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After almost a year, I finally decided to buy the N810 and have to say i have a lot of mixed feelings about the device/platform/experience. I know there are already a million posts on this device, but I thought a list of pros and cons will definitely come handy since I am thinking about selling this device already ! Anyway, I’ll keep it short but I’ll try to update this list as much as possible.

My feelings at the moment go from excitement about this ultra-portable and very stylish device to utter fear of having wasted 200£ of my credit-crunched money on a simple digital photo frame. Actually, without any intention to offend anyone working on this platform, the device is such in pity state that nobody even made an application to turn a screensaver on and make the device a very expensive photo frame (you have to use the slideshow of some image viewer to make it so). Why I cannot take a picture and as soon as I’m back home or withing bluetooth range transfer automatically the pictures and have them on a N810 screensaver?

Cons

• Writing with it is quite strange. The keyboard is not as useful as I thought (possibly because of the layout), the word suggestions on the screen become a distraction and there are a lot of missing features that could have been implemented to improve general navigation (look at the example below, the Benq S6, for one example)
• My biggest complain is web navigation because when I try to move the page in any direction I often end up clicking on its links. Also, the resolution makes impossible to click on some links without the stylus and the directional pad is used to move from link to link and not move the page. Why Nokia didn’t use the “opera-mini” approach with some sort of pan-view navigation and read-view for reading and clicking on links is beyond my understanding. Just look at how nice is the the Android browser!!! Here’s the browser in action:
• The directional pad would have been perfect to navigate pages with a simple touch but nothing… What’s strange is that Nokia already implements the NaviWheel on some of its mobile phones so why they didn’t implemented it here (not just the rotation gesture but also scroll up and down). Also, it is positioned in the wrong place . Nokia could have positioned the d-pad outside the keyboard to have larger keys and be able to use it even when the keyboard was closed. On top of this, I always find difficult to move up (I’ve got big thumbs ) because there is not enough space between the d-pad and the front part of the N810.
• During the installation of any application the devices becomes unresponsive for seconds if not minutes! Not sure if CPU is up for most of the jobs, but the impression is that it’s not just a hardware issue
• Ecosystem is not as lively as others (a certain phone and s60) and here the lack of business drive is really showing the limitations of the open source ecosystem compared to other ones. The biggest problem however is that most of the N810 applications compared to S60 ones for example don’t get the job done quickly either because of lack of features or because the GUI is too complicated to use (and that applies to apps with nice GUIs as well where you need 50 clicks to just add a song to a playlist! Jez, sometimes performing a task seems I playing a game! )

• I’m not quite sure what niche it is supposed to fill. Can I use it as a mobile? No thanks, my N95 is already doing that job nicely. Is it a portable computer? mmm, don’t think so. Navigator? TomTom is cheaper and gets the job done better (besides, I use my N95 as my satnav)… So, I’m not sure where and when is supposed to be used?
• Official website is sloooow (www.maemo.org). Is it hosted using one of these web servers?
• Minimising into the background so that it does not take precious screen space in the application switcher area is not possible for skype and other applications.
• it’s labeled as n-series but i think it’s should be called gseries as in geek series or google series since it seems that Google products work better than other ported applications (actually you can install Android too). The device is barely ready for a geek, imagine for mass market.
• Browser is sometimes slow and loading a page make any other browser windows completely unresponsive (e.g. why can they fill the gap when loading the page with something else such as changing view for one specific page or something else…). BBC iPlayer does not play smoothly . It seems it can barely play youtube videos.
• It’s still not 100% finger friendly… Actually, you get the feeling that it’s trying to force you to use different styles all the time (now keyboard, now stylus, now middle finger ). Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
• Even when it’s finger friendly, I get the feeling of a desktop environment with menus a la windows and problems a la Linux! Totally disappointing! Examples?

The menu is like windows when it could have been like the curtains-menu you probably saw in the Benq S6.

The Application Manager shows the libraries! Is the average user supposed to see this advanced configuration with names like libillumination0 which have nothing to do with the applications I have installed (well, they are dependencies but the user should not really care)…

• Email notifications are quite useful but kill the battery in few hours (using wifi), so it’s now off

Pros

• Not trying to contradict myself with the above points, but it’s quite finger friendly once you change some setting (echowb theme), understand the “workflow” and where you are supposed to put your fingers . I know, it shouldn’t be like this but it definitively grows in you once you get it
• Wonderful screen, good resolution. Device is absolutely gorgeous and the screen is fantastic (oops, I think I already said that)! You have to see it to understand and just compare the style of the N810 with the Benq S6 to see the difference between plastic and metal!
• That’s it I wish I can expand this list in the future

What i would like (or I wished they copied from other successful gadgets)

• USB Host (possible already, but not out of the box)
• 2 memory slots not 1!!!!
• Able to read multiple card formats
• make the keyboard ‘reactive’ to the stylus so the real keyboard can be used instead of the on-screen one
• Use the direction pad for scrolling pages with a simple touch
• Option to show the category instead of the name… I.e. Why I cannot turn something to show Media Player instead of Canola2? Would really help newbies.
• Nokia to show some interest in keeping this platform alive…

-Reda

Interesting Links

Nokia will bring bling and finger-friendliness to Maemo 5

PS: Application Installed/Used

• Default Media Player (often useless when playing radio since a broken connection is not re-established and need to do it manually)
• Browser. Resolution kind of ok, hopefully I will not become blind by the age of 50 using this tiny tiny screen, but it crashes the device very frequently. Cannot check Google Reader without worrying to crash my N810
• Skype
• Canola2 (took a long time to get it working!)
• Kagu Media Plaer
• mYTube
• PDF Reader
• AbiWord
• FBReader
• Maemo WordPy (nice menu - big buttons)
• E-Mail
• CrazyParking
• Blocks
• VGBA
• Scopa (Italian game)