After the first initial impressions about the new Nokia N800, here comes a full review.
Introduction
I used to own a Nokia 770, the predecessor to the N800, and was very happy with it. Of course, this review will compare the two devices every now and then, but I will try to keep it interesting for those who don’t already know either of the two devices.

Hardware
The 770 had a very robust appearance, almost like a piece of industrial hardware, and I never lost a thought on that I might break it. The N800 looks far more fragile and delicate and I am quite afraid to snap it.
Sure enough, the N800’s case is made of high-quality material. This is not a toy, this is a high-end product. But will it survive when dropped on a floor? I wouldn’t want to try.

This time, the stand comes attached to the device. And it’s very practical, too!
Worse, the N800 comes with a soft fabric sleeve that offers no protection to the screen. While this sleeve looks a lot better than the ugly sock that was supplied with the 770, I miss an equivalent to the 770’s slide-on hard cover. Let’s hope that PDAir will come up with another bag that will take care of that, since my 770 PDAir bag was a perfect fit that offered good protection to the device.

This is meant to protect a 400 € device?
You may have read elsewhere that the 770 and N800 screen is gorgeous and I can confirm that it is. High resolution of 800×480, small size – perfect to read a normal web page or a PDF document. This is the best screen on a portable device of this size I have seen so far, and I can’t understand why other PDAs, phones or video iPods still use the typical 320×240 QVGA format.
The 770 and the N800 both use bluetooth and wireless lan to connect to the internet. So you either need a bluetooth-enabled phone or an access point. The N800 comes with full BT keyboard support and it works excellent (much better than the third party BT plugin for the 770).

Much better than with the 770: Bluetooth keyboard support comes pre-installed for the N800. Perfect!
The N800 comes with a lot of very welcome upgrades. The 770 was fast enough for my browsing needs, yet the N800 comes with more CPU power and twice the RAM (128 MB plus an optional swap area of the same size on the internal memory card). The 770 used to have only one memory card slot for the not-so-common RS-MMC format, the N800 upgraded this to two slots for standard-format SD-cards.
These are the most common memory cards on the market right now, so you can buy a lot of memory cheap. My N800 now runs on 2 x 2 GB of additional memory.
At the moment, the N800 is bound to the SD size limit of 2 GB per slot, but some people are reporting that a non-SDHC 4 GB card works already and that SDHC cards larger than 2 GB might work in the near future.

The external SD slot cover feels more fragile than the 770. I hope I won’t snap it one day.
The N800 uses the same charger and battery as the 770, which Nokia also uses for many of their phones.
This pragmatic approach is what I like most about this device: Nokia uses a standard USB cable, standard batteries and chargers, standard memory cards, standard headphone plugs and I guess that the headset microphone connector is non-proprietary enough, as well. (Ok, so the batteries are Nokia’s own standard, but still:) You can buy parts very cheaply once you need to replace them. And you have a choice among third party suppliers. (Don’t get me started on laptop battery formats, and pricing. Or non-replaceable iPod and Palm batteries soldered into the gadget!)

Three Nokia devices, three different charger plugs. Why can’t they agree to use just one within the company?
The most obvious change is that it now comes with a small webcam for video conferencing. I would have preferred a built-in GPS receiver over the camera.
It’s a pity that the USB connector still cannot be used to charge the N800 (while more and more gadgets allow this).

