Nokia N810 Screen Shots

Ethan Estrada

August 26, 2009 - 5 minutes read - 993 words

Here are some screen shots to assuage your curiosity and give you an idea of what this nifty little device can do. Keep in mind that somethings may be blurred out to protect sensitive information of others and myself.

Here is the main page of the tablet. As you can see, there are a number of widgets that are both pre-installed on the machine and that can be download from the maemo.org website:

From Nokia Tablet

The file manager is both simple and intuitive. Moving files is as easy as dragging and dropping or opening up a dialogue to decide which folder to place a file. Creating, renaming and deleting files and folders is similar to a desktop operating system like Windows, MacOS, or a desktop variation of Linux (i.e. Ubuntu, RedHat, openSuse). Anyone who has ever used a computer before of any type should find this system simple to navigate and use:

From Nokia Tablet

You’ll notice that in the bottom left hand corner of the next image, the tablet is suggesting what the rest of the word that is being typed might be. By simply touching the word on the screen, the word is completed. The Nokia actually learns what words you type most and begins suggesting those as well. This function is present in any text field that is being typed in, not just in the file manager. I have found that this feature works well and learned my word preferences quickly:

From Nokia Tablet

There is an internal memory card (2GB) that is separate from the main memory. It can be used to store files and/or be used for extended ram to speed up performance. A separate MiniSD card or MicroSD (using an adapter) can be added as well. They can be either standard format or SDHC. I assume that it will show up in in the file manager in a similar fashion to the internal memory card:

From Nokia Tablet

The file manager will also show you any shared drives of any machines on the network you are currently connected to (you can set your sharing preferences on your tablet so you don’t have to share all your files with everyone on the network either):

From Nokia Tablet

Interestingly enough, when I connected my tablet to my desktop via USB, WMP (Windows Media Player) saw the tablet’s internal memory card as a syncable media player. This makes sense as the tablet is preloaded with a simple, but powerful media player that supports mp3, wma, avi, mpeg and other formats. It can also play DRM laden files via some business deal Nokia made with RealPlayer (I dislike DRM altogether, but at least my N810 can play nice with it when it needs to). So, I synced my music collection. WMP even created a file structure so all the audio files were placed by Artist and Album. The only problem was that after WMP had finished, the Nokia file manager saw my internal memory card as read only! I couldn’t move files from my main memory over to my card, have the web browser save downloaded files there or anything else involving writing to my memory card. Bummer. I backed up the files, reformatted the card and dumped the files back on it. The card can be written to again, so everything is hunky dory now; it would have been nicer not to have had to do the work around in the first place though. I will have to try to figure out what happened, use a media player that is free and open source, or simply drag and drop my files myself. Probably one of the latter two.

The media player is simple and powerful. It reads the Artist and album information without any hitches and organizes the files inside the media player (without moving the files from their original location) according to that information. So far, I really like the media interface and have found it play pretty much anything I throw at it; the one exception being ogg vorbis, but a quick plug-in download fixed that in no time. So far, so good:

From Nokia Tablet

Overall, I am loving this little device. Still some hiccups in the phone calling department. It can be done, but it requires workarounds; ugly workarounds. I will post a full update on that situation soon. I am optimistic as to the result. Adios until next time.

4 comments:

Derrick August 26, 2009 at 9:37 PM

give songbird a try for your free and opensource media syncing software: http://getsongbird.com/ I’m not sure if it supports plain USB drive syncing yet or not, but I believe they are planning on having it soon.
Derrick October 3, 2009 at 11:43 PM

So How’s the experiment going? I just got my google voice number and also got Gizmo working on my netbook. There’s something about a 3 minute call length limit though? still workable I think. I’m not sure if its for all calls, or just outgoing.
Ethan October 4, 2009 at 2:03 PM

The 3 minute limit is only a problem for calling directly out of gizmo once you have associated your google voice with gizmo on the gizmo website. However, if you use the click2call function on the google voice website and use your gizmo number as the number to call you, then there is no charge since gizmo sees it as an incoming call and not an outgoing one. Does that make sense?
Ethan October 4, 2009 at 2:11 PM

I should also mention that the 3 minute call limit is not in effect when people call you on your google voice number and it rings your Gizmo number. Again, this is because gizmo sees the call as incoming and thus doesn’t charge you anything. However, you do have to associate your Gizmo SIP number through the google voice service.