I came across this review (Using The N810 – Writer’s Friend (Or Not?) as the tablet guru.com feeds are sucked into my N800 RSS reader and was very interested to read the comments and views expressed. I have long desired to do more writing and when I find myself away from my laptop is usually when I have my best ideas, fail to write them down and then forget about them completely. This was part of the justification for getting the N800 as it has a massive screen and I would be able to take it anywhere and jot down notes and ides whenever I felt the need.
I bought my N800 just before the N810 was due out and couldn’t justify waiting or the additional cost for the slideout keyboard (which looked un-usable to me anyway) and built in GPS which I didn’t need as I still had a perfectly good bluetooth one that I used with the Tapwave. Instead I shelled out for an iGo Ultra-Slim Keyboard which paired up nicely and fits very nicely into my other pocked to counterbalance the weight of the N800 in my fleece.
Now onto the practicalities. Most of the time for short notes and general use (browsing the internet, searches etc.) I find the on screen stylus operated keyboard very usable and very quick. The location of the N800s d-pad means it rests under the left thumb as you are typing so you can navigate about quite easily and the whole interaction feels very well designed. For slightly longer notes esp when I am tired I will resort to the on-screen thumb board which again can be very fast but seriously limits what you can see on the screen as you type. The best solution all round from when I am sat on the sofa/in bed or out in a coffee bar somewhere is to pull out the iGo. Even if I am mid note and I decide to use it I just open it, hit enter a couple of times (I am lazy and leave bluetooth on all the time, screw battery life it lasts long enough for me) and the on screen keyboard vanishes and I can tap away. I can even leave the N800 stood on the coffee table (WordPy allows you to increase font size) and type with the keyboard on my lap. The only occasional issue I have is with some double characters being typed especially when I use the function keys to get a number and get the number followed by the letter but thats easy to fix.
I did briefly make use of abiword for OS2007 and if this is a killer application for you then using an N800 with the stock OS2007 is definitely the way to go (although it is a little buggy in places but not un-usable). However most of what I write will be posted to a blog or end up being dragged into another document at some point on my desk top for formatting so the combination of NoteCase and WordPy is easily enough for me. The built in Notes app is very good too though for very simple text but I just seem to have stopped using it now that I have Notecase.
In summary if you want to write then get a bluetooth keyboard and potentially save yourself some money by getting the N800 instead of the N810.
6 responses so far ↓
Nseries WOM World » Blog Archive » Jotting, noting and writing on the N800 // March 6, 2008 at 5:23 pm |
[...] on his blog the Ether Guardian has written about his experiences using the N800 as a tool for just such things. He finds the on-screen keyboard fine for quick notes [...]
DSS // March 6, 2008 at 6:30 pm |
Out of curiosity, are you using OS2007 or OS2008?
I ask because OS2008 seems to have several glitches with connecting/disconnecting bluetooth keyboards and the input from the bt keyboard seems to lag on it too, something I don’t recall OS2007 doing. Just saying that if you are doing lots of typing on OS2007 you might not want to upgrade until they get around to fixing it.
See my bug report https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2850
etherguardian // March 6, 2008 at 11:14 pm |
DSS, I am currently using OS2008 and have done since the first 2008 beta. I have never had such problems with the iGo keyboard at all. The connect and disconnect is virtually seamless and there is no lag that I can appreciate on typing. I have seen some lag on any text input into javascript heavy form pages such as hotmail but I don’t use that all that often from the tablet.
Duncan // March 7, 2008 at 9:24 am |
Not for writing novels, but if I’m in a meeting and want to jot down notes then I use Xournal: it turns the screen into a pad of (lined) paper and I can scribble on it almost as easily as any pad of paper including simple diagrams. At the end I can either keep the xournal file or save to pdf. Ok, so it doesn’t do character recognition, but most notes I take in meetings don’t need to be more than a scribble anyway. (It does work with the tablets handwriting recognition, but that is slower and loses the ease of use.)
Kevin // March 8, 2008 at 8:01 pm |
What do you do about getting your notes from the tablet to your PC? Notecase looks nice, and it would be great to have the same notes on both the tablet and your laptop, so you can continue where you left off, no matter what you’re carrying with you.
etherguardian // March 8, 2008 at 8:56 pm |
There are a combination of solutions that I use. If I am at home I will tend to just grsync the n800 to my buffalo linkstation (theres a post on that here) which exports all the backup directories as NFS shares so I can pick the notes file up from my laptop.
If I am away I use a Bluetooth File Sharing Gnome applet on my laptop to just ping the nce file back and forth when needed.