- My wife and I are buying a new home with it. I'm not exaggerating here. The N800 has turned out to be the perfect device for something we call pillow surfing: browsing Internet sites with your spouse or significant other while snuggled together in bed. The N800's small size, amazing screen resolution and desktop quality browser make reading the news together a thoroughly pleasurable experience and we do a fair amount of that with the help of its no-frills RSS reader. But where it's really shined for us is on Realtor.com and Google Maps. Most of our house-shopping happens in the early morning with coffee in bed or in the evenings before we go to sleep. The ease of flipping between 8 or 10 browser windows open to various MLS listings, "Featured Tours" and map locations has made the Internet Tablet our primary home shopping tool. An indication of the N800's stability and multitasking capability is that we just reviewed a property that's been continuously open in one of those browser windows since last Saturday. Terry has little patience for my gadgets and the laptop is strictly off-limits from the bedroom, but the little tablet has become a welcome way of sharing the Internet in bed. Aside from the great screen, browser and multitasking, this gadget fits perfectly on the nightstand when you go to sleep. It has completely supplanted my Treo there, thanks also to the pleasant-sounding alarm clock feature.
- Ambient email. Handling email has always been a matter of delicate balance for me. As an entrepreneur I need to be available and responsive, but as a developer I need to keep the tendency to be distracted by email in check. Email clients that pop up a notification with incoming mail hurt my productivity, but these days some people wonder what's up with you if you don't respond to mail within an hour or two. I once tried keeping a laptop as a dedicated email machine off to the side of my development workstation to keep my Inbox at hand but just out of my field of vision. It didn't really work. But the N800 turns out to strike just the right balance on my desk. It stands up on its kickstand and has a special icon that glows in brighter colors when you have something in your Inbox—a reminder that is enough that I don't forget to check my mail, but not so intrusive that I check it compulsively. If it's a day when I'm doing a lot of email back-and-forth I keep the tablet's mail client open so I can see the state of the conversation at a glance. The small size and lack of connection to my PC keyboard keeps me from getting distracted and writing a lot of mail that I don't need to. I only launch my desktop email client when I've made a conscious decision to do email—usually about once every couple of hours. This has been an unexpected boon to my productivity.
- E-Reading. A lot of my reading material is digital: in addition to work-related blogs and tech sites I read a lot of white papers and design docs, as well as the occasional RFP or contract, usually in PDF format. I find being able to get away from my desk and settle into a comfortable chair to do a lot of this reading makes it much more enjoyable. That's especially helpful to my work if what I'm reading is something tedious that I have to get through but might otherwise procrastinate. The built-in PDF reader in the N800 is very good, especially because the hardware buttons for zooming in and out are so easy to use. Zooming is one of the best features of this device and is used a lot while pillow-surfing too. Anther thing I read a lot of is source code. Sounds boring I know, but it's not just part of my job, it also satisfies my compulsion to learn how software works and how I can improve my own development. Since most of the code I want to read is in my development environment, I used to have to be at my PC or crack open a laptop to do this. With the N800 I just fire up the VNC viewer, connect to my PC and my IDE is fully available to me while I'm lying on the couch or in my easy chair. I never have to sync stuff over to the device this way. This gives me most of the code navigation features and all the syntax highlighting to make reading code a comfortable and productive experience, even within large projects with hundreds of files (Eclipse's code browsing perspective helps here).
I could tick off a number of features or applications that I miss in the N800 (a good note-taking application would be at the top of the list) but what I'm trying to point out here is this: the features that work well on this little tablet make great experiences that have never been possible for me on other mobile devices. I don't care in the least that I don't have PIM applications, a cellular radio, or a built-in keyboard for this baby. I can't even bring myself to be too upset that Cingular blocks me from tethering it to my phone over Bluetooth so I can use it when I'm out of the house. Just the way it is it makes my life better in no small way and that's all I can ask for in a mobile device.
Posted by cervezas at 16:44:55. Filed under: Mobile Devices
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