Nokia N810 Internet Tablet review

Nokia N810 Internet Tablet Review

Reviewed by: Bonnie Cha

Reviewed on: 5 February 2008

A completely new feature to the Nokia N810 is integrated GPS. The tablet comes with Nokia Maps for coloured maps and points of interest. However, to get any sort of driving directions, you'll have to purchase the Wayfinder Navigator application, which costs around £75 for a three-year subscription. You get a 7-day trial of the service, but in all, it would have been nice to get this functionality as part of the package given the already expensive price tag.

The miniSD expansion slot is located on the bottom of the device and can accept up to 8GB cards

Last but not least, multimedia. The N810 now ships with Rhapsody support, so you can access the service's music catalogue. The built-in media player is basic but functional. It supports a number of music and video formats, including AAC, MP3, WMA, WAV, AMR, RealAudio, WMV, AVI, 3GP, MPEG-4 and others. Whew!

Transferring media to the device is a snap as it's a simple matter of drag and drop. You can also import playlists or create them on the fly, and there's a shuffle function. If you're looking for some fresh tunes, check out the Internet radio. Finally, the Nokia N810 comes with an image viewer (supporting JPEG, TIFF, BMP and other formats) and four preloaded games (Chess, Blocks, Mahjong and Marbles), and you can always download more. All in all, there's 128MB DDR RAM and 256MB flash memory, and the miniSD slot can accept up to 8GB cards.

Performance
The Nokia N810 Internet Tablet is equipped with a 400MHz TI OMAP 2420 processor, but the handheld still felt a bit underpowered. There were slight delays when opening various applications and even with simple tasks like exiting out of a program.

Web browsing on the N810 was excellent. We visited a number of sites, including CNN, YouTube and Flickr, and while upload times could go on for a few seconds for more graphic-intensive sites, overall, we enjoyed quick page renderings. Moreso, we were impressed that the browsing experience was much like what would you expect on a PC.

Multimedia performance has improved over the N800, mostly in the video department. Music playback was smooth, but the volume was weaker through the device's speakers and lacked richness and bass. The quality was much better when we plugged in some decent headphones. We watched clips from our personal library and YouTube, and in both instances it was a pleasurable experience, thanks to the N810's beautiful screen. Pictures and audio were always synchronised without any hiccups.

As we briefly mentioned earlier, we had no problems making and receiving Skype calls or chats. However, the call quality wasn't great. Our callers said it sounded like we were underwater. We had similar results on our end and could barely hear our friends, even with volume at the highest level.

The N810's GPS capabilities are on par with standalone portable navigation systems. However, it took the receiver a little while -- 5 to 7 minutes -- to get a lock on our position from a cold start.

Once established, though, the N810 accurately tracked our location and held a steady fix as we drove. We wish we didn't have to pay extra to get driving directions, but we will say they were accurate and route recalculations were swift. However, the N810's weak speaker system does make voice prompts difficult to hear.

The Nokia N810's battery is rated for 4 hours of continuous use -- with display and Wi-Fi on -- and up to 14 days of standby time. It also claims 10 hours of music playback and up to 5 days of online time. We're still running battery tests and will update this section after we have results.

Conclusion
We don't think the N810 is necessarily worth upgrading to from Nokia N800 Internet Tablet (you can download a software update from Nokia to get the latest OS) but if you're making your first foray into the mobile Internet devices, the Nokia N810 is a sleek and Web 2.0-friendly choice.

Additional editing by Shannon Doubleday