After owning an n800 for about 90 days, and being an avid reader of the posts on this forum, I feel compelled to write about the shortcomings of this tablet.

I get that the tablet is extremely customizable, with its open Maemo allowing developer to come up with some really fancy applications (I especially like the work on Kagu). However, all of these fancy apps cannot hide the fact that the reason why the devs (which are some of you, the users) are working so hard to program these apps, is because the n800 did not come with the apps in the first place.

The n800 browser is extremely slow, which I attribute to its slow processor. Its extremely painful to watch load times of a frequently surfed page, akin to the speed of a pentium 2 on a modem

Dont get me started on the useless webcam. I doubt having a video conference with a bunch of guys on this forum is that appealing to n800 users.

It can't even play youtube properly, without UKMP or orb.

So like all of the people here, we'll have to wait for further updates to the OS or better programs to reduce (not eliminate) this underperforming toy.

Until then, I'll probably be stuck with this annoyances for a while as there aren't many competitors for the pocketable tablet market.

And so will all of you...

agreed, it just doesn't do anything well out of the box... I mean even Windows comes with outlook, internet explorer, etc... OS X has mail and safari, address book, iCal and they all do the basics well to some degree.

I'm hoping it atleast does GPS well with the navigation kit which I'm going to purchase and if it doesn't do that well I'm just going to sell the entire thing off and wait for the iphone...

People keep saying it's not a phone it's an internet tablet... so what the heck does an internet table do exceptionally well?? To me internet tablet just means that instead of a hardware keyboard it has a virtual keyboard or stylus text entry no different than the Palm Pilots. Oh ya how about the fact that you can't use the bloody usb cable to charge the thing seriously Nokia that was a no brainer.

it doesn't sync contacts or even come with a half decent contact management app... I don't need anything fancy my tools are a Palm Treo 650 and Mac OS X and both of those I use the default out of the box contact managers, calendars nothing fancy. I was hoping the N800 could join the bunch but it's been a real pain not to mention the fact that each OS upgrade is like a format and reinstall of every app you have.

I went BlackBerry shopping this weekend... haven't bought one yet but again they do the basics... and then some BB's have built in GPS now... I would even Gladly pay Nokia more money for better software but they don't even give users that option.

Wow, we just cannot get enough of these threads. They are so fact-filled and yet entertaining at the same time!

Obviously neither of you have reflashed your N800s to the latest firmware which supports Skype and haven't bothered to install the new Minimo browser (micro-b) or the new SIP/VoIP package.
And to date I have not seen even ONE mobile handheld device with a "fast" web browser like on a laptop/desktop. Not ONE. Not even the vaunted iPhone has a fast browser.
Show me a handheld linux-based device on the market right now that does VoIP, Skype, and has not one but TWO (soon to be THREE) different web browsers with good battery life like the N800 has?
The only one that comes close to that is another Nokia device....the N95.
Show me one that can actually run a full KDE 3.5.6 window environment?
Show me one that can boot into different window environments from one SDHC card?

Of course, before now the only handheld devices that could run Skype were Windows CE/Mobile/whatever devices that were part PDA, part phone. I've used some of them and the crashes were frequent and horrible. Good luck finding an open-source SDK for WinMO so that one can "fix" some of those problems.
There's a good reason why almost 99% of all WinMo/CE software is commerical, pay-for....to recoup the losses incurred from having to buy the development kit/environment.
Not so with the N800, and for the most part not so with Nokia's Symbian S60 3rd Edition environment.

As far as the developers porting over software because "it's needed" I'm not sure how much that claim holds up to scrutiny. The hobbyist developers here port over apps THEY themselves want, not the majority of users in these forums.
I'm not sure there's a high demand for Frotz/Gfrotz, Battle for Wesnoth, or Star Control II that they should be arbitrarily installed on N800s at the factory or included in firmware.

I'm sorry, but I'll have to respond to anyone thinking they can speak for me in the following manner: Fsck off!
You don't know me or anyone else here Mr. I-just-created-an-account-to-whine-about-my-lack-of-technical-prowness-on-my-N800, so don't pretend to make asinine generalized statements like that about the users here.
I'm pleased-as-punch with my N800. I gives a damn about being able to watch the latest cat-plays-piano video on YouTube. The sites I read on it (Engadget, The Register, Google Reader, ITT, etc.) load up pretty quick. I'm not expecting desktop-equivalent browser speeds because I live in the real world with real expectations of what the N800 is capable of with it's hardware and current software.
Show me another handheld linux-based device on the market that can browse to the main YouTube site and play anything from it all! Show me another handheld linux-based device on the market with Flash 9 on it? I'm not finding one...
And the reason a lot of web pages load up slow is due to a lot of bad user interface design and sloppy javascript programming on the part of the actual web developer who created the site. You do know Javascript itself is single-threaded, right? That means that a site loaded down with Javascript (also known as "AJAX" for you Web 2.0 folks) has to load every single script one-by-one and if any one of those are used to load up a stupid flash ad that's improperly programmed or on a slow server/connection will wind up causing the page to load slow in just about any browser, even more so on a handheld linux-based device.

