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I like the idea of small portable devices used to connect to the internet. They’re not going to be ideal for CAD work, writing a thesis, or churning out thousands of lines of code. But they should work fine in many situations where an internet connecton comes in handy. Fireing off a quick mail between lectures, checking cinema times in the pub, pulling up Wikipedia/IMDB when watching a movie, grabbing a Podcast when waiting for the bus, IRC on the bus, &c. As a student price is also an important factor.

About 19 months ago, at Skycon ‘07, I got a brief look at Matthew Garretts Nokia N800 internet tablet. I’d read about them online and was drawn in. They looked set to fill the gap in the market left after the demise of the PDA, somewhere between smartphone and laptop.

Later in 2007, at FrOSCon I got to play with a 770 and N800 properly. I was one of the FrOSCon Crew/Helfers, manning a camcorder for a track. Tarent were showing off some Java collaboration app on the Nokia Internet Tablets and the iRex iLiad. I borrowed an N800 for a day while on the camcorder and played with it.

One of the first things which threw me with the N800 was the keyboard. I remember having to find an actual QWERTY keyboard in order to realise what symbols my SSH password was composed of, thanks to the offputting touchscreen layout. My main thought comming away from the N800 was “this’d be great with a proper keyboard”.

So I kept an eye on forums (internettablettalk++) and was delighted to hear that the N810 was coming with a keyboard. Surely this would trounce a small laptop, due to longer battery life and more portability. You can’t comfortably put any laptop in your pocket. The Asus eeePC line of sub-notebook/mini-laptops started taking the world by storm last Christmas. At CeBIT I got my hands on an eee900. Its major drawback seemed to be the relatively short battery life, compared to the tablets.

Then the eee901 was announced which boasted a vastly superior battery life thanks to the Atom processor. My stedfast desires for a tablet were waning.

I saw an N810 at The Last Hope, and a 901 at DEFCON, but didn’t get a chance to play with either of them. I got my hands on an eee1000 at Software Freedom Day in Dublin and found that while the specs were great it was starting to stray from the carry-everywhere-device I was looking for, due to the increased size.

So, having not fully experimented with either the N810 or eee901 I took a leap and went with the eee901 a few weeks back. And within a week the 8Gb SSD failed (yes, I got a Windows XP version, Sharptext don’t do Linux boxes). And then the VGA out failed.

I rang the wholesaler who I purchased the eee901 from and was told that I’d have to return it to ASUS. Rang ASUS and was told that I’d have to ship it to .de and that I’d be without it for 6 weeks. Nuts to that. I’ll return it in January when I won’t need it (as much).

I’ve read stories in the past of manufacturers not repairing laptops when the OS has been replaced. That and the fact that the wireless drivers still aren’t 100% means that I’ve been using the eee901 with Windows XP and 4Gb of storage space.

One of the first people to criticise me when I got the eee901 was Joe, telling me that the tablet was a better choice. After all the hardware trouble I went through I started to think that maybe he was right.

Last week Internet Tablet Talk announced that they were becoming talk.maemo.org. Community driven (sites) forums or wikis are usually the best place to find out about a given device, product, service, band, $thing. The Mistic River forums are a fantastic resource for all things iRiver (unfortunately the H320 hasn’t seen much action since it recorded the HOPE/DEFCON interviews). Muse Wiki is another great example of a community driven site.

One of the best things about community sites is that the good and the bad come out, freedom of speech is (usually) a high priority. If a certain feature needs fixing then a post will go up and irate users will pin their avatar to a petition. I’m reasonably sure (but have no proof) that the likes of Nokia, Muse and iRiver will keep an eye on these user sites from time to time. It’s effectively free feedback. If they want to continue pleasing their most loyal fans then fixing current problems seems like the logical step.

So news of the largest Nokia Internet Tablet community site merging with the official site for the device OS, and Nokia funding the site, makes for interesting news. I brought it up in the pub on Friday and boots mentioned that he had an N810 lying at the back of a drawer, unused. Very kindly he let me borrow it. And I’ve been using the N810.

The first thing I’ve noticed about the N810 over the N800 is that it seems to be much more sluggish. After a fresh flash (4.2008.36-5) and a reboot, with no extra applications installed there is ~10Mb free from 128Mb of RAM. In five days I’ve had to restart the device maybe 8 times, due to the browser locking up, or web audio streams no longer playing.

When the N810 works it’s great, I’ve been listening to more radio and reading more news because of it. The status light is nice. The IM application is great too, but could do with MSN/Yahoo IM support by default. The ability to easily install 3rd Party Apps is a godsend because some of the default options are woesome (I’m looking at you terminal, with your lack of font or colour options).

There seems to be a ton of processes running on the device. I taped out this post so far on the N810 (in the OS Notes app, wordpress in the Web application was too slow) and have a few other programs running, three web browser windows and roxterm with an SSH session to a Skynet screen session. I have ten extra apps installed (advanced-backlight, bash2, grsync, load-applet, mauku, mnotify, openssh-client, roxterm, rsync and sudser). There are 90+ processes running and the loads are is ~2. I’ve seen a 5 minute average load of 5+ on this, when the device was idle for 5 minutes.

The UI is very shiney, but I get the feeling that the maemo project are putting form before function. I’d be more than happy with no gradiends or rounded corners if it meant the device was snappier. XP has a “classic mode” option, why not maemo OS2008 too?

My other big gripe is with the keyboard. The main keyboard has 40 keys and lets you input 71 characters (plus backspace, enter and control). The iGo Bluetooth keyboard I have has 50 keys but allows you to input 97 symbols, plus the standard control, alt, meta, backspace, tab, escape, enter, delete. iGo pull it off by having two function keys, which would make life with the N810 easier.

irssi is painful without tab, alt, escape, or square brackets (to obtain an escape). I’ve found that Ctrl+i is tab and Ctrl+Fn+e is an escape character. I still cant find a Page up (unless I remap the keyboard) so reading scrollback is out for now.

The BBC site lets me watch the news with no problem. RTÉ claims I don’t have RealPlayer installed, even though there is a Real media player on the N810.

All these little things add up, while the internet tablets are a major step up in terms of functionality and useability from any smartphone I’ve used, it’s still not up a replacement for a laptop. While I’d really like to own one of these devices, I would have to own a laptop first. I’ll be sorry when I have to give the N810 back to boots.