WOM World, MobileCampLA, and the Nokia N800

Backstory

One day while checking my email I stumbled upon a message that was too good to be true.

The email was from WOM World and said, amongst other things, that they had some spare spaces available to a Nokia-sponsored mobile technology conference in LA and would like to invite me, a mere blogger, to attend the event with them.

The risk of being inundated with more spam was by far outweighed by what reward that could materialize if this display of generosity was genuine — a free, all expense paid trip to an industry conference in LA.

I bit the bullet and hit reply, and I’m glad I did.

WOM World sent me a couple e-tickets and shuttle passes for a trip to LA, where my luxury hotel room at the Marina del Rey Marriott was awaiting my arrival.The day before the conference, I was introduced to my British hosts Richard and Shiva, and my fellow netizens, Jeremiah, Mike, and Al. After the necessary (in)formalities, we set off on a whirlwind tour of LA that included all the major attractions:

The next day we attended an Unconference titled MobileCampLA. The schedule was spontaneously filled with tech talks by several noteworthy names that I should have had the forethought to jot down.

My current research project supervisor’s paper on the Skype protocol somehow found its way to the event:

MobileCampLA was not all tech talks and dry science. The most entertaining portion of the day was most definitely the random business idea competition, put on by Halfbakery.com, where we were given a set of random words and were allowed fifteen minutes to extract a business plan.

The plan we came up with was LaserMessage – a mobile 2d barcode laser projection system that could both project and burn barcodes on walls, clouds, and kittens.

Later there was another cool event where people answered mobile tech-related trivia questions and received really sweet prizes like N800‘s and N95‘s. With some help from my table buddies, I managed to SMS in a winning answer. Since I already had an iPhone (academic research equipment), I decided that the tablet was the way to go.

Unboxing

What’s in the box? From left to right, top to bottom – a suede-like cloth carrying case, a USB type A to mini 5 cable, an AC adapter, two documents that I tossed after taking this picture, the N800 device itself, an extra stylus, a battery pack, a headset, an SD card case complete with miniSD card adapter and 128MB miniSD card, and a coupon for three months of free Skype Out.

Hardware

Front

On the left we have 2D and 1D rocker pads. The rest of the front is dominated by the touch screen and grilled metallic stereo speaker facade.

Back

From the back we can see the removable rear panel, the stylus, and the retractable stand.

Behind the panel there’s an internal SD slot and a user-replaceable battery.

Left

The left side of the device houses the pop-out, rotating video camera.

Right

The right side of the device houses the stylus silo, the headphone jack, the power connector, and the mini USB port, cleverly hidden behind the retractable stand.

Bottom

On the underside of the device, there is an external SD slot cleverly hidden under the retractable stand.

Top

The top houses the microphone and power, forward, maximize, and back buttons.

Build Quality

The N800 is well built. I’d put the build quality somewhere significantly above the MacBook and slightly below the iPhone. The front has a metal overlay, which is a nice touch, and the rest of the unit is made from a high quality plastic composite material with a matte finish.

The haptics of the device are quite good. Sliding the triangular stylus into its perfectly fitted silo has a very satisfying feel, and pressing the silvered buttons emits a solid, muted click.

Software

Upon bootup, the phone asks a few questions to tailor itself to your needs, such as timezone and language. It also sets up bluetooth pairing. The tablet successfully paired with my iPhone, but none of the functionality one might expect from a successful pairing exhibited itself during my trials. This is probably because the iPhone is crippled by Apple/AT&T, making it impossible for customers to use the phone as a data conduit.

The phone comes with a multitude of applications built in, including a media player, RSS feed reader, image viewer, file manager, Skype, Rhapsody, Gizmo, Google Talk (with video?), and the Opera web browser. There are several more generic applications preinstalled, such as “clock.” More applications can be installed using Application Manager, but at the time of this review there were only a handful of applications to choose from. It is also possible to add applications from websites, although I haven’t found many websites with downloads compatible with the N800.

My favorite feature of the applications is that they almost all sport a “full screen” mode that can be activated using the full screen button on the top of the device. With one touch, movies, websites, and pictures can take full advantage of the vast amount of screen real estate.

My biggest criticism of the device is that the user interface is unsuited for mobile use. Everything looks like it belongs in a stripped down GTK desktop application and feels like it was ported from a desktop environment without being optimized for the mobile user. All of the applications exhibit tearing if the view changes too quickly. This even happens in simple scrollable text lists.

Skype and Opera seem to be the only applications that put some thought into their UI. Nokia needs to do some in-house work to really show off what their platform can do. It definitely has potential, but the execution on the software is not very inspiring. Fortunately, it’s an open platform, and improvements are always around the corner.