I know I said I am looking to get a Sharp C3100 in another thread, used to have one a couple of years ago. However I have been looking at the Nokia N810, which would be better? The main thing is the C3100 is a whole lot harder to find, and I have found the N810 is a bit less expensive. I am looking to buy within the next couple of weeks, I could use a little insight here.

SL-C3100/SL-C3200:

Pros: Free CF slot and full-size SD slot, internal HDD (but now comparable with Micro-SD cards in N810), well protected display when closed.

Cons: No internal Wi-Fi, no internal Bluetooth (both needs to be extrernal).

N810:

Pros: 800 pixels horizontally, more memory, camera, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth.

Cons: Much worse keyboard (one row less, when pressin upper row, your fingers touch the top part edge).

N810 or Zaurus, depends on what you want to do. However, I would say for most folks a N810 would probably be the way to go. A fairly active community at maemo.org, nokia is still committed (although quiet about their next device). Nokia still looks at what closed pieces they can open source.

Bluetooth and wifi are very well integrated and work. The N810 is supposed to be an "internet tablet" so good selection of apps are web enabled. The web works wonderfully for a small handheld.

Way ahead for os with community development of mer (ubuntu thin layer).

A convenient way to run debian in a change root environment from within maemo.

Unless you are the type of person who would say "you can have my zaurus when you pry it from my cold dead hands," I'd say take a look at the Nokia N810 or wait until later this year when their next device comes out or the fabled Open Pandora device decides to ship a year + late.

Seeing as I'm the potential seller this may be biased but my two cents are valid as I've owned both of them.


This was a HUGE problem for me. It's actually been a turn off to me for most sliders in general. The Aigo and the Sony Mylo also suffered a little from this problem, but on the N810 it was terrible.

In terms of productivity, I could do just about anything on the Zaurus, but the N810 only got use if I wanted to check email.

Having large storage space available in the Zaurus is a great feature, even more so when you consider modding with a larger CF card in place of the microdrive. I have done this on a Z3200 and have a 16GB card there. The N810 has 2gb (I think?) internal storage, though expansion via mini sd (ugh) is possible.

One of the other things that intrests me about the N810 is the Garnet VM app, where you can run Palm os on the N810. With that, I could combine 2 devices...does anyone know anything more on that aspect?

I agree that nothing beats the C3100 keyboard. The N810 keyboard does pale by comparison. The single mini-SD card slot is also a limitation on the N810. Mini-SD effectively means micro-SD with adapter. I have a 16 GB microSDHC card in mine. There is also a third party accessory which thickens the N810 but allows the use of full SD cards.

Another Nokia option if one doesn't care for a keyboard is the N800 which has dual SD card slots.

A couple other hardware features I think haven't been mentioned:

N810 - internal slow acquiring GPS, light sensor for changing screen brightness levels, host USB but I think unpowered or severely underpowered

N800 - internal FM radio

C3100 - Better host USB support with limited power


Another consideration, if one wants a full featured micro-workstation the Zaurus has more options. If you don't mind using software mostly written or optimized for the device the Nokia does well.

The Nokia also offers QT4 with bindings for their gui and python-qt. The Nokia does reasonably well as a media player (audio and video that has been transcoded).

Ok thanks, that's good to know. Also what I'm trying to do is to have a better syncable pda than the Palm OS that I've been using.

with the zaurus there's k pim/pi, which is prett awesome if you need the performance. PIM and contact management on the nokia is very lacklustre if not effectively non-existent - just a contact list for email, instant messaging and VOIP.

I've still failed to replace my Palm T3, Nokia E65, Zaurus and N800 tablet with one device. I'm going to be trialling a Nokia E71 soon which I'm hoping I can persuade to replace the Palm and E65, but I have no idea whether there's a truly effective way to export everything from palm to nokia; I suspect I'll be using Palm Desktop forever even after the Palm has gone to gadget heaven, even if it's just in a windows VM accessed over rdesktop from some handheld device!