USB: Too bad it doesn’t charge.
Software
The N800 runs its own flavour of Linux called Maemo Internet Tablet OS 2007, which is based on Debian. Being a Debian/Ubuntu Linux user, I felt right at home and was happy to find many third party applications written by other developers, ready to install using the tools I was familiar with. The User Interface based on the popular Gnome desktop is called Hildon, and Nokia claims that porting existing Gnome applications to Hildon is relatively straightforward.
I found the Hildon user interface a bit clunky. Anyone familiar to the typical Windows-desktop user interface will have no problem using it. But still it is a weird mixture of icons, buttons and nested menus where UI design choices are inconsistent even within the applications pre-installed by Nokia. (Am I just nostalgic or is the Palm UI still the most straightforward pen-based user interface so far?) I never really liked the 770 UI graphic design, yet the N800 looks even stranger: Of the four pre-installed N800 UI themes, two are rather wacky, using babyblue or bright purple widgets. I guess that’s a matter of taste, but it didn’t meet mine.
The original firmware comes with a browser based on Opera and several internet applications such as an RSS reader, a mail client, a streaming MP3 player etc.
I find myself mostly using the browser. People have complained that the browser supports “only Flash 7”, but I disabled the Flash player, anyway, as I don’t do a lot of Youtube browsing. To me, it’s surprising that a non-Intel Linux device has such good Flash player support, at all.
The mail client should be nice enough if you get few messages, but my business email address gets way too many messages to handle them with Maemo’s mail client, so I use webmail on the N800’s browser, again.

The camera. I wonder how to use it with desktop Jabber clients? Hopefully, the Skype client will support video – once it is released.
Another nice application is the Jabber client while on the road. Its addressbook is not very practical if you have many people in your contact list, though. (Or is there a way to hide offline users? I didn’t find that.) I don’t know what to think about the camera and its use for video conferencing, since I didn’t find out how to connect to a desktop client with video, yet.

Ich glotz TV: Watching TV recordings on the go.
The wonderful hi-res screen should make the device a killer mobile video player, so it’s a pity that the device cannot play video in full 800×480 at 30 fps. The pre-installed video player software is rather limited and while mplayer was able to play higher resolutions and bitrates on the 770 (mplayer is not yet available for N800), it didn’t reach the full resolution of the screen, either. While I wish it would support better video playing, it’s certainly enough to watch a TV recording on the go.
Conclusion
Nokia again and again explained that the 770 and the N800 are not phones, but internet tablets. I have tried and used several PDAs and their pen-based operating systems in the past years, among them Palm, WinCE, Qtopia, Windows XP Tablet. Compared to those, despite Maemo’s occasional clunkiness, the 770 and N800 offer a great combination of brilliant hardware and a promising, hacker-friendly operating system.
The device is perfect for reading on- and offline and very nice for watching lo-res video while traveling. Thanks to cheap memory cards, it can handle a lot of data to carry around. I use it a lot and I am very happy with it. It’s a great all-purpose tool. It’s a full Linux computer with far more RAM and storage than the computer I used to run Windows 95 on just a few years ago! It is far cheaper and lighter than a laptop or a UMPC, uses cheap standard replacement parts, has a better UI than a UMPC, is less limited than a typical PDA or phone.
But it is meant as an internet tablet and so it’s too bad that internet via cellphone is quite expensive here in Germany. Also, more and more WLAN access points are secured, so that I don’t find access to the internet as often as I wish I could. (An Ogo may be a better choice in Germany and elsewhere if you need a cheap, totally mobile, yet limited gadget.)
I guess it’s not quite yet suitable for an end-user once you wish to add third-party applications to it. Third party software installation on Maemo is rather difficult and despite Nokia’s efforts, I miss a user-friendly “distribution” site that combines all tested applications at a central .deb-repository, similar to Debian’s and Ubuntu’s central package servers offering stable and bleeding-edge distributions for easy access.
Right now, one has to hunt several different sites for .deb-Packages, edit the sources.list, use a hidden “Red Pill” mode, sometimes switch to “R&D mode”… And yet, upgrades to the system, as far as I understood, are not distributed as incremental package updates through the official repository, but via full firmware blob releases. Quite impractical. Maemo needs a Release Manager!
Should you buy it? If you understood the previous two paragraphs, definitely. If you didn’t, probably not yet. While you might like the N800 it if you’re not familiar with Linux, you will like it a lot if you are.

Update: Here are some more thoughts on the N800 after a few weeks of using it.