Also, had you ever seen an "internet tablet" BEFORE the N770 came out that was this size with this battery life?
If you did it was because the words "internet tablet" were in a quotes in a review or magazine article about a much larger device with horrible battery life. Nokia so far is the only one to openly brand these devices as an "Internet Tablet".
There wasn't a real definition of "internet tablet" until Nokia pretty much went out and defined it. And they're refining that definition all the time.

It's no one's fault but your own that you bought a device for which you did not do proper research on before you bought it.
Sorry for the rant but I'm getting tired of folks coming in here and whinging about the N800's lack of this or that while not even mentioning what it can do that no other device in it's class CAN do.

C'mon Tex, a little criticism never killed anyone. N800 does certainly have some room for improvment. I'm afraid Cupertino has definately raised the bar.

Now before everyone starts flaming me, I have a 770 and an N800 - I really wanted these things to blossom. When they came out they were the best handheld 'internet' experience. However, I also have an iPhone ( yeah I know - Spit! ) and I find myself reaching for it more often the the n800 for a quick trip to the net. Why?

Maybe it is the better touchscreen, or just the ui's navigation. Maybe it's easier to zoom /pan ( or at least smoother & more predictable ). Battery life is really good. Does media really well too : ) Camera is decent. *Extremely* pocketable. It's not perfect, it's closed, it's not expandable,etc, but it "just works".

Day-to-day I don't really need to ssh anywhere, don't care for skype or vid conf, etc. But I do like an email client that doesn't suck as much, a quick/reliable browser ( though it has shortcomings as well ) contacts, calendar, etc.

Nokia's IT has soo much potential - I'm sure there are people working really hard on it, but it needs to gain some regular-joe usability before it gets left in the dust by either iphone or the sure to come iphone-like intel-based MID's that are on the way.

The majority of the points in iball's long reply are pretty valid, but I think this last part really hits at the crux of the issue, which is that Nokia has clearly and by it's own admission never positioned the internet tablet as a PDA. If that's what you bought this for then that was your first mistake.

Having said that, I did weeks of research before my purchase and it suits my purposes quite nicely. I knew exactly what I was getting into. I also considered the PDA question and decided that since my work does not require me to maintain a consistent database of contacts and such, the lack of PIM and sync functionality was not a dealbreaker for me. Being a Linux user I also discovered during my research that adding rudimentary PIM functions was simply a matter of loading up the correct repositories and installing the GPE apps if I should so desire. As to the slowness of page loading, I find it to be perfectly acceptable for a device of this size, and unless your used to surfing on a T1 line or something I think your perception of just how slow it actually is is a little exaggerated.

Rather than continue to carry on, let me just close by tagging on to iball's last point by saying that at it's base the N800 is simply a connected device for internet communication and entertainment when a laptop would be impractical or inconvenient, and to try and make anything more of it than that will almost guarantee disappointment.

I cannot talk with such prowess as iball, but I have to say that I'm extremely happy with my nokia n800. I haven't gotten the new firmware even, but I haven't been able to hook it up to a pc. for what I paid... this is awesome, I'm very intriguedmto learn more about it as it goes... that is all

Show me where I ever said criticism was a bad thing.

I'm just teasing these 2 guys NOT for criticizing but for useless bashing. Please. Look at the posts. You call that criticism???

And to end with this:

Well, he lost all credibility there, IMO.

This is really funny. I mean, who am I? I own a 770 and never have the feeling its "underpowered" when surfing or reading my mails/RSS-feeds. (Yes, it is underpowered for other tasks which I simply don't expect a 770 to do for me.)
Is the N800 slower than the 770? Am I slower than Liam1? Or is it maybe that my expectations are different because I know the IT is not my quadcore desktop PC? (Maybe its also because I'm still used to working with Pentium/PentiumII-PCs and still find the speed quite acceptable for the tasks mentioned.)

I think the N800 handles everything it needs to do quite well. Sites load fast, audio/video plays well, scrolling can sometimes be a little laggy, but I think there is plenty of room for improvement in the maemo platform.

Nokia is well known for releasing new models quite regularly, I'm sure the next IT will have a beefier processor, more ram, but you also need to make sure that battery life is acceptable. At the moment I think we're doing pretty good with the N800.

I don't know about you but I like the size of the N800 and the battery life. I'd rather we see optimisations via the platform and associated software (ie: flash) rather than just making the IT bigger and bulkier so we can have more power.

My 2c