Web 2.0: Nokia's N810 Internet Tablet

I'm at the opening afternoon at the Web 2.0 Summit--always one of the year's best tech conferences--at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. So far, we've heard from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Marissa Mayer, and Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen. But the closest thing to a product launch so far came when Nokia's Anssi Vanjoki talked about the company's N810 Internet Tablet, a Linux-powered device that's bigger than a cell phone but smaller than even the smallest notebok.

Here's a photo of it, swiped from Engadget:

As its model name suggests, the N810 ain't revolutionary--it's an upgrade to the N800, a tablet that Nokia launched back in January. Like that model, it has a nice big touchscreen, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS, and while it's not a cell phone, it can talk to them for connectivity and can do VoIP calls. But it adds one feature that makes it instantly much more interesting to me, and probably to other folks, too: a slide-out keyboard.

(The last keyboard-less computing device I truly liked was the Palm Tungsten that was my last old-style PDA...and since then, I've only really been interested in ones that do tactile QWERTY in some form, such as my HTC TyTN II phone. I'm not sure if that makes me a fuddy-duddy, or makes me a pragmatist, or whether it's just that nobody's figured out a genuinely great QWERTYless user interface...)

The initial bloggy reaction to the N810 seems to be pretty positive, which is intriguing given that it in some ways reminds me of a tinier version of Palm's ill-fated critical fiasco the Foleo, at a simular price ($479). I appear to have been the one tech pundit on the planet who was willing to give Foleo a chance, so I'm intrigued by the N810, too...