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Nokia's Linux-powered N800 Tablet Sneaks Out

Posted by CmdrTaco on Sun Jan 07, 2007 10:26 AM
from the don't-lick-it dept.
Handhelds Software Hardware Linux
sjvn writes "Officially, Nokia Inc.'s new Linux-powered N800 Internet Tablet doesn't exist. In reality, it's already for sale in the United States and boasts double the RAM and Flash Memory of its predecessor and it has a faster processor to boot."
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Nokia's Linux-powered N800 Tablet Sneaks Out 50 Comments More /

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  • Will it totally replace the 770, or will it be a big brother?

    I hope it brings the 770 price down a touch, its just over my novelty price bracket at the moment.

  • Finally... (Score:3, Informative)

    by mriya3 (803189) on Sunday January 07 2007, @10:32AM (#17497694) Homepage
    more information at http://thoughtfix.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com]
    I hope it features a powered USB connector (unlike the 770)

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by dakkar (128056)
          Not a phone. That thing you can see in some pictures sticking out on the left is the foldable stand, not an antenna.

          You can use a BlueTooth keyboard, at the expense of battery life. If they made the USB controller act as a "host" (it does not in the 770), you could use a USB keyboard. None included in the package, anyway.
          • I hope there is some kind of Psion 5-sized usb-keyboard. If those two could be combined in some kind of holder, I'm sold. (The Psion 5 has always been my favourite in size and usability, because of the excellent keyboard. I've used it for about five years, but then the display broke, and the replacement broke in less then a year.)
          • The thing sticking out of the left is the camera, not the stand.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jmorris42 (1458) *
          > Here's a question, will it be a cellphone out of the box and take sim cards?

          Your question is asked anytime this product is mentioned. NO! The second it is a cellphone it will be a closed platform, the cell carriers won't accept an open phone on their networks, period full stop. Use bluetooth to talk to a cellphone to get net or do VoIP via 802.11.

          > And keyboards of some kind.

          One word, BlueTooth. Really, this is why they invented Bluetooth, so why reinvent the wheel?

          > Heck, even a video out por
          • The second it is a cellphone it will be a closed platform
            so.. this thing [trolltech.com] by your definition isn't cellphone then?
            • Yeah, my impression was that all the supposed "we can't let you touch this or you'd screw up our network" stuff can be encapsulated in a separate piece of hardware running unmodifiable firmware, and the chip that actually runs linux (or whatever) would get some sort of serial modem-like interface to that hardware that would let you place calls and transfer data and so on without having to know all the details of how the radio network works.
              • > ..encapsulated in a separate piece of hardware running unmodifiable firmware, and the chip that actually runs linux (or whatever) would
                > get some sort of serial modem-like interface..

                So if you stick a phone and the computer in the same housing but otherwise seperate them they will allow em to share the screen and battery. Wow. If your carrier even allows a phone they didn't sell onto their network... if it is compatible with their network. And when a new high speed service appears you replace bo
          • This only happens in North America. Here in Malaysia we have, as an example, the Motorola A1100 that is Linux based and not at all closed.

            Nokia's market is not limited to north America by any means.
      • The 770 could do USB host, by running flasher --enable-usb-host-mode. I expect the N800 can do this too.

        Of course the socket isn't powered and you need a weirdo adaptor to plug anything in, but it does work.

  • skip the blogspam (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2007, @10:41AM (#17497752)

    as the link in the submission doest even have any pics just fluff leading to the real article here (with pics)

    http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS9981902594.html [linuxdevices.com]

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Emetophobe (878584)
      There is a video of the N800 in action on this guys blog [tokash.org] (I'm not promoting this guys blog, just found it through google). It looks pretty cool, but one of my concerns is the battery life, previous models suffered from a short battery life (3-4 hours between recharges). Hopefully Nokia addressed the battery life with this model.

      Also, that blogger was playing a video on youtube on his N800 and he said, and I quote, "UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Youtube videos play at a brutal 1 or 2 frames per second. Yu
      • The videos from youtube might play @ 1 or 2 fps because the tablet is used to decode the video frames.

        Would it be possible to turn the n800 into a passive receiver, all decoding done somewhere on a server and only the frames displayed on the tablet ? =>strong central computer and "passive" receptor... I'm sure I saw it somwhere, maybe in vlc ?

        Would be ideal @home where I have some computing power available...

