last friday, the Nokia N810 from the maemo developer program arrived. I didn’t get a chance to do much more than charge it before I had to leave for Potsdam. On the way there, the Maps application already proved to be useful for finding a place to eat. It didn’t prevent us from missing an exit on the motorway, but it was a great help when recovering from those errors.
The performance of the device, especially the POI search, and acquiring a lock on the satelites was awful, and installing aditional applications such as skype didn’t work with the original firmware version. After updating the device to the latest firmware however, it worked quite nicely.
The hardware is tremendously slick and feels extremely solid. The only slight criticism is the keys on the slideout keyboard: The keys are slightly dome-shaped, and that, combined with their smooth surface means that my fingers ocasionally slip onto neighboring keys when typing. The backlight on the keyboard is fantastic though. The screen is also pretty stunning and the touchscreen works quite well, as long as I don’t use my fat fingers on it.
Quite easily the best thing about the device however is the contributed 3rd party applications like skype, canola, quiver, doom, scummvm and others. Quiver is an image viewer with lots of little touches like kinetic scrolling that make it rival or even surpass what’s available on the iPhone. Canola is a nice integrated “pocket media center” type app with a great thumb friendly fullscreen UI. More about different apps when I’ve had a chance to try them out.
I can’t wait to get access to the campus WLAN with the N810. With network access in different places around town, this thing could really begin to shine. More news as it happens…
