Nokia's N800 internet tablet is in some ways more interesting that either Apple's iPhone or Nokia's N95, discussed in our news story today. They are likely to sell more but they are very much devices of today, packaging current technology to meet what the designers hope will be current consumer demand.

The N800, while it should attract a market now, is ploughing a fairly lonely furrow to the future when tablets will be mainstream and far more versatile than the specialist handhelds of today. In this it is taking  the mobile-phone industry in the same direction the Ultra-mobile PC is going from the PC space. The difference is that the UMPC packs all its features aboard, whereas the N800 draws virtually everything from the network and therefore needs much less battery power.

I'll be writing a full review over the next couple of days. First impressions are that it looks prettier than its predecessor, the 770 tablet. The processor is said to be twice as fast on many tasks, providing a faster boot-up time. The screen can be driven by your fingers as well as a stylus: the software cleverly detects which you are using and alters menus and the soft keyboard accordingly. This means you can actually type with your fingers and thumbs - not as easily as on a physical keyboard but well enough for text messages. It has two SD/MMC memory slots currently able to hold up to 4Gbyte between them - the amount is restricted by current card capacity.