        Still no strong IR emitter to turn the tablet into a universal remote... Anyone knows of a 8-10 m
    • Thanks for the pictures!!

      Reading the article and posts, couple of hours ago, just after submission, I thought this was 'THE ONE TO GO FOR'. Would make my ideal moving maps / GPS platform.

      But now having seen the photos, IMHO it's a pretty lousy design. I love the technology behind it, but just the design doesn't appeal to me at all. And you pay big bucks for being an early adopter, so the design better be right.

      It has all this rounded off, soft cornered look and feel. Which IMHO doesn't match with the rest o
      • my ideal moving maps / GPS platform.

        Buy one. Buy it today. Buy a bluetooth GPS receiver. Install Maemo-Mapper and configure it to download maps. Happy Happy Joy Joy. Crunch GPS map goodness.
  • I'd be curious to see how fast this unit runs in real life. I purchased a 770 to run small flash presentations/slide shows, and it performed rather dismally. Not the market I'm sure, and I love the concept, but if your going to have an internet/s tablet it needs to be able to see typical content...

    • No Free Power Lunch (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fm6 (162816) on Sunday January 07 2007, @12:18PM (#17498400) Homepage Journal

      Do remember that ultraportables deliberately sacrifices performance in favor of battery life. They'll always be inferior to bigger machines in raw processing power.

      That said, I would think that a 220 MHz processor would be fine for most Flash presentations. Perhaps the ARM implementation of the plugin is less robust than the Pentium version. Or perhaps you're doing fancy animation that overtaxes the system.

      And don't make the usual mistake of fixating on the CPU as the sole provider of application performance. Any application uses many different resources, and a bottleneck in any of them (in graphics applications, it's usually the video adapter, not the CPU) will screw you over.

      • Re:No Free Power Lunch (Score:5, Informative)

        by msh104 (620136) on Sunday January 07 2007, @01:17PM (#17498924)
        try the mplayer port (with basic gui)
        http://mplayer.garage.maemo.org/ [maemo.org]

        it is said that it runs 25/30fps when running optimized movies..
        (there is a conversion script out there too..)
        • Transcoded a movie from DVD to this format using the script to which you refer. It uses mencoder. The movie was about 2 hours and widescreen format. Output file was 400MB.

          I can't speak to how good this looks on the device, but it looks ok and sounds ok for TV output on my linux box.

          I use ffmpeg to transcode DVDs to mpeg to play on my Treo 650. The Treo is not an ideal platform for video playback.

          Completely separate subject, I'm having trouble getting matrixview to work. I think reencoding a video in

            • You mean the perl script on the site the grand parent linked?
              No idea where you might find that...
    • I mentioned this already elsewhere, so I will just link to my previous comment: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21551 4&cid=17498444 [slashdot.org]
      Youtube videos run at 1-2 frames per second if that's any indicator of processing power.

      • Re:Processor (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Sunspire (784352) on Sunday January 07 2007, @12:37PM (#17498588)
        Probably it's a problem/limitation of the Flash plugin, and can therefore perhaps be fixed, because the device itself plays Xvid/Divx at decent resolutions and framerates.
        • A question now comes to me: Does it uses the flashplugin from Adobe, or it uses an open-source implementation?
          • It's not an open source implementation, so it's probably the Adobe source licensed by some other company and ported. I can't recall what company offered binary Flash plugins for embedded devices though.

            Remember that writing a compliant Flash implementation is very tricky, the rendering model is very precise and simply saying "I'll use Cairo/GL/X/etc to draw" results in an incorrect implementation.
  • What about just the lightest, foldable-smallest, cheapest tablet that is just a high FPS streaming/VoIP/VNC client with WiFi? Everything else but the AGUI can go on a server, if the WiFi can keep the streams over 24FPS and the audio over 80Kbps, with minimal jitter and framedrops.
    • Even if the Wifi bandwidth can sustain it, high Wifi usage is a battery killer on many devices... Higher compression or some features provided locally can actually make it lighter while still useful. It's a tradeoff and I note that you didn't mention battery life at all. P4 laptops were also quite cheap and they had those wonderful fans and > 90 W chargers :-)
      • I'm sure eliminating everything but the video, soundcard, network, Flash/cache and minimal CPU make for a lot more WiFi and a lot of extra weight capacity for 8h battery.

