I have recently posted about being a business user of the Nokia 770 and Nokia 800. I thought people might be interested in a comparison between uing the Nokia 770/800 instead of a laptop on a recent business trip. The trip involved a lot of travelling in the US (7 flights) and two transatlantic flights.

In my travel kit I had a Nokia 800 (and my Nokia 770 just in case I had a problem with the 800, how it wasn't needed), ThinkOutside fold up blue tooth keyboard, Nokia 6680 3G mobile phone, Belkin Wireless Ethernet Travel Router (for hotel that offer Ethernet but not wireless internet, this turn a ethernet cable into a wireless network).

All though this might seem to be a lot of pieces it was easy to pack the keyboard and router inside my luggage and only carry my phone and N800. These both slip easily inside my coat pocket so there was no need to carry a laptop bag. Having spent a lot of time in airports (thanks to snow storms in the Northwest, sleet in Dallas and the Tornado in Florida) waiting for delayed planes the freedom from a laptop bag was priceless. As was the ability to browse anywhere. To use a laptop you need to be sitting down, to use the Nokia you can be nearly anywhere. I found the battery life exceptional and only once had to perform a "rescue" charge because I hadn't charged the unit fully overnight. However, charging was another area where the N800 scores heavily over a laptop. I can use the same charger for both my mobile phone and n800, it was also possible to get a lowcost (US$49) kit to allow me to charge the n800 in a car or airplane seat. I didn't need it but I could imagine this would be really useful for some people.

Applications:

I was using email and web browsing alot. I found that Slypheen and minimo were really necessary to overcome the limitations of the inbuilt email client and browser. My company has a Intranet that enables me to perform most tasks via secure web pages, however the inbuilt browser can't access the secured pages ( I think this is a common problem); Minimo could but I needed the bluetooth keyboard to enter the username and password because the soft keyboard doesn't work for password entry.

RDesktop, I am amazed how well this works. There are a few minor bugs to do with disconnecting but otherwise I was able to connect to my PC remotely and using the ThinkOutside keyboard work normally - the performance was very good for the tasks I was untaking. This mainly involved access two company applications that are not web enabled.

Entertainment.

One of the hidden gems of using the n800 instead of the 770 (which I have used on previous trips) was the ability to get 4GB of storage. This enabled me to take 3 DVD's (converted to the n800 format) and several hours of MP3 music from my collection. This helped pass hours in planes and airports.

Smug!

The most enjoyable part of the n800 had to be sitting in the airport lounges watching the other business people balancing laptops, or shuffling phones, pda and laptops (even more enjoyable). Lying back and tapping on the n800 was incredibly satisfying.

The other real smug moment is at Airport security. I just took the n800 out of my pocket slipped it in the tray next to my shoes. This is so much easier than digging the laptop out of a bag.

The not so good.

Word and Excel attachments in email messages proved to be a real menace and usually meant having to rDesktop to open outlook on my work PC and then open the file. It was workable but could be improved with some word and excel viewers. I know this is a linux device!

Things I would love to see improved:

A proper contact manager and improved email client, Slypheen while an improvement still means a lot of compromise.

The ability to remove the IM contact buttons and to customise the menu. I don't use IM.

More robust web browser that can access secure web pages and also that doesn't miss so many connections. I frequently got could not connect messages, then I would hit the link again and the page would be displayed.

Support for more media types. It would be great to be able to open avi streams and secured real media streams.


It would be great to be able to plug the n800 into a project in order to do a presentation, however my answer to this was to bring the USB cable and to put the company and product presentations on the memory cards. I then simple plugged the n800 into the presentation PC like a USB memory stick and ran my presentations that way.

Conclusion.

All this are minor issues compared with the absolute joy of not carry a heavy PC (even the light one are heavy compared with a n800) and there by having another bag.

I hope others find this useful.
Damian

Very cool write-up. I ordered an N800 earlier today and have been reading up on this exact use case: replacing my laptop in various situations. Your post is very encouraging in that respect.
As for the office apps, I did notice that there was a port of the gnumeric spreadsheet app to OS2006, but I haven't been able to find an abiword port for Word Document viewing. The latest release of abiword, though, does allow for command-line based conversion of word documents to more open formats like HTML. You could probably use this capability to set up a basic web service that let a user upload a word doc and view it as HTML. Just a thought.
Thanks again for the thorough post.

I've used this service from my 770 to convert both excel and word docs http://www.expresspdf.com/. Extremely easy and works like a charm on the 770.

What would be nice though is for one of our Internet Tablet programming aces to take a Linux app that converts doc/excel to PDF and compile it for our Tablets. Not sure such a Linux app exist, but I'd be surprised if one didn't.

https://garage.maemo.org/projects/docreader/

A tip for Nokia N800 travelers who require an even better battery life: I found out that the N800 is a lot more forgiving (the 770 was quite peculiar in that respect) in accepting charge from those emergency AA(A) cellphone chargers. A single set of 4 AA's will easily double your independence from an AC socket.

Most battery chargers tend to come standard with the "old", big Nokia tip, so get a connector that has the new, smaller Nokia tip (it seems that more and more of the generic AC chargers come with this tip as well, so you could combine the purchase of an extra AC charger with the connector).

Gnumeric for ITOS2006 works perfectly on an ITOS2007 N800. Abiword, it seems, is finally coming (All hail Alexandyr!).

Great to read a real-life adventure like this dbf! Nice work.

Let's hope that they all got the $100 developer code for that.

bac522 and rcull,

thanks for those links. They look very useful I will try them.

Regards
Damian

Karel,

I wondered whether the AA emergency battery back-ups would work. That would be a really useful addition to my travel kit. I have the power adaptor as my phone comes with the "old bulky" connector.

Thanks
Damian