iPod touch vs. Nokia N800, Four Months Later
Well, the January Software Update is out, and I feel like I have to address my old post about keeping my then-returnable N800 in light of the iPod touch’s debut.
After all, the post centered around events we didn’t know would happen, such as the announcement of an official SDK and the release of iPhone apps which were missing from the original firmware of the device.
So what’s left from my original bullet-point list of things missing from the iPod touch, in light of the iPhone and the Nokia Internet Tablets (NITs)?
- Camera
- Microphone
- Bluetooth
- Speakers
So am I as firm on the NIT as I was then? Eh… not so much.
Let’s break this down.
Camera
The inclusion of a camera on the N800 was an attractive piece of its arsenal. However, it has become the single-most unfulfilled feature for the platform. What can you use the 640x480 front-mounted camera for? Video chat from NIT to NIT only. While the N800 was released in January 2007, it took 10 months before the Gizmo Project released an N800 version of their app that could do NIT-to-PC video chat. For someone wanting to set up a video chat solution for one or two users, this is great, but the camera still does not live up to its marketing as a web camera: it does not work with Flash’s web camera API, despite the NIT now touting having a “full version” of Flash 9. That means no webcam recording for YouTube, etc.. To this day, Gizmo is the only third party to utilize the camera for a mature product.
Summary: the camera fails to be useful for anyone who doesn’t use or need application-based chat, as it is the only usable experience of the camera.
Grade: B-, if you video chat (and use Gizmo); F, if you don’t
The VS factor: Yeah, the iPod touch doesn’t have a camera, but that doesn’t make it a plus for the NIT, because odds are you’ll never use it anyway.
Microphone
The microphone goes hand-in-hand with the camera of the N800. However, with Skype being easily available to the device since the latest firmwares, audio chat is a much more attractive prospect than video chat, and with headset support (see Bluetooth) this makes audio chat a really powerful feature of the device. Sadly, very little extra has been enabled for the microphone. A community-developed audio recorder does exist, but it is not promoted in the device (the repository is disabled by default).
Grade: A+, if you chat; C, if you don’t
The VS factor: I don’t use Skype, and I have a cellphone. Losing the mic is not a deal-breaker for me, or for most people really, unless Skype is your bread and butter.
Bluetooth
The inclusion of Bluetooth on the N800 ensures that if you can’t get a Wi-Fi connection when you’re trying to get onto the internet, you can always use the dialup-networking profile of your phone to hook into your cellular data plan. Even though I have the T-Mobile Total Internet plan which includes their hotspots, I can’t stress how important this is. Cell signals are nearly ubiquitous in big cities, whereas a trip to a compatible hotspot is a good 10 minute walk. Even so, the Bluetooth support is pretty standard, and doesn’t include A2DP for stereo bluetooth headphones, which combined with the many shortcomings of the Media Player keep the device’s ability at a novelty level. It’s simply not optimized for audio/video.
As far as pictures go, with the right cameraphone, or Bluetooth capable full camera, viewing your snaps on the NIT’s screen is as easy as opening the device over the BT connection, or copying a batch of files over first before viewing. Very nice.
Summary: not just headset support for Skype and other chat apps, but backup networking with the right phone when you’re in the middle of nowhere.
Grade: A-
The VS factor: Pretty huge. During our recent Macworld Keynote Lunch Out, one of our party had a Wi-Fi only device, but neither the restaurant nor any nearby tenants or stores had an open access point. The device, for our purposes right then, was useless. I was able to tether to my cell phone for data, and was able to monitor MacRumors in style. Bluetooth will save you when you need it. It will also give you instant compatibility with other devices you own that you’d need to buy a proprietary cable or accessory for the iPod, if one exists, that is.
Speakers
While you don’t always need them, the convenience of built-in speakers is pretty damn nice, and on many occasions I have listened to a podcast on the way home, only to unplug the headphones to listen to the show out loud once I have gotten back into my apartment. Sure, you could have an iPod Hi-Fi at home, or some extra portable speakers to dock into, but that’s another accessory to buy, carry and juggle when you want to use them, and they are never as portable as just the device itself. For light use they’re perfect, and it’s only minus for plugging into your stereo system is that you can’t set it to output a line level signal.