  • Sounds good, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MikeRT (947531) on Sunday January 07 2007, @11:05AM (#17497916) Homepage
    I had a 770 for a little while, but it was just too slow and unstable to really enjoy. When it wasn't crashing, it was often too slow to do anything really cool with besides surfing the web. Even that was pretty slow. I hope for the sake of the N800 that it has really addressed a lot of that because it would make for a killer gadget for a lot of people. In fact, if they have addressed most of those issues, I might get one.

    What I am curious about is the processors in some of the PocketPC handhelds like the Axim are pretty powerful. Why didn't they go for similar hardware specs in the first place with the 770? With those, they might have been able to get embedded Qt instead of Gtk.

    • Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by mbrubeck (73587) on Sunday January 07 2007, @11:15AM (#17497980) Homepage
      The latest OS upgrades have made my 770 a lot more stable and a little faster than it used to be. It's still slower than I'd like. I can't wait to try the 800.
      • True, but it's still too slow to be useful for anything. I have one. Still trying to figure out what to do with the thing. It is neither fish nor fowl. If it were lightning fast it might actually be useful for viewing web content (if you have good eyes). Even though it does run linux, there isn't much out there for it software wise, especially if your not a geek type person.

        It looks like Nokia is taking a page out of Microsoft's book. Version 1, utter crap - Version 2, almost useful, Version 3 - DRM'

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by antime (739998)
      The OMAP ARM+DSP combo is what Nokia use in their telephones, so they basically used what they had and know. The choice of GTK+ was probably due to the programmers on the project (at least some were recruited from the Linux iPaq project, which uses GTK+).

    • What I am curious about is the processors in some of the PocketPC handhelds like the Axim are pretty powerful. Why didn't they go for similar hardware specs in the first place with the 770? With those, they might have been able to get embedded Qt instead of Gtk.

      and that (choosing qt over gtk+), pray tell, what would have accomplished? I'm not aware of benchmarks showing incredibly blazing speeds of qt over gtk+ on the embedded platform.

      by the way: don't try the "gtk+ is slow because of cairo": the 770

  • Better Photos (Score:4, Informative)

    by Henry 2.0 (1017212) on Sunday January 07 2007, @11:18AM (#17497990)
    Better photos over here [carrypad.com]
  • At least the price point is within reach. I'm looking forward to it! Esp. all the hacks that are sure to come down the pipe! SSH to my server and get some work down from the crapper!

  • Video (Score:4, Informative)

    by nursegirl (914509) on Sunday January 07 2007, @11:45AM (#17498146) Journal
    One of the people who owns one has posted a video [tokash.org] of it booting and some general use. It looks slick.
  • anyone any idea if it supports voip calls (sip or h323) ??
    • There was a big announcement about supporting GoogleTalk [blogspot.com] on the N770 last year...I guess it works, but I can't find anything about it on the actual GoogleTalk site. I'd assume the 800 supports it too.

      I nearly bought the 770 last year, but decided to buy a XV6700 [mobiletechreview.com] instead. After playing w/ the 770 awhile, it just seemed to need a few extra bells/whistles (e.g., a camera - which the 800 now has), and the size/resolution of the screen wasn't that much better than the 6700. (Plus my carrier made the latter re

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by chill (34294)
      GoogleTalk and GizmoProject both work on the N770, so I'd be surprised if they don't support the new N800.

  • Looks like an improvement all right (Score:5, Informative)

    by tjcrowder (899845) on Sunday January 07 2007, @01:27PM (#17499032) Homepage

    I have a 770. First off, it's brilliant device, I love it. Definitely using it on my next long-haul flight rather than the built-in video players on airplanes. (I wouldn't use the built in video player, but mplayer has been ported to it and plays 400x240 movies full screen [hardware pixel doubling to fill the 800x480 display] at full fps, 128k audio, and about 500k video. Very watchable, and a full-length movie fits on a 1GB MMC with plenty of room left over for a couple of TV shows.) And of course there are various PIM style apps available for it over at maemo.org [maemo.org], not to mention VNC, xterm, ssh, ...

