Nokia N810 Silver Review - Design & Features

N810 is fashioned primarily from metal, finished in a smooth two-tone grey color scheme, and is a sharp looking piece of hardware an understated, luxurious sort of way.  By way of comparison, the device measures up at 72 x 128 x 14 mm and 190g, or slightly larger and considerably heavier than an AT&T Tilt, which is just about the bulkiest smartphone currently offered by a US carrier.  But N810 has a 4-plus inch screen and remarkably slim profile, and so the overall effect is that of a device that packs a lot into a small space, and carries with it the heft of a well-built machine.  The tablet exhibited no creaks, loose joints, or flimsy parts of any sort in my testing.  Kudos to Nokia’s industrial designers in that regard.

The first thing N800 users will notice about the N810 is the slide-out QWERTY board.  For my money, this addition makes the N810 a much more usable - and marketable - device, especially considering the touchscreen’s performance, which we’ll get to in a bit.  Typing on the QWERTY board isn’t as great as it should be, though.  The device remains nicely balanced in hand with the board extended, and the buttons are large and nicely rounded, which makes them easy to find and move across with thumbs.  But actually using the keys to write an Email or blog post was less than satisfying thanks to rather mushy key action.  Also, Nokia arranged the keys in a grid instead of the offset pattern that people are more used to from computer keyboards (and typewriters, for you old-timers). Most smartphones default to this straight grid arrangement, but I personally find the few that use an offset layout to be noticeably easier to use over the long haul.

The QWERTY layout’s buttons are almost all double or triple-mapped, which makes the most of limited space.  There’s also a five-way D-Pad and dedicated Menu key located on the left-side of the sliding panel, which struck me as a bit odd considering that most people are righties and so might prefer to man the navigational controls with their right thumbs.

With the QWERTY board slid shut, N810 is basically a web tablet built around a 4.13” WVGA touchscreen display.  The screen’s 800 x 480 resolution yields more pixels than all but the most exotic of smartphones - far more than iPod Touch’s 480 x 320 display - and provides ample real estate for full-on Web browsing and video watching.  For some reason the panel tops out at 65,000 colors and not the 262k or 16 Million afforded by some of Nokia’s phones.  The 65K limitation resulted in color banding across gradients, but only once in a great while.  Display brightness is regulated by an ambient light sensor located on front panel just above a VGA camera designated primarily for Web conferencing applications. 

There are two buttons on the front of the device and four more - along with a sliding lock switch, multi-function indicator light and stylus slot - along the top panel.  These six keys control volume, zoom/full screen image modes, power on/off, and some navigational features.  Most of what you’ll do with the N810 you can do via the touchscreen; the buttons are mainly there as hardware shortcuts for oft-used tasks, like switching between full screen mode and the application menu.  The full screen button, in particular, was super-responsive and handy for reading long blog posts and articles on the Web without any screen clutter from the OS’s menus.

The bottom panel of the device houses a spring-loaded battery latch and a miniSD memory card slot protected by a tethered plastic cap.  On the N810’s sides you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone jack, miniUSB and AC adapter ports, and side-firing stereo speakers, and there’s an integrated microphone hidden in there somewhere.  Front-firing speakers would have provided a better stereo audio experience, but the side-mount design is a decent compromise between form and function.  An integrated kickstand props the tablet upright on a table at your choice of three viewing angles (great for watching videos) and folds flush against the back panel when not in use.

N810 comes pre-loaded with a suite of applications that make good use of its efficient hardware design.  The Mozilla-based Web browser can handle full Flash 9 and Web 2.0 content, so you can watch YouTube videos, check your Gmail, and otherwise do most of what you’re used to doing in a desktop-class browser.  A Skype client makes use of the Webcam, microphone, and speakers for Web-based voice and videoconferencing.  Nokia Maps utilizes the internal GPS chip, and a car mount is included so you can dock N810 on your dashboard and use it like a standalone GPS unit, which is a thoughtful touch (Wayfinder navigation works with the device but requires a paid subscription).  The preloaded media player can handle almost all varieties of audio and video tracks and streaming content, and if the 2GB of internal memory isn’t enough for all of your multimedia content, you’ve got that miniSD port at your service.

Really, the N810 packs an enormous amount of functionality into such a small device.  About the only thing missing here is a cellular radio, though Nokia makes it clear that the N810 was made to tether via Bluetooth to your 3G-enabled Nokia cell phone for Net access without a WiFi connection.  Again, geeky-cool but not necessarily for Joe Consumer.  The N810’s $479 MSRP price tag slots it somewhere in the neighborhood of high-end smartphones and ultraportable notebook computers like the ASUS eePC.

 

 

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