Nokia N810: 3 Months In

Tech 1 Minute

I’ve been using my Nokia N810 for a few months now. Though enough time has gone by for the initial “Shiny!” love to wane, I still carry my Nokia around with me everywhere I go.

Why? Because it’s fulfilled everything I wanted it to do:

  1. Replace my forest of small notebooks: Check. I’ve gotten much better at typing on the built-in keyboard, and still enjoy swapping back and forth between using it and trusting the handwriting recognition to make sense of my scribbles. It’s great to be able to jot down a story idea, then come back and fill it in later, all on the same machine. Oh, and I can carry around a single list of all the books I want to buy/read, so when I’m in the bookstore I don’t have to worry about remembering the title of “that great book I read a review about six months ago.”
  2. Serve as my primary ebook reader: Easily. FBReader is an awesome piece of software (for reading non-DRM’d books), and the Garnet VM lets me run my Palm-OS Mobipocket Reader in full-screen mode. Now if only I could buy more books in electronic form!
  3. Replace my iPod: Check and double-check. That’s right, I gave up my Apple Shiny for Linux. I buy my songs on Amazon’s MP3 store, download them to the 8GB card I’ve got in my Nokia, and use Canola to play everything back. Canola’s got a nice user interface, and even recognizes the .ogg files I’ve ripped from CDs!
  4. Read (and respond) to email away from home: Check. I can not only look at GMail in regular (non-mobile) mode, but revise my Google Docs and respond to any forum discussions I’m involved in. The Nokia’s browser renders web pages flawlessly, and connects to local WiFi hotspots without trouble. I only need to take my notebook if I’m doing some programming. Otherwise, the laptop stays at home.

Published by Ron Toland

Ron Toland grew up in West Texas, where he learned to love libraries and hate cactus (it knows what it did). After a long spell in Southern California, he recently upped stakes for British Columbia, where he swears the rain is just fine, really.

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2 thoughts on “Nokia N810: 3 Months In”

  1. Glad to hear! I remain tempted by that shiny thing…

    Does Canola work as a podcatcher for podcast feeds, or is there another program for the unit that will do the same?

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