Hello people,
I have been looking at the N800 for a while. I wanted to know if it was for me now I have found it for £150. So here are a few questions;
1. How limited is this device? I mean will it display alot of internet pages? I hope it does being an internet tablet
2. Alot of people are saying they are getting a "Out of memory message"?
3. Will it play music off Myspace?
4. A few people in the forums are saying their headphone socket has broke and now there is only one channel of sound coming through. How often does this happen?
5. Also people have said it has stopped there memory card working. How often does this happen.
6. I would like to play RPG games and the odd point and click style games. Are there any games for this.

These are all of the questions I can think of for now. Thanks to anyone who replys

Just out of interest, do you happen to hang around on #mercenariesguild on freenode?

You sound like a good candidate for the N800. I don't use it much for videos, but I have seen some killer performances by the group Pere Ubu on YouTube, for example. The hardware problems you mention are extremely rare. I mainly use it for listening to mp3s, browsing the web, reading ebooks. I don't play many games, though it seems like a new game is made available every day. I'm sure that is an exaggeration.

Get an N800!

Only you can decide if it's for you. But . . .

1. Yes it displays all the web pages that I have tried.
2. I have never gotten an out of memory error. I've set the swap to use some of the miniSD.

Haha thanks and no I dont hang around on "#mercenariesguild on freenode"?
So will it play myspace music?
Does it sound good? With some better head phones of course.

Thanks for the fast reply guys.

Guess you must be a different Silverfox.

Yeah i've never heard of that website/place

It's important to note the dates of posts regarding some of these things; things have been both fixed and broken at various times.

I'll take a crack at your questions, referring to the latest official release of OS2008, and, where noted, to the next OS release, Diablo*, which is due by the end of the second quarter.

1. WRT internet access, it's pretty good. Flash is just a touch slow for Youtube and the like. Works excellent for many flash games. But it does have Flash, and it's the whole thing, not Flash Lite. It's missing ready Java support; there's some stuff available, but it's not at all newb friendly. For any normal web pages, it does quite well.
2. Without links to know what they were talking about... You can run out of storage (flash) memory, or out of RAM.
   • The former was an issue for me, but for very few others. (I installed a lot of programs, including a build environment to compile software on the N800. Most people cross-compile apps on the PC.) If you run into that, you can setup booting of the SD card, with GBs of space instead of 256 MB. It's an advanced procedure, but anyone who manages to fill up the 256 MB is an advanced user.
   • Running out of RAM is more prevalent, if you don't enable swap. You will probably want to get a Class 6 SDHC of some size (I've got a 16GBer, but that's overkill for most people; 2 GB is plenty for a lot of stuff.) and set 128 MB of swap on it. This effectively doubles your memory, and lets you run a lot more browser windows, PDFs, etc. Not a problem, in my experience, once you've got swap.
3. I have no clue here. I play music from my SD card, and don't hang out on Myspace.
4. I think I've heard a total of 3 people with that complaint. It's very rare, though obviously a major inconvenience if it happens to you.
5. There was, in olden days (last year), a revision or two (several?) of OS2007 that had faulty power management; they could forget they were in the middle of a long transfer to the SD card, reduce the power to the card, and brick the card. That was fixed in the latest OS2007 versions, and has never been an issue in OS2008; there have been occasional reports of an SD dying (I've even had one go zombie for a week), typically if the tablet is rebooted while writing, but just the same troubles as with a computer or anything else.
6. I'd rather play a game where an RPG is a weapon, not a genre. But there's an ANSI truckload of RPGs on the N800; some native, and some emulated. Not sure what exactly you mean by point and click style...

Oddly, you didn't ask about:

• The touchscreen; there's a lot of people irritated about the touchscreen handling in OS2008. However, this is reported to be dramatically improved in Diablo.
• The VGA camera; lots of noise about the camera. For taking pictures, forget it. (That said, it can be used to take pictures; and it's real nice for figuring out if an 890nm IR laser is working. The pictures it takes are just worthless except in optimum (outdoor) lighting.) It's not really that good for taking video; frames get dropped (no one is quite sure why), and so the audio drifts out of sync. It is OK for video calls, as long as you are in a well-lit area. It recently (last week) has been made to work with Flash; what practical meaning that bears is unclear (perhaps recording video to youtube via flash will work better), but it's progress.

* Several people affiliated with Nokia are currently beta-testing Diablo; also, I am about an hour away from getting a development version installed on my N800. (It was inadvertently made publicly available last weekend, and several of the more hackerish people around here got it downloaded while it was available; most of them have it installed already, but I was deep in take-home finals, so I'm doing it today.) That's where information on it comes from.

Wow thanks for all that.
Are the series 6 card just faster read/write cards? Swapping is just a feature that allows you to use the flash cards as RAM right.

You said it was slow for youtube. I have watched some videos online with people with this device and said as long as you let the video load up its fine/smooth.

I never knew the screen was an issue for anyone. I don't mind about the camera I won't really use it.

Class 6 designates write speeds (to a clean card) of at least 6MB/s. Class 2 and 4 are similarly defined. There are no classes higher than 6; so whether it's 6 or 12 MB/s it's still Class 6... It actually say nothing about read speed; read speed is always much faster than write, but need not vary much between low-end (non-classified) and Class 6. In practice, a cheap card is a cheap card, and generally slower reading as well.

Exactly. Ideally, that wouldn't be necessary, so it qualifies as "just a touch slow" IMHO.

Mainly it relates to the on-screen keyboard; a lot of people have trouble with doubling, and also it senses whether to bring up the finger-board or stylus-board depending on pressure, and that's pretty bad right now. Most people have to press/thump/smite the screen rather harder than normal to summon the finger-board. Both issues are largely fixed in Diablo, though, so you don't really need to worry.