interesting! do keep us informed on how it works out for you!
Short answer: not very well, actually...
Longer answer: Apple changed the handheld device landscape forever.
The other day, Jerry Holkins, aka Tycho Brahe, said this:
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It's got to be so annoying to compete with Apple, at anything really, because it's not like they're doing something fucking crazy. Everybody's had these ideas before. The difference, and this is grim if you are a competitor, but the difference is that everyone else spends a lot of time (and often, money) determining why those things aren't possible. And then it comes out, for real, only you didn't make it. Some other guys did. And when you come out with what is (on paper) a better version of the same thing, maybe even multiple times over, it's too late. You made a "product" to compete with their "product," tastefully arranging your regiment, only to discover that they hadn't made a product at all - they made a narrative. A statement about how technology should interface with a life.
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The Nokia N810 was obsolete the day it came out.
You see, it came out in October of 2007. The iPhone came out in June of 2007. The iPod touch came out September of 2007.
If there's one thing that disqualifies me from technology punditry--and there's not just one thing, there's a lot, but bear with me--it's that I have a long history of being wrong about Apple. I'm probably still wrong about Apple because I refuse to buy any of their devices. Honestly, I didn't realize how wrong about Apple I was, though, until this week when I realized that I was being haunted by the specter of Steve Jobs.
This isn't just a tale of Apple superiority, really, but of Nokia mediocrity. The N810 lacks the ability to be used as a conventional phone, in that it is always on 'speakerphone'. I made a test call, fortunately in the privacy of my own office, and held the device up to my ear as one does--only to have the sound blast out at the same volume it plays music at and makes the UI sounds with. I had just sort of assumed it had a 'phone mode'. No, I guess we are expected to use a headset instead. You know what; I already
have a device that can make calls over the Internet using a headset; it's called my freaking computer. If I'm standing in line at Neomonde and my phone rings, I don't want to have to fish my headset out of my pocket and hope that the bluetooth connectivity actually works. I want to answer my phone.
The N810 lacks the capacative touchscreen of the iPhone. Using a stylus is fine if I'm going to be sitting down in a chair at a coffee shop, but not if I'm chatting with my friends and we want to look up who it was who played in that movie we saw last month. Whipping out a phone and swishing the thumb a few times is casual; breaking out the stylus and hunching over the screen is not.
The N810 has a GPS receiver in it. However, said receiver was so slow and so fiddly that I never quite got it to work right. It also uses out-of-date maps from some lame map vendor. Hello; if your map doesn't even realize that I-540 connects with US 54 and has since I moved here over two years ago, you fail.
The N810 cannot sync with Microsoft Exchange. Like most office drones, the only way I know that I'm supposed to be somewhere other than in front of my computer is my Outlook calendar. Although I wish our company would switch to an open format, the convenience of allowing anyone to put events on my calendar that will then pop up and remind me that I'm supposed to be in some meeting is hard to deny. When people complain about this, the standard response is "the N-series is used for multimedia and for the Internet. It's not a PDA". OK, fair enough, but if there's anything that's clearly a multimedia device it's the iPod touch and
they managed to work it out.
Perhaps most perplexing is that if the N-series is indeed intended for multimedia, why is the media player such weaksauce? I can't play Pandora, playing video is an exercise in frustration, and if you have more than fifty songs on it then finding the one you want is way more annoying than it should be.
This ultimately is the failure of the device: its own mediocrity. Buying one device that's only
OK at everything means that I will be frustrated and outclassed wherever I turn.
"But wait", you might ask, "didn't you extol the virtues of openness? Wasn't that supposed to be the future".
Yes. However, the device's failings are primarily hardware in nature. It's a vicious cycle: the hardware limitations drive developers away, so although it might be possible to work around a lot of these problems in software, the incentive just isn't there.
The N900 recently came out, and it sounds like Nokia has fixed some of these problems. Well, they fixed the "doesn't work as a phone" problem by making the N900 a phone--it has a quad-band GSM radio--but it's expensive and still clunky.
Ultimately, it seems like the device I want doesn't exist. The iPod touch does some of it, but it's not an open platform and the software ecosystem is severely limiting. Android devices do some of it and the platform is nominally open, but most Android devices are phones and require a contract. The Nokia N-series is probably the most open commercial device I've seen in a while, but the lackluster design and above limitations make it a turn-off.
I think Google is getting close. The successor to the Nexus One, whatever and whenever it may be, may very well be sufficiently tempting.
Until then, I'll be Skyping it up from my desktop and carrying my aggressively underfeatured phone with me everywhere else.
(If you're wondering about the fate of the N810, while obviously in my above post I was quite starry-eyed about it the rational part of my brain still suspected this might happen, so I made sure to buy it from a place with a generous return policy. I will be shipping it back tomorrow (after, of course, wiping the device clean so my personally-identifying information doesn't go with it)).
