Talk About Nseries

As I mentioned in Part 1 of my review, the Nokia N810 runs ‘Internet Tablet OS2008′ based on Linux and Maemo 4.0 instead of Symbian S60 which is the platform most other Nseries devices use.

Naturally, this brings a completly new user interface and experience which I will try to show to you in this part!!!

Read on for more!!!

When you start up the N810, you are presented with a standby/home screen (Shown above) much like S60, but where you would have the active standby screen, you have a large area where you can drag and drop different widgets. These can be moved wherever you want on the screen with the stylus and could even overlap giving lots of flexibility.

There is a decent selection of widgets you can choose from, but you cannot download any more which I think would be a great feature to have. A widget you can expect to find by default when you get the device is the search box enabling you to search for websites faster than navigating to the internet browser and a ‘Get Started’ widget.

The ‘Get Started’ video is fantastic and an excellent move by Nokia to get a newcomer used to how to navigate and control their new device!

Up on the top right of the screen you will find the Status Bar. This will show you the current status of your internet connection, battery, volume and GPS. By tapping on these icons you have the ability to control them from whichever application you are in.

To the left there are 3 icons. The first (globe) will give you access to the internet browser and your bookmarks.

The second icon will give you easy access to your contacts, your email account to create/send emails, start an internet call or start a chat!

Finally, the third icon gives you access to all of the applications available on the internet tablet.

The applications are seperated into six different categories: My selection, Internet, Communication, Utilities, Settings and Extras. I was disappointed to see that there were no real office applications pre-installed onto the device. You do however get a basic ‘Notes’ applications and a PDF reader. I think that there is a lot of potential for a really good office document viewer/editor on this platform and would be great if Nokia supported this natively.

Applications can be moved to whichever category you want - applications that I have installed onto the N810 automatically were put into Extras by default.

To multitask, an icon appears in the bottom left of the screen. By clicking on this, all of your open applications and web pages are listed so that you can switch between them. Every application has a ‘File’ menu much like a PC. To access this, you tap on the symbol marked with 5 lines (highlighted in the image above). To minimize the the application you are running, just click on the arrow next to close (X).

The user interface of the N810 is really easy to use, understand and navigate around and it didn’t take me long as a complete novice to get used to how to use it. I think that the screen is also a huge credit to the UI. Its sharp picture, great colours and of course the overall theme make this an attractive platform to use.