Summary: Always underrated, built-in speakers are perfect for sharing, on the desk, and around the house. You may not need them, but once you have them their convenience will never go unused. The only strike against the NITs speakers are their relatively low volume levels. They’re not quiet by any means, but often they just don’t get loud enough. For many of my podcasts, a running sink can drown it out at it’s top levels, forcing me to use a radio or something else with more power.
Grade: B+
The VS factor: You don’t always want to deal with a headphone splitter and extra headphones if you want to share a song or watch a movie, and speakers make that happen. And when they’re built-in you never have to worry about leaving them at home. You’ll never “need” them, but you’ll miss them when they’re gone.
So.
What have been my biggest complaints with the NITs, now that I’ve had it for this long?
The immaturity of video support: Sure, Mplayer is there and functions well, but about the same as Excel on Windows. Most players do not integrate well to the tablet’s OS, or support basic ID3 tags, or make playlists easier to manage, or run reliably. 320x240 H.264 files are supposedly supported in the latest tablet OS, but as fully as they were on the PSP, meaning the window of acceptable encoding settings is so small that most files you’ll find online and in podcasts won’t work, even though they are 320x240 H.264 files. And yes, some of these even choke Mplayer. For someone like me who adores video podcasts, and has a 50GB music library with perfect ID3 tags and album covers, this has been a migraine headache for me.
The incompleteness of media players and other applications: Aside for a few stars in the Maemo world, such as Vagalume (a last.fm radio client) and FBReader (an ebook reader), the hobbyist audience of the NITs becomes very apparent very quickly. New media players (that use the same media libraries, therefore not adding new media support) crop up on what seems like a weekly basis, all repeating the same shortcomings and errors in usability and user interface. Setting up the SDK for the device is apparently only for the hardest of hardcore, meaning only the hardcore Linux programmers seem to be developing for it. Simply put, I expect a higher quality of 3rd party applications on the Apple device despite the newness of the SDK simply because I expect the development environment to be an extension of the easy-as-pie Xcode environment, meaning designers and artists can get into it with the programmers, too.
So where am I now? Still stuck in the middle, on the precipice of buying an iPod touch, only because of the failings of the NITs. Because as necessary I’ve found Bluetooth to be, and how useful the speakers and the microphone can be, the overall experience has been only adequate, and now that the main internet-application failings of the iPod touch have been solved — core apps like Mail available, and an SDK coming in a month — there’s no reason for someone who wants a internet & media player to consider the NITs anymore. Unless they are Skype addicts.
It won’t feel like a full computer in the palm of my hand, but it will feel like it works like the way it was meant to work.
[Update 2008-01-22]
Those who read the blog regularly or follow me on Twitter know that I also have an N95. I thought of mentioning it originally, but when comparing the two, I felt it was only relevant to tethering the NIT to a data connection.
However, I think that the phone influences me in a few ways as many of its features are redundant in light of the NITs. Since they are sold side-by-side as Nseries devices, you can either see this as ironic (two devices designed to work together doing double-duty) or making perfect sense (you really are expected to pick one or the other).
I won’t go into great detail here about the N95, but I will say that the deficiencies of the iPod touch are picked up extremely well by the N95, even if the phone is not the optimal experience for them. Because of that, my needs from the tablet revolved things that a tablet-sized device should have a better experience for than a handset — videos, reading, web browsing, general internet connectivity and performance.
Case in point: I always read RSS feeds on the N800 because it has a bigger screen, caches images well, can be used in an “offline” manner and has good display options. But there is a dedicated feed reader in the S60 browser, too. Hell, both devices even have a video podcatcher app named “Video Center.”
It doesn’t really change or affect the details in the post, but it does shed some light on the level of frustration I had, and the lower value I placed on the geekier features of the device, since Nokia makes both and the newness of the NIT OS is made even more obvious in light of the S60’s maturity. Many NIT issues have been long solved in the phone products. The knowledge is around there, somewhere, but it’s just not making it to the tablet teams yet.
