Yesterday I received a Nokia N800 Internet Tablet as part of the Nokia Blogger Relations program. Unlike everyone else who did an unboxing video, I decided not to spend time making a video of a box and what's inside. But here's a picture this morning on my desk.



The first thing I did was upgrade the system to the current release. I've set it up for WiFi and paired it with the N73 (my current primary N-series phone).

The setup was mostly easy, but with a couple of minor twists. Parining it with the N73 over bluetooth was easy. Getting it to use the N73 GPRS link required proper setting of the GPRS settings.

Perhaps most distressing was the documentation. What came in the box isn't in English. But I sat at my computer and grabbed the right PDF to step through that. And Nokia has a series of flash setup tutorials online that make it incredibly easy to get the basics working.

I installed Gizmo and did a couple VoIP calls, both outbound from Gizmo to the PSTN and a pure VoIP call with Andy Abramson last night. He's in France and it was morning for him. The voice quality is superb. There's no other way to descibe it. If you're a Gizmo user and want to here for yourself, my ID on Gizmo is ken_camp. Add me and we'll do a test call, but it has to be when I'm in WiFi range, not over the GPRS pairing through the N73. I only use Gizmo for IM in that mode.


The browser works well in my use so far. The built-in email client does a nice job of handling POP3 and IMAP. It looks like it can easily handle multiple accounts. I'll set that up in the next few days. Themost difficult part seems to be figuring out how to import an Outlook address book.

GoogleTalk support is built in and the Contact section is loosely based on that. That explains part of the Outlook issue, as the contact setup just isn't a extensive as Outlook. That's an issue because there isn't an easy way to synch contacts. That's a problem in my view. With 2000+ contacts in my address book, I'm not at all keen on manually updating. I'd expect that to change with maturity in the device and as more solutions and conduits are developed.

This weekend I'll be ordering a couple more memory cards and a bluetooth keyboard. I've been delaying the keyboard out of laziness and will be using it for a mobility project I'm working on. I'll share more on that soon.

I haven't had a lot of time to play with the deviceyet, and I'm swamped right now. But it's up and working and I'm very impressed. And in my mobility project, I'll tell you more about why I think it's an important tool.


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