Nokia N810 review

Nokia’s updated N810 ‘Internet Tablet’ is a solid little thing. The big screen’s surrounded by tough plastic, and there’s even a hint of metal about it. Pick it up for the first time and you’ll feel a warm wave of superiority, almost hitting the same stratospheric smugness level of an iPhone user.

Gives a good first impression

Fire up the N810 and that touchscreen seems blindingly bright. You can poke it with a finger to open up the web browser, plus there’s a stylus hidden in the side for more accurate prodding of the smaller menu screens and web links.

The Mozilla-based browser’s good and works with YouTube, with sites appearing quickly and in a unbroken fashion.

The resolution is a splendid 800×480, but even so a few of the icons and buttons on the 4in display are a bit tiny, forcing you to reach for that stylus unless you’ve got fingernails like Catweazle.

On second thoughts

So in reality, you’ll need to use a mixture of touchscreen, hardware keypad and stylus input while mucking about online. Not a particularly user-friendly way of doing things, especially if you’ve got some serious typing to do.

Straight out of the box it’s possible to browse music files you’ve got in shared folders on your desktop PC through the network, then play them back on the N810 – or copy them on the fly to the memory.

A pirated DivX movie file failed to play, as expected, but internet radio will keep you amused and have the N810 happily doubling as a portable Wi-Fi radio about the house.

Hobbled GPS

The N810’s possible killer use of GPS is sadly hobbled – a subscription to Wayfinder is required if you want to use the thing to provide you with directions. You can still have fun finding out where you are in the world for free, although the fact that the N810 isn’t a mobile phone means you’re rather unlikely to bother taking it out with you in the first place.

[MPU]

House-trained

But if you need a capable little media player and internet module about the house, or like checking your emails every ten minutes from the comfort of your sofa, bed, toilet or special safe place, the N810 does the job.

It’s a Skype phone, music player and web browser in one very luxurious little case. Just don’t expect it to replace your laptop or mobile phone.