At CES Nokia has worked up a good deal of enthusiasm with its N800 tablet device. The N800 is the successor to the N770 released just over a year ago and it seems to have a number of the faults with the latter fixed. As a general purpose PDA/tablet it seems to now have most of the features required, including GPS and Skype, moving to a more common flash memory standard, and the ability to communicate with lots of other things, all of which is great.

In other words it's the sort of gadget I'd love to have.

BUT

There are a couple of things that struck me as I started to gather information. The first is that Nokia's marketing for the N series products is almost the archetype of that from a company trying to be hip and cool but not quite getting it. They have a dedicated N series website for CES with lots of snazzy flash, details of the products and a link to "blog". Unfortunately this is where the "trying to be hip but not succeeding comes in" because it is not a blog really. Firstly it is also in flash and hence has no direct way to link to it, secondly it has no information anyway beyond regurgitation of press releases and thirdly, and this may be due to the fact that I recently upgraded to Flash v 9, clicking on URLs doesn't seem to work.

The second thing that annoys me is the price. We are told it ships for US$400 which my handy web finance tool translates as €307. Unfortunately we are also told it will sell for €399 which my handy web finance tool translates as nearly $520. In other words would be European purchasers will be ripped off by around 25% or €100 compared to their US counterparts. No one, I think, minds a slight price variation - we understand that currencies fluctuate and that you try for good price points (399 instead of 408 say) - but the Euro-US Dollar exchange rate hasn't been at parity for four years and has been in the €1~=$1.25 range for most of the last three so this seems like an exceptional amount of gouging from a European company.