The Nokia N810
The Nokia N810 is an internet tablet released in November 2007, running Internet Tablet OS 2008 on a 4.13in 800×480 resistive touchscreen, and it is the only tablet in the Maemo line with both a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a built-in GPS receiver.
It is the third of the four internet tablets and the last one Nokia made before the platform grew a phone radio. The full sequence, from the 770 through to the N9, is laid out at The devices, in order.
What the Nokia N810 is
The Nokia N810 is a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth handheld computer running Maemo, sold as an internet tablet and never as a phone. It has no cellular modem, so it reaches the internet over 802.11b/g or through a phone tethered over Bluetooth. Announced at the Web 2.0 Summit in October 2007 and on sale from November, it shipped with Internet Tablet OS 2008, the retail name for Maemo 4.
What distinguishes the N810 from its siblings is a three-row hardware keyboard that slides out sideways, plus 2 GB of internal storage where the N800 had 256 MB of flash and a pair of card slots. The keyboard is the reason people bought it, and the reason the case is a different shape from every other tablet in the line.
The Nokia N810: release date and the software it shipped with
The release date of the Nokia N810 was November 2007, and the software it shipped with was Internet Tablet OS 2008, built on Maemo 4.0, codenamed Chinook. Nokia later issued the Diablo update, Maemo 4.1, for the same hardware, which is the last official operating system the tablet received. There was no path from Diablo to Maemo 5 Fremantle: Fremantle required the ARM Cortex-A8 of the N900, so the N810 stopped where Nokia’s tablet software stopped.
A second model, the N810 WiMAX Edition, followed in 2008. It added an IEEE 802.16e radio alongside Wi-Fi, aimed at Sprint’s Xohm network in the United States, and otherwise ran the same Internet Tablet OS 2008. Xohm was folded into Clearwire not long after launch, the radio had almost nowhere to connect, and the WiMAX Edition became the rarest device in the whole line.
The Nokia N810: case, screen and input
The case of the Nokia N810 measures roughly 128 x 72 x 14 mm and weighs about 226 g, with an aluminium back and a metal slider, and it is noticeably narrower than the N800 it replaced. The stand folds out of the back rather than clipping on, and a VGA webcam swivels out of the top edge for video calls. A stylus stows in the body.
Input is where the N810 differs from everything else. The 4.13in 800×480 resistive touchscreen accepts a stylus or a fingernail, and behind it a three-row QWERTY keyboard slides out with a directional pad on the left. There is no number row, so digits sit on a modifier layer, and the keys are flat and closely spaced. The slider and its ribbon cable are the parts that fail with age on these machines, which is why keyboard faults dominate what owners still discuss about the hardware in Maemo and the Nokia Linux line and its surrounding archives.
The Nokia N810: full specifications
The full specifications of the Nokia N810 are set out below. Where the two models differ, the WiMAX Edition is called out; where a figure was never published, it is left out rather than guessed.
| Item | Nokia N810 |
|---|---|
| Announced | October 2007 |
| Released | November 2007; WiMAX Edition in 2008 |
| Operating system | Internet Tablet OS 2008, Maemo 4.0 Chinook, later Maemo 4.1 Diablo |
| Processor | TI OMAP 2420, ARM11 core at 400 MHz |
| Memory | 128 MB RAM |
| Storage | 2 GB internal, one memory card slot |
| Display | 4.13in, 800×480, resistive transflective touchscreen |
| Input | Three-row slide-out QWERTY keyboard, stylus, touchscreen |
| Camera | VGA swivel webcam |
| Radios | Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth, built-in GPS; WiMAX 802.16e on the WiMAX Edition |
| Cellular | None |
| Battery | BP-4L, 1500 mAh, user replaceable |
| Size and weight | About 128 x 72 x 14 mm, 226 g |
The Nokia N810: battery and battery life
The battery of the Nokia N810 is a BP-4L rated at 1500 mAh, and battery life depended almost entirely on whether the Wi-Fi radio and the GPS receiver were running. With both idle the tablet held charge for days, because there was no modem waking it and no push mail service to keep alive; with the GPS locked and the screen at full brightness for navigation it emptied in hours. Nokia’s own figures separated standby from active use for exactly this reason.
The BP-4L is user replaceable and was shared with other Nokia hardware of the period, which is why cells are still findable. Third-party extended packs existed for the tablets, but their stated capacities came from the makers and were never independently verified in any published measurement this reference is aware of, so no number is quoted here.
The Nokia N810: the Linux underneath, and what still runs on it
The Linux underneath the Nokia N810 is a Debian userland on a 2.6 series kernel with the Hildon interface on top, the same arrangement Nokia used across the tablets. The Application Manager fronted real apt repositories, so software arrived by adding a repository rather than through a store, and a terminal with root access was available to anyone who installed it.
Modern continuations do not reach this device. Maemo Leste, the Devuan-based revival, lists The Nokia N900 among Nokia hardware and not the tablets, because the ARM11 generation falls outside what it targets. The security distributions that produced N900 images, such as Kali Linux and BackTrack before it, likewise never shipped an N810 build. What runs on an N810 in practice is Diablo, community package archives from the Maemo 4 era, and whatever the owner compiles.
The Nokia N810: what replaced it, and where it sits in the line
What replaced the Nokia N810 was the N900 of November 2009, and the replacement changed the category rather than the product. The N900 kept the slide-out keyboard idea and the 800×480 screen but shrank the display to 3.5in, moved to a 600 MHz Cortex-A8 with 256 MB of RAM, and added a GSM and 3G modem. An N810 owner who upgraded gained telephony and Maemo 5, and lost the larger screen.
Placed in the line, the N810 is the high point of the tablet idea and a dead end for the hardware. Two devices followed it, both phones: the N900 on Maemo 5, and The Nokia N9 of September 2011 on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan, which had no hardware keyboard at all. Nobody at Nokia built another tablet in this family.
This reference carries no firmware, no ROMs, no prices and no second-hand listings, and it is not Nokia, not Jolla and not maemo.org.