I took my N810 for a walk to test its GPS capabilities. It’s been raining quite hard and I was hoping the river would be up and interesting to look at. Unfortunately the river was low, but my N810 worked very well. Having a built in GPS is very useful.
I have Maemo-Mapper installed, and because it was raining I sealed my N810 inside an Ortleib map case. I found this a really good combination, the map case being totally waterproof and yet flexible enough to allow the touchscreen to be used.
Locking onto satellites is something often commented on with the N810, with reports of it taking five minutes or more to achieve an accurate lock. While it did take a few minutes to find the satellites it wasn’t any great inconvenience – if I were driving and wanting to use my N810 for navigation a few extra minutes wouldn’t really be an issue; I mostly use GPS navigation for long journeys.
Once locked I noticed a strange thing. The GPS always thinks its moving at a speed between 0.1 and 0.3MPh. This is probably part of the way GPS works, but it’s quite odd watching the track drawn by Maemo Mapper. The track ends up looking like a random walk algorithm, centred around a midpoint.
This randomness doesn’t impede normal operation though, I followed a path and the track drawn in Maemo Mapper accurately followed where I was walking, right down to the junction of the path and a main road, and a canal. I followed the same route home and the return track was fairly close to the first.
The other new feature of the N810 is its slide-out keypad. Having experienced the amazing convenience of Skype and Google Chat from anywhere in my house on my N800, making these two things work on my N810 was the second thing I did. Skype text using the onscreen keyboard is just awful, its impossible to get any decent typing rhythm going. The slide out keypad of my N810 has sorted this, I can now tap away at a respectable rate, knowing the device is keeping up. I know you can pair bluetooth keyboards with the N800, but that isn’t half as convenient as having a permanent keyboard attached. OS2008 even has keyboard shortcuts too.
The screen’s “sunlight readable” (that’s transflective TFT to techies) screen really helps when trying to use the N810 outside. Often when driving it was very difficult to follow the map because even a dreary UK day could wash the screen of my old N800 out.
Originally I moaned that I’d have to bin all my memory cards and buy yet more, but in a different format. While this probably will happen, it’s not a complete negative point. Already I can buy a 4GB card for less than what I paid for a 2GB card last year. And since the N810 comes with 2GB internally (of which I have 1.5GB available – my Maemo-mapper cache and a swap file taking up the rest) I’ve not yet needed to buy a memory card. I found it hard choosing 2GB of music to take with me before.
