« Professor Layton and the Curious Village | Main | Building Websites »
April 30, 2008
Nokia N800
In my quest to get a decent hand held e-book reader, I've tried using a PDA (which wasn't bad but the screen was a bit small) and the Newton Message Pad 2100 (which had a large enough reading space but was painful to get books onto it). Both were adequate but still weren't the solution I was searching for.
Then about a month ago, a friend of mine (Hi Rory!) told me he wanted to sell his Nokia N800. I had looked at this device before and was pretty impressed with it's capabilities but it ran about $400 (I think) when it came out. This was way more than I would have spent on it at the time, but I was able to buy the N800 for $100 from my friend. I jumped at the chance.
As an E-book reader, it fits all of my criteria. It handles plucker style e-books (which I get from project Gutenberg), PDFs (I'm currently getting free pdfs from Tor Books on a weekly basis), and plain text formats (for most other files). It is comfortable to read on and it has a wide screen which can be fully utilized. So in the E-book category it is working superbly.
But since it is an Internet tablet, it does so much more! I can browse the Internet, play games, and even play music on it.
The Internet browser works well for most pages. Occasionally I find some odd problems, but they are usually minor. I use this feature mostly to get my e-books from Project Gutenberg, but I have just browsed around on the Internet with it. I have also setup the RSS Feed agregator to get my favorite news feeds.
For games, I have downloaded a sudoku program for it (which is tolerable), a version of Ataxx, and ScummVM. With ScummVM I have been playing Gobliiins on it, but I really need to find my copies of Monkey Island 1 and 2 for it.
The only music I have played on it so far are Internet radio stations. I probably won't take much more advantage of the music playing features for two reasons. First it only has a 2 GB SD card in it right now. This isn't even close enough for my pitifully small music collection. Second, and perhaps more important, I really like to use my iPod for podcasts, music and video. In fact, lately I have been using both together by browsing the internet on the N800 while playing some podcasts on my iPod.
So, I think I finally found the solution that works for me. :)
Posted by Kaishaku at April 30, 2008 02:24 PM