Slightly ajar

While I've known about this for a while, under a different model name, the Nokia N800 has just been officially announced at CES. This is the follow up to the cult hit, Nokia 770. The reason why I'm writing out it of course is that it runs the Opera browser. It is an interesting choice by Nokia's marketing department that they have decided to move the device from it's own product range to the N Series range. Will this cause confusion in that while the N Series are Symbian S60 based smart phones, the N800 looks smart, but is neither a phone (likely to cause the biggest confusion), nor runs S60. It instead runs Nokia's own Internet Tablet OS 2007 edition, which is based on embedded Linux.

Judging by the photos, the N800 is made of nicer materials than the 770, but I think I prefer the understated minimalist design of the 770. The onscreen keyboard also looks much improved. In some ways this competes with another Opera powered device; the Sony Mylo, but they are both aimed at different markets. The Mylo's style looks like it is aimed at a younger audience and the form factor is more suited to communication as it's primary function, while the N800 has a more mature look and it's screen size is ideal for web browsing first and foremost. The beautiful 800 x 480 screen means that pages can be shown in their original form without zooming, reformatting or horizontal scrolling. The only issue being that if your eye sight is not as it once were, the text size may be too small at this high-resolution to read comfortably for long periods, which is where Opera's zoom feature will come in handy. This is different from the Wii where the screen may be big enough, but smaller text isn't sharp enough without zoom due to low resolution on regular TVs.

This device is another perfect excuse to make sure your site works in Opera. Like the Nintendo Wii, web pages will display just as they do in the desktop browser, baring resolution differences. Like the Wii, this supports the latest embedded Flash version, Flash 7. The main difference is that while the Wii sports Opera 9, the N800 uses a build of Opera 8, so there may be some issues that are not present in the latest desktop release. However in general, if you get your site working in Opera desktop, it will also work great on Wii, Nokia 770 and N800, and any other device that comes out in the future with around desktop resolution screens, for free. Not to mention the big head start on getting sites to work on screen size constraint Opera powered devices, such as mobile phones. It'll be quite interesting to see what devices come out next. Whatever it is, make sure you are ready for it.

P.S, Nokia, where is my copy so that I can test sites and Open the Web on this thing?