View Single Post
Posts: 479 | Thanked: 58 times | Joined on Dec 2007 @ Dubai, UAE
#23
I'm in a little late on this, but here are my impressions, seeing that I received an N800 from my wife for Xmas and bought her an iPod Touch for the same occasion. Being the man of the house, it also meant that I was the one to set up the device for applications, videos and music.

For the record, I am running a Transcend 16GB SDHC card as internal memory, and will be getting another 16GB SDHC in the coming month.

Syncing Music

iPod wins with iTunes, since it rips and syncs in a no-brainer fashion (good for the wife). The N800, on the other hand, has a customizable interface (Canola) which I prefer, and I can use MS's SyncToy to sync the folders that I want -- a video folder containing files converted by the N800 Video Converter, and specific folders in my iTunes folder. However, the N800 comes back as it supports OGG. I'm wondering if it supports WMA as well.

Oh, and contrary to an earlier post in this thread, I also get to enjoy podcasts, courtesy of Canola 2

Syncing Videos

iPod Touch falls flat on its face here. I have a number of anime fansubs and DivX movies that I can easily and quickly optimize for the N800 with the N800 Video Converter, and then just sync (or copy using MS File Explorer) the movies over to my N800.

Because I can set up multiple syncs in a single profile in SyncToy, I can get it to sync my videos to the external SD card and my music and pictures to the internal one, or vice versa. I have tried downloading iPod-formatted content off various torrents and have found the quality to be much poorer than what I get from my own conversions, and I have yet to find a video conversion tool that would get me small filesizes (700MB down to 400 MB or less) and get the conversion done as quickly as with N800 Video Converter. Videora wasn't a good solution for the iPod and I've written off getting movies onto the Touch.

Battery life

Battery life on the N800 for watching movies is downright disappointing. Watching a single episode of Bleach (half an hour?) resulted in a Low Battery warning. I could go on for at least 4 episodes on the iPod Touch before any kind of warning comes up. This might not be such a big problem as I am looking for a portable emergency charger that allows me to use a AA battery to charge a Nokia phone (claims to be able to offer another 2 hours of talktime from a single AA battery), and then jigging it to run 12 AA batteries which I can store in my backpack for flights and long trips. More to follow

Connectivity

This was the clincher for me. I work for an integrated telecommunications service provider, and enjoy unlimited data as a staff benefit. With the N800, I don't have to go around hunting for WiFi hotspots, and simply connect my N800 to my Nokia E51 and connect using HSDPA/3G.

And I get VoIP (Gizmo, Skype, MSN, Yahoo) and good IM with the N800, which I don't get on the iPod Touch unless I tried a jailbreak (which could void the warranty of the unit).

And I get to use my SE BT headset (not an A2DP one) with my N800 for VoIP calls. Since the N800 isn't properly supporting A2DP at the moment, it's on par with the iPod Touch where Stereo BT is concerned.

3rd party apps

Doesn't exist for a legit iPod Touch, but there are tons out there for the N800. Enough said.

Web Browsing & Email

Again, the N800 wins (in my book) because I am not dependent on having a WiFi access point nearby that I can log on to for getting online. IMHO, browsing with the N800's Mozilla web browser (is it really Firefox?) feels more natural than browsing the web on the iPod Touch where I have to keep resizing the page to get to what I am looking for.

With a BT keyboard, I'm going to enjoy composing and replying to emails more than I would on the iPod Touch, although I usually just use the built-in mail client for Gmail (IMAP4) and the Mail For Exchange client for office push email anyway.

Ultimately, once I overcome the battery life issues with the N800, and get my other 16GB SDHC card, it's going to be the near-perfect device for me

Last edited by ghoonk; 2008-01-02 at 09:19.