Not particularly.

Reference needed.

+1

It took 'em six months to offer them for sale in Australia... What third world countries does he speak of?

Greetings:

The Nokia N800 was not that popular in Canada in 2007.
About the month of July 2007 it started showing up on TigerDirect Canada.

It seems that many people in Canada are not too current in understanding Linux driven devices.
But 2008 will change all this.

Regards Robert

Robert:

I think you are wrong.

There are lots of Canadians posting on this group. The problem has been buying the tablets in Canada. Nokia Canada refused to sell or service (I have an email from them) the 770 and only recently started carrying the N800 and N810.

If you wanted a tablet then you had to find a way to get one from the States and forgo any warranty service - which was kind of critical for the 770. I felt sick whenever I thought I might have had a white screen of death ...

I am not sure that I would count availability from TigerDirect.ca as a good signal that the N8xx has finally arrived in Canada. Now, if I saw them over the counter in FutureShop ...

Cheers,

Don.

Nokia N800 from Dell.ca
Nokia 770 from Amazon.com

(Added): Whoops, sorry for the OT reply.

ncix carries them as well, Dell, and ca.buy.com.

Here is what I see happening this year. Most of the MID's I'm seeing do have quite a bit to offer. Take a look at the 810. To me, in canadian dollars, it's usually 479-499, and I think it should be 329 tops. It's overpriced by a large margin. When Sony comes out with it's MID at 299, which has a keyboard, not to mention other MID's to follow, that 499 pricetag of the 810 is going to be crazy.

Then there's the itouch. Jailbreak it, and it's a cool device. A faster one too at 600+Mhz. Smaller screen yes ,but with it's install base and popularity I see it as growing much faster as the NIT's, and do not forget the hacking scene, which to me have always been more agressive then the open source scene. I expect to see an overwhelming amount of apps for hacked ipods in the next 12months.

Add everything together, and Nokia has got it's work cut out for it. it needs to get all of it's @#$@#% together RIGHT NOW, not next year, NOW or they'll be lost in a sea of competing and better internet tablets.

Huh. I did NOT buy an iPhone nor iPod Touch specifically because the virtual keyboard implementation sucks. The N800's thumb keyboard at least lets you have a full screen app ... you just have to switch back and forth (which is both annoying and limiting). But the N810's keyboard is definitely an improvement over the N800.

The N810's keyboard could be a little better (more definite click feel, and softer pressure required), but that aspect of the N810 is a definite improvement over the N800. No more switching back and forth between thumb input and viewing the application itself. No having the usable screen space consumed by the keyboard (like the apple implementation). I wouldn't want to have to go back to a keyboard-less device.

The dpad placement, though, was definitely better on the N800. Put the N810's dpad back in that location, and add a second dpad on the right side (mirroring the first dpad's location), and give 3 of its buttons/directions the functions of the button cluster ... make the other two "soft buttons" (like the soft buttons on most cell phones), and all would be better.

But, whatever Nokia does, and for all of the things they SHOULD steal from the iPhone (finger friendliness), they absolutely should not steal the keyboard implementation from the iPhone. That aspect of the iPhone is absolute crap.

What they should steal/borrow is the intelligent word guessing. That would be really useful

They do have word guessing .. it's just not that intelligent :-)

Yeah, but it beats not having one at all