I got N810 two days ago but lacked time to write about it.
Hardware
At first I was thinking that N810 is heavier then 770 but Ross told me that it is not true — device is smaller so it feel like that. I took kitchen scales and checked. N810 is lighter then 770 with cover indeed.
Good things
Overall look is nice. Good selected colours; nice, very bright display. Screen dimming/lighting based on light level is nice addon. Integrated stand (also present in N800) is useful and it also cover not so often used ports/slots (battery lock, memory card slot, micro USB connector). I also like fullscreen and zoom keys order — same as in 770 so I do not have to learn other layout.
Lock screen/keys key is nice thing. It was present in many Sony devices before (as “Hold” key).
Stereo speakers are nice (770 had only mono speaker) and plays loud enough.
Bad things
Keyboard… Lack of “Tab” key, no padding between keys, D-pad is available only with slider opened, no numbers row. And top row is too close to case :( Overall using of keyboard is not comfortable. I have to compare it with some HTC phones one day…
Top keys present on bottom part of device instead of on top one. With slider open it is hard to reach them.
Mini-SD cards — I wonder which card format will be used in next tablet. 770 had RS-MMC which nearly no one else used, N800 had 2 SD slots which was best option. N810 has one slot for mini-SD card and 2GB internal card. I would prefer second slot instead of that internal card as 4GB cards are quite cheap today.
Not decided good or bad
GPS is something which I will not comment. Have to make comparison with Neo1973 GTA01 first.
Micro USB connector means another cable to take care of but looking at case it probably be hard to use Mini USB one.
I did not tested headset which was in package.
Software
OS2008 looks nice. It is clearly visible that Maemo developers tried to make it finger friendly. Sometimes too much and in other places not enough.
Good things
Hard to tell what is good in OS2008. I used OS2005, OS2006, OS2007 ‘hacker edition’ before on 770 so I have nothing to add here yet.
Bad things
Locale system is like it was in all previous versions… You cannot have 24 hour clock with “English UK” region, you cannot select own date format etc. And I did not yet found a way to hack it to have Polish region (package which works on my 770/OS2006 does not works with OS2008).
Applications menu cannot be switched to look like it was in OS2008 (not finger friendly) so with few more apps installed I have to scroll menu list.
No DivX support in MediaPlayer :( I had to install MPlayer to watch Monty Python Flying Circus.
Internal contacts application failed to import phone book from my cellphone. It told “file too big” on 600KB file ;( Filled bug.
First experiments
First was PowerTOP. As other NCurses based applications it fails because there is no terminfo database installed on device. Also there is no kernel support enabled for collecting timers statistics so I had to flash it with my kernel (which recipe is present in Poky). After all I re-flashed device :(
Second was MPlayer (maemo version). There is “nokia770” video driver written for 770/N800 hardware but on N810 it tells that no hardware is present. After some research I found a reason — it parses /proc/cpuinfo for “Nokia 770” and “Nokia N800” strings to check. But it lack “Nokia RX-44” check for N810. After manual change in binary it now works ok on my tablet (not that it was non-working before… it was but with XVideo output). Filled bug.