card will fill up really soon.

• A rare use case for power users – when I was transferring my Lifeblog data via USB and demonstrating videos on the TV using TV-out, there was a distinct noise in audio channel. Disconnecting USB cable helped to get rid of it.

• Multimedia Menu is an impressive demonstration of 3D graphics capabilities of the device. Although it seems that memory consumed by special effects was the trade-off – sometimes an active application (like browser or real player) would shut down when I accidentally or deliberately press multimedia menu button. Also I am not sure if it is adding to the usability. New users might find it rather confusing – there’s active standby menu, main menu and multimedia menu on just one device. Also there’s a need to scroll in multimedia menu now to find required application, compared to just one button click in the previous versions – so the idea of fast multimedia applications access is somewhat diluted.

• Memory. Free RAM is about 22Mb. It is definitely not enough for such a powerful multimedia computer. I had difficulties running Visual Radio and Browser at the same time. Out of memory situations sometimes happen when trying to play a video that’s been just recorded or edited, when browsing content rich web pages, when using Gallery with Maps opened in background. All these applications require a lot of RAM, and it is not surprising that it is sometimes difficult to run two of them in parallel.

• Joystick is not very suitable for games – when playing Snakes I always end up in multimedia or regular menu.

• Battery life. I’ll have to see how it behaves in a daily use, because so far I had to charge it twice a day. Of course I was using it extensively – browsing using wireless lan, using bluetooth, talking, listening to music and radio, recording videos and taking pictures. But why do you need allthese features if you cannot use them to save battery?

• GPS is only integrated with Maps application. It is surprising that Local Search which is a great application in itself is not using real location to provide search results. Possibilities to use GPS in appliation software are enless and I really hope that this will be improved.

All in all, a combination of the latest technologies in a well designed and well built multimedia computer makes a hit. This is a product that I belive will be in my pocket for most of 2007. Go look for one in the nearest shop. And if you’re still in doubt – go see www.greatpockets.com