The Nokia N800
The Nokia N800 is an internet tablet released in January 2007, running Internet Tablet OS 2007 on a 4.13in 800×480 resistive touchscreen with 128 MB of RAM, and it is the second of the four Wi-Fi tablets Nokia built on Maemo.
It is the device that fixed most of what owners complained about on the first tablet while keeping the same screen and the same Debian userland underneath. Its place in the sequence is set out at The devices, in order.
What the Nokia N800 is
The Nokia N800 is a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth handheld computer running Maemo, with no cellular radio and no telephony of its own. It reaches the internet over 802.11b/g or through a phone paired over Bluetooth, and Nokia sold it as an internet tablet rather than as a phone or a PDA. Announced at CES in January 2007, it shipped that same month with Internet Tablet OS 2007, the retail name for Maemo 3.
What distinguishes the N800 from its siblings is memory and expansion. It doubled RAM to 128 MB against the 64 MB of the 770, moved from an ARM9 to an ARM11 core, and gave the tablet two memory card slots, one behind the battery cover and one on the outside. No other device in the line has two card slots. It also added stereo speakers and a VGA webcam that pops out of the top left corner for video calls.
The Nokia N800: release date and the software it shipped with
The release date of the Nokia N800 was January 2007, and the software it shipped with was Internet Tablet OS 2007, built on Maemo 3, codenamed Bora. Nokia then did something it did for no other tablet: it issued Internet Tablet OS 2008, the Maemo 4 release built for the newer N810, for the N800 as well. That single decision extended the N800’s supported life by more than a year and left both tablets running the same Chinook and Diablo software.
The N800 received no Maemo 5 update. Fremantle was written for the ARM Cortex-A8 in the N900, and the ARM11 tablets were left on Maemo 4.1 Diablo, which is where their official software history ends.
The Nokia N800: case, screen and input
The case of the Nokia N800 measures roughly 144 x 75 x 13 mm and weighs about 206 g, wider and thinner than the 770 it replaced, with a metal stand that folds out of the back. The webcam swivels out of the top corner and retracts flush; the second memory card slot hides under the battery cover, which is why owners often ran one card permanently and swapped the other.
Input is by touchscreen only. The 4.13in 800×480 resistive display accepts a stylus, which stows in the body, and Maemo offers three text methods on it: an on-screen thumb keyboard, a smaller stylus keyboard, and handwriting recognition. There is no hardware keyboard on the N800; that arrived with the N810 in November 2007 and is the clearest hardware difference between the two.
The Nokia N800: full specifications
The full specifications of the Nokia N800 are set out below. Figures Nokia never published are left out rather than guessed.
| Item | Nokia N800 |
|---|---|
| Announced | January 2007, at CES |
| Released | January 2007 |
| Operating system | Internet Tablet OS 2007, Maemo 3 Bora; updated to OS2008, Maemo 4 |
| Processor | TI OMAP 2420, ARM11 core at 320 MHz |
| Memory | 128 MB RAM |
| Storage | 256 MB internal flash, two memory card slots |
| Display | 4.13in, 800×480, resistive touchscreen |
| Input | Stylus, on-screen keyboards, handwriting recognition; no hardware keyboard |
| Camera | VGA pop-out webcam |
| Radios | Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth |
| Cellular | None |
| GPS | None built in; Bluetooth receivers supported |
| Battery | BP-5L, 1500 mAh, user replaceable |
| Size and weight | About 144 x 75 x 13 mm, 206 g |
The Nokia N800: battery and battery life
The battery of the Nokia N800 is a BP-5L rated at 1500 mAh, the same cell the 770 used, and battery life turned almost entirely on the Wi-Fi radio. With the radio off the tablet idled for days, because there is no modem to keep a network registration alive and nothing pushing mail in the background; with Wi-Fi associated and the browser working, it ran for hours rather than days. Nokia quoted standby and active use separately for that reason.
The BP-5L is user replaceable and was shared across several Nokia devices of the period, so cells remain findable. Third-party extended packs were sold for the tablets, but their capacities came from the sellers and were never verified in any published independent measurement this reference is aware of, so no figure is quoted.
The Nokia N800: the Linux underneath, and what still runs on it
The Linux underneath the Nokia N800 is a Debian userland on a 2.6 series kernel with the GTK-based Hildon interface on top, and nothing modern targets it. The Application Manager was a front end onto real apt repositories, so installing software meant adding a repository and letting dpkg do the work, and a terminal with root access was one package away.
The revival projects skip this generation. Maemo Leste, the Devuan-based continuation, lists The Nokia N900 among Nokia hardware and not the ARM11 tablets. The security distributions that produced N900 images never shipped an N800 build either. What runs on an N800 in practice is Diablo, the Maemo 4 community archives, and anything the owner cross-compiles.
The Nokia N800: what replaced it, and where it sits in the line
What replaced the Nokia N800 was the N810 in November 2007, ten months after the N800 went on sale, and the replacement traded expansion for input. The N810 kept the 4.13in 800×480 screen, raised the same OMAP 2420 to 400 MHz, added a slide-out keyboard, a built-in GPS receiver and 2 GB of internal storage, and cut the card slots from two to one. Owners who valued storage flexibility stayed on the N800; owners who wanted to type moved.
Against the phones that followed, the gap widens. The N900 of November 2009 brought a 600 MHz Cortex-A8, 256 MB of RAM, 32 GB of storage and a cellular modem, and The Nokia N9 of September 2011 replaced the resistive screen with a capacitive AMOLED and the whole Maemo interface with MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan. The N800 sits in the middle of the tablet era: the model that proved the format worked and could not follow it into telephony. The platform history around it is at Maemo and the Nokia Linux line.
Searches for the N8000 and N9000 usually land on Nishika stereo film cameras from the late 1980s, which have nothing to do with Nokia or Maemo. Nokia made no device called the N8000 or the N9000; the tablets are the N800 and the N810.