I just recently bought a N800 and the NavKit late last week.

I am increasingly having difficulty finding my N800. Mysteriously it moves around by itself.

It appears my wife has started using it. She laughed at me and called me a geek when I tried to explain why I wanted it. But now she is starting to see the benefit of being able to jump on the net using a nice small device. ("Hey do you have your net thingie... I want to look something up".)

SO... my plan is to just let her get more and more hooked. I'll even let her borrow it to take out sometimes...

Then when the new model comes out... I'll buy it and give her the N800.... <insert evil laugh here>

But seriously... I think it's funny how in just a few days she has already started to understand WHY I wanted something bigger than a cellphone/iPod and smaller than a laptop. (Although I could do with something a little bigger. I have to laugh at the people that advocate using something with a smaller screen and claiming that to be completely acceptable. It's not. I think something about the size of a paperback book would be perfect.)

It's just not a proper evil plan without friggin' lasers...

Well, that's why Nokia worked with I-Tech on the N810.

(Joke! Joke!)

I will duct tape the N800 to a mutated sea bass when I give it to her.

This is exactly what I've found too, far from being a geeks-only gadget, the tablet actually has a lot of mainstream appeal.

I wish Nokia would stop marketing it as some kind of programmer's tool, it's actually something that's very accessible to people of all skill levels. In fact I'd say it's far more accessible than (for example) Windows Vista.

they probably will once the eager pool of beta testers has helped them perfect it.

there are quite a few devices around which run linux and "noone" but us geeks notices: tomtom go GPS, tivo, older linksys boxes, sony mylo...

I think for the purposes of viewing the web the N800 is already better than any other pocket-sized device. It's already good enough to go mainstream in that respect.

The stuff that still needs work are the procedures for finding and installing apps, and there ought to be better official software for transferring music and video (why doesn't the N800 work with Nokia PC Suite for example? I certainly can't get it to work.).


True, but I don't think any of those quite have the mainstream pick-up-and-surf appeal of the N800. Those are all very specialist devices, whereas the N800 seems to be deliberately browser-based without much in the way of PDA-style software.

I actually think that's the future for mobile devices, that one day all we'll have is a browser with a radio transmitter attached to it, with all the software running on servers accessed through the browser.