I’d intended to do a full review of the N800 last spring, but events – in the form of an disagreement with large canine as to who was to get through a door – overtook this. So I will restrict this article to some observations on the machine which I’ve had in daily use for most of the last nine months. I’ve recently moved on to the N810 but still use the N800 around the house. I’m about to upgrade the N800 to Diablo to provide a like-with-like hardware comparison with the new N810, but here’s some early notes I never got around to publishing. I will add to them after the Diablo upgrade.
The Good
A not-too-closely-guarded secret of the N800 is that it has a built-in FM radio. No, not the control electronics with the actual receiver built-in to a custom earpiece assembly, but all the radio gubbins built in the device itself. Thus you can use any old earpiece or headset as the antenna. You can even get the stronger FM stations out of the speakers with a short bit of metal electrically contacting the 3.5 mm jack socket. For some reason Nokia have chosen not to feature this bonus in the official spec. The software control widget is pretty nifty too, and enables you to speedily identify and store the FM stations.
The N800’s battery is a 1500mA BP-5L which is the same as used in my Nokia E61 phone, the N770, and the E90 Communicator. This was a great bonus (while it lasted) as I only needed to carry one spare battery, and could use the E61 as a charger whilst using the N800 around the house.
Standard SD Cards, and no less than two slots (one internal, one external) is great! The internal SD card is arguably easier to swap out than the external one. That’s because the back comes off in a trice, and the battery isn’t in the way. And yes, with the OS upgrade to Chinook, you can use SDHC in both slots. Meaning more storage than you have a right to expect in such a tiny computer, and at a price per gigabyte which seems to fall every month.
Re-flashing the machine with Chinook gives a noticeable speed boost to the CPU (400MH/z) putting it right on par with the N810. That sort of proves that both machines share the same basic hardware.
The Bad
Unfortunately when you upgrade the operating system to Chinook you’ll run into bad on-screen keyboard bounce problems. It seems like Chinook was optimised for the N810 screen and hardware keyboard with little back-testing. This means constant use of backspacing to erase the extraneous characters. It doesn’t render the device unusable, but it sure is frustrating when it worked OK with the previous OS!
The Ugly
The N800 has a harder screen surface than the N770, but sadly it’s no more sunlight readable. Turning the back-light brightness right down can be a case for regret.
There’s two (stereo) internal speakers, an improvment on the N770. But not such an improvement that it’s still too quiet with even a moderate amount of background noise! For many sources there’s still nothing like enough audio gain. OK, so it would distort on more beefy sources; but having to have the gain fully up 90% of the time is dumb, and could have been easily adjusted at the design stage.
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Has the N810 fixed any of the the N800 weaknesses – given that it’s essentialy the same hardware at core? Well… you’ll have to wait for the N810 article; real soon now! 
