I love my N800, but the iPod Touch I was given for the holidays is making me see how much better it could be. The hardware is outstanding...16gb of user storage, beautiful screen, decent battery life, and an accelerometer. And of course it's about as thin as my N800's battery!

The first thing I did was jailbreak it and install a number of apps. Every single third-party app I've installed has been totally polished and relatively zippy. Even the RSS reader I installed runs circles around the frustrating stock one on my N800.

The "jailbreaking" process itself is pretty simple...and the Installer app that get installed as part of the process is quite elegant. Similar to the Application Manager in maemo, Installer peruses "sources" (repositories) and pulls down new apps as well as checks for updates on your currently insalled apps. Adding sources is much easier than in OS2008...it's just a URL.

There's not a ton of system memory for application installation, but it's decent. And there are already a number of useful/fun dev ports...like Apache/PHP and a Python runtime...in addition to common utilities like OpenSSH, DropBear, ncftp, and others. There's also a decent terminal available, and the device can be mounted as an AFP mount point on any mac, which is really nice for file transfers over wifi. The developer community isn't as deep as this one, but it has produced some admirable apps and games. One particular standout is Labyrinth...which is a version of the classic wooden game where you tilt the board to navigate a steel marble through a maze. But in this version you tilt your device to roll the marble around, and it's extremely accurate. The Solitaire clone that's available is also fantastic, and great to use in landscape mode.

Of course, it's not perfect. The jailbreaking process is obviously not sanctioned, and will inevitably be blocked by Apple's next firmware...until it can be hacked again. It doesn't have much of an external speaker, no external mic, and no built-in stand for viewing media. It doesn't have bluetooth, so I'm stuck with wifi. And no removable battery means at some point it'll have to be taken apart. But I love its "finger centric" navigation, and the fact that it works as a good music player and OK movie player (extremely limited formats) is nice.

I'm not saying I'm selling my N800, cuz I still love it. Opera and microB are fantastic mobile browsers! And the bluetooth functionality makes it far more networkable. But its many idiosyncracies has kept me from using it as much as I'd like. OS2008 is a major improvement, but there are still a LOT of things that bug me about the N-series...particularly its lack of finger-centric apps. I also find it a lot of work customizing it. The things I really want to customize, like hiding/removing the "Presence" apps/icons...which I have no desire to use on the device)...aren't customizable.

I'm not sure why I'm ranting like this. I guess I just want to communicate the sheer awe that this device inspired, and made me wish the N-series competed better in some ways. But the best part is that I can communicate with the people who help shape Maemo to make this happen...you! That's simply not an option with a closed device like an iPod. Sorry to ramble...

Apple did a great job of raising the user interface expectations for every other vendor. They tend to be good at that.

If the iPhone/iTouch had fully functional bluetooth and if I could make it useful without jailbreak and without being slaved to iTunes and a PC, it would be in my hand already. But the UI is awsome.

Yes the iPod Touch is a great synergy of hardware and software. My friend had one and I was tempted to get one as well, it was either the Touch or the N800, but then the N810 came out and changed the game, I decided I wanted that over the other two. So a few days ago my N810 came and I haven't looked back. Going from a UMPC (UX180P) to the N810 makes me feel like the N810 GUI is very well suited to touch/finger navigation. One of the testaments to that is that the amount of pressure required to register an input is pratically nothing compared to the touch screen on the UX180 and other touch screen devices that I've used. Its so good that it feels almost like active touch (like on the iPod Touch). I love the easy multitasking on the N810 that the iPod Touch doesn't really have. The web browser supports nearly full desktop rendering which is awesome.

Speaking of web browsers I'm still using the one that came with the N810, you said Opera and microB are great, are they better than the default, should I install them?

Also, hasn't anyone looked into make a web browser/app that acts similarly to the iPod Touch so we can make use of many of the iPod Touch web apps? I'm extremely jealous of the Google implementation. They made an amazing iPod Touch web interface for things like Google Reader, Mail, Calendar and nearly all their other online apps and I wish I could use it. Ironically because the site detects the N810 as being a desktop browser I get the full version and can't access the iPod specific version.

Agreed.

Agreed.

I believe that the browser on the N810 is MicroB.

I thought the default browser was Opera. I may be wrong about that.

My guess is that since MicroB is based on mozilla, you can spoof the user-agent to be an ipod touch to get access to those sites. (Why they actively prohibit non-Safari browsers is beyond me.)

Can you be more specific in the spoofing? I'm not very experienced in hacking stuff up ^_^

The Nokia N810 is just so much more computer tablet than an iTouch. Anyone who has researched and reviewed all these devices will know this. For anyone that hasn't already realized this, there's really no more explanation that can be provided. You either get it or you don't. If you don't, then just get the itouch..

Its not "nearly", its actually "full", since the default browser in N810 is microB, which sports a Gecko 1.9 engine a.k.a. Firefox 3. You can have full JS/Ajax experience if the CPU can handle it. In this line of thoughts - The iTouch/iPhone screen is too small to be able to use normal sites without special modification.

ipod touch is a nice toy, but i dont see how you can compare it to an internet tablet. yes, its smaller, and looks better, but the actual usability stops there, not to mention that you have people working against you when trying to make stuff for it compared to actual support