Nokia N800

Is Nokia's touch-sensitive tablet hard to swallow?

The N800 Tablet offers widescreen web access, email, IM and VOIP calls without the need for a SIM card. What you will need, though, is the patience of the sort of men who make matchstick scupltures of cathedrals to deal with its buggy software.

Although the N800's been designed to be left switched on, its battery dies after just a few hours of web surfing. The meaty 4.2-inch, stretch-VGA display is excellent: sharp, colourful, with dedicated 'full screen' and 'zoom' buttons that make short work of even the most tricky websites. Using the Opera browser via Wi-Fi is easy, and a month's free hotspot access with The Cloud is included.

Stray from basic browsing, though, and the N800 starts to wobble. The email package doesn't sync with Outlook and fails to open some simple attachments. The RSS news reader looks really great on the home screen, but slows down and occasionally crashes the device when you follow a feed through. Despite a pop-out webcam, VOIP and IM are awkward to set up and limited to Google services for now, although Skype is promised for the summer.

While the touch keyboard and handwriting recognition are fine for web navigation, the N800 can't open Office documents or create anything other than plain text files, making it useless as a PDA, although it does have a PDF reader. Its meagre 128MB storage is no competition for a PMP's hard drive, but there is a MicroSD slot for expansion.

As a casual, coffee table browser, this is a fun tech-toy. As a convergence device, it lags behind most smartphones and for portable internet access, the PSP is £100 cheaper.