    From what information we currently have (including the pics and video referenced above), I have to say I think they've addressed several of the biggest issues with the unit, specifically:

    • Moved the ports to the side - on the 770, they're on the bottom, which is a problem if (say) you're plugging the 770 into an external amplifier to play some tunes, and want to put it on its stand so you can see what's playing. You have to put it up right at the edge of a book or something so the audio (and, frequently, power) connections coming out the bottom have room to protrude. Dumb. And fixed with the 800.
    • Faster processor. Yum. The 770 definitely has speed issues depending on what you ask it to do.
    • More built-in flash RAM -- excellent.
    • Built-in stand. Very good idea. The little stand that comes with the 770 is fine, but not convenient to use. Looks like the built-in stand has at least two different tilts, as well, which is good.
    • Stereo speakers built in. Very nice, the poor little one in the 770 does surprisingly well, so I'm guessing the 800 sounds pretty good (for what it is).
    • Built in webcam. Excellent. Now it's a videophone!

    From the good close look we get at the connectors in the video nursegirl linked to [tokash.org], the USB connector is still unpowered. Frankly, I'm not sure how big an issue this really is. Yes, it means you can't use your existing USB keys with it even if you had an adapter cable, which -- true -- is less than ideal. In terms of other devices, you wouldn't want to power an external keyboard of the poor little 770's battery -- you're better off getting a little portable Bluetooth keyboard. I haven't felt the lack of the power on the USB port yet.

    Looks like a great upgrade, good to see Nokia thought it was worth pursuing the product line... I hope the next focus is on software -- improving the handwriting recognition, doing some Nokia-tested and certified PIM apps (calendar, etc.), improving the little desktop area, etc. Doing this device with Linux, documenting the API, and fostering a development community were all masterstrokes, but you can't leave everything to the community, too many users won't be able to handle the complexity (not to mention that, er, some ports are done better than others...).

  • I am provocative here, but think about it, in terms of specs not target. The specs are VERY similar. Yes, the form factor is different, but many things are definitively similar. The biggest difference is the price, Nokia being 2.5x more expensive. Is it really worth? I hope OLPC will show that you can produce these tablets at reasonable price and drive the overall market price down.
  • After reading this thread and the lined stories (yeah, i RTFAd), i called CompUSA who confirmed that the store closest to me had 7 in stock - despite it not yet being on their web site. i drove down to the store and the employee i talked to said it didn't exist - and as proof, pointed to their web site. i recounted the call to CompUSA, including that i'd clarified with the guy on the phone that it was an N800, not an N80 (a common mistake); the guy called his manager, who checked some other inventory system
  • I'd like to use it for browsing my recipes and playing music mostly, but being able to watch TV, even on a small screen, would be nice, too. But, I see it's an ARM processor, so the atrpms site won't have a precompiled install. Has anyone tried to compile mythtv from source for a Nokia 770 or this new 800?

  • Sell your 770 now (Score:3, Informative)

    by rgavril (805158) on Monday January 08 2007, @08:02AM (#17507002)
    Nokia is slowly dropping support for 770. Looking on maemo.org's faq [maemo.org] you can see that OS2007 won't run on 770.

    4.10. Can I upgrade the OS 2006 of my Nokia 770 to OS 2007 ? Unfortunately that is not supported. Internet Tablet OS is still evolving fast to support the desirable hardware and software features for ultra portable computing with Internet Tablets - things like bigger memory configuration, webcam and finger use in OS 2007. At this stage fast development with early and frequent releases is preferred over design compromises to support wider range of older hardware.
    • I second you, brother, as a compatriot. Under the equator line it's quite hard to get a decent portable computer at a decent price. The best PDAs we have are those (*argh*) microsoft-based ones. Palm's LifeDrive, besides being expensive, totally suck stability-wise. If the guys at hackndev.org make WiFi work with Linux on it, however, I'll buy another LifeDrive in a snap. Zaurus are even harder to find here in Brazil than in U.S., and I believe Sharp is missing an important market by keeping us out of the m
        • My first palm was a 72, which I traded for a LifeDrive, which, after driving me to the brinks of madness, was stolen. Then I have my current palm, a new zire 72. LifeDrive without the suck, without the WiFi and without the big screen, but better anyway :)
    • Had the 770 (and now the N800) been a cellphone as well, I'd be on this device like flies on ... well, I'd buy one. I had a word with one of the Nokia developers and they couldn't see why having an integrated GSM/GPRS transceiver wouldn't be better than having the 770 AND a separate cellphone communicating with each other either via Bluetooth or what-have-you. The savings on the number of items in ones pockets alone is enough reason to go integrated. Add to that possible incompatibilities with Bluetooth imp

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