The devices, in order
A Nokia internet tablet was a pocket-sized Linux handheld with an 800×480 touchscreen, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth but no phone radio, and Nokia shipped four of them between November 2005 and 2008: the 770, the N800, the N810 and the N810 WiMAX Edition.
All four ran Maemo, the Debian-based platform Nokia maintained for this hardware, under the retail name Internet Tablet OS. Two later devices continued the same software line into telephony. The N900 of November 2009 kept the tablet shape and added a cellular radio, and the N9 of September 2011 dropped the keyboard and the resistive screen and closed the lineage. This page is the ordered list; each device has its own page, and the wider platform story sits on Maemo and the Nokia Linux line.
The four internet tablets, in release order
The four internet tablets appeared in release order across three years, and each one changed a single defining thing about the previous device rather than reinventing the category. The table below gives the release, the Maemo release each carried out of the box, and the hardware change that distinguishes it. The two telephony devices are included at the end because they run the same software line.
| Device | Released | Shipped with | Defining change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nokia 770 | November 2005 | Internet Tablet OS 2005 | The 4.13in 800×480 screen and the whole idea |
| Nokia N800 | January 2007 | Internet Tablet OS 2007 | 128 MB RAM, two card slots, pop-out webcam |
| Nokia N810 | November 2007 | Internet Tablet OS 2008 | Slide-out keyboard and a built-in GPS receiver |
| Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition | 2008 | Internet Tablet OS 2008 | An 802.16e WiMAX radio for Sprint’s Xohm network |
| Nokia N900 | November 2009 | Maemo 5 Fremantle | A cellular radio, a Cortex-A8 and 32 GB of storage |
| Nokia N9 | September 2011 | MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan | Capacitive AMOLED, the Swipe interface, no keyboard |
The Nokia 770 and the first internet tablet
The Nokia 770 was the first internet tablet, announced at the LinuxWorld Summit in New York in May 2005 and on sale from November of that year. It ran Internet Tablet OS 2005, the first shipping Maemo, on a Texas Instruments OMAP 1710 with an ARM926 core at 252 MHz, 64 MB of RAM and 128 MB of internal flash. There was no camera, no keyboard and no cellular radio: text went in through an on-screen keyboard, handwriting recognition or a stylus, and everything the device did online it did over 802.11b/g Wi-Fi or through a phone paired over Bluetooth.
What made the 770 unusual in 2005 was not the hardware but the software model. Nokia shipped a Debian userland with apt underneath, published the Maemo SDK, and let the machine run software the company had not written. That decision is the reason a community assembled around the device at all, and it set the pattern every later tablet inherited.
The Nokia N800 and N810: more memory, then a keyboard
The Nokia N800 and the N810 kept the 4.13in 800×480 screen and changed everything around it. The N800, announced at CES in January 2007, doubled memory to 128 MB, moved to a Texas Instruments OMAP 2420 with an ARM11 core, added stereo speakers and a pop-out VGA webcam for video calling, and gave the tablet two memory card slots instead of one. It shipped with Internet Tablet OS 2007 and was later updated to OS2008, which is the reason N800 units outlived their own release cycle.
The N810 followed in November 2007 with the change owners had asked for most: a three-row slide-out QWERTY keyboard, plus a built-in GPS receiver and 2 GB of internal storage. It shipped with Internet Tablet OS 2008. The trade was one memory card slot rather than the N800’s two, and a slightly smaller body. A variant, the N810 WiMAX Edition, arrived in 2008 with an 802.16e radio aimed at Sprint’s Xohm network in the United States; Xohm was folded into Clearwire and the variant went nowhere, which makes it the rarest device in the line.
The Nokia N800 versus the N900
Comparing the Nokia N800 with the N900 is really a comparison between a tablet and a phone that share an operating system family, and the gap between them is four years and roughly two orders of magnitude of storage. The N800 has an ARM11 core, 128 MB of RAM, 256 MB of internal flash and no radio beyond Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. The N900 has an ARM Cortex-A8 at 600 MHz, 256 MB of RAM backed by 768 MB of swap, 32 GB of internal storage, a 5 MP camera and a GSM and 3G modem.
The software difference matters as much as the silicon. The N800 runs the GTK-based Hildon desktop of Internet Tablet OS 2007 and 2008, built around a stylus. The Nokia N900 runs Maemo 5 Fremantle, which reworked the interface around finger use, four desktops and a live window switcher, and shipped the Gecko-based MicroB browser. An N800 owner moving to an N900 kept apt, the terminal and root access, and gave up the second card slot.
From tablet to phone: the N900
The move from tablet to phone happened once, in November 2009, when the N900 shipped with Maemo 5 Fremantle and a cellular modem in the same slab-with-a-slider shape. It was the only Maemo device Nokia ever sold as a phone, and the last official Maemo 5 firmware, PR1.3, arrived in 2010. After that the Community SSU project kept the platform patched, which is why N900 units still boot working software long after Nokia stopped issuing updates.
The N900 is also the only device in the line that the Maemo Leste project supports among Nokia hardware. Leste is a Devuan-based continuation of Maemo rather than a Nokia product, and it is maintained entirely outside the company.
The Nokia N9 and the end of the line
The Nokia N9 ended the line in September 2011, running MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan on a 3.9in 854×480 capacitive AMOLED with no hardware keyboard and no home button. Harmattan was a Maemo body wearing a MeeGo name: a Debian-based system with the MeeGo 1.2 API on top, produced after Nokia and Intel merged Maemo and Moblin into MeeGo under the Linux Foundation in February 2010. Nokia had already announced its Windows Phone strategy in February 2011, so no MeeGo successor followed the N9.
What followed instead came from outside Nokia. The Mer project carried the MeeGo core forward, Jolla was founded by former Nokia staff, and Sailfish OS ships on Jolla hardware. That is where a reader who arrived here from a fifteen-year-old link about internet tablets usually ends up.
What this reference does not carry
This reference does not carry firmware, ROMs, repackaged applications, prices or second-hand listings, and it links to none of them. That these devices existed and what they contained are public facts; the binaries are not ours to distribute, and a stale price is worse than no price.
This site is an independent reference. It is not Nokia, not Jolla, not maemo.org and not the community blog that used this domain between 2009 and 2015.