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Email and Instant Messaging

The N810 comes with a basic application for handling email. This is probably the weakest software package on the device, though. You can set it to download your email on a schedule, and it supports POP3, so you can get messages from most of the consumer email services, like Google and Yahoo. It also offers IMAP support, but I found this to be so poorly implemented and painfully slow that I can't recommend that you use it.

Another complaint with this application is its rudimentary scheduling capabilities. There's no way to set "off" hours, so if you sleep near the N810, expect to be woken up multiple times during the night when new messages come in. All in all, this application is so lame that, unless you find a third-party replacement you prefer, you'd be better off with an email service that allows you to check your messages through a browser. A related application is the N810's PDF Reader, which lets you view Adobe Acrobat documents that come in as email attachments. This worked well in my limited testing, and might even be good enough to do double duty an an ebook reader.

Beyond just email, this handheld offers strong support for Instant Messaging. It connects with a variety of services (Google Talk, Jabber, and SIP), and functions essentially like its desktop equivalents. Naturally, when you're logged in, you can see who else among your friends is also on. You don't have to set these up yourself, or at least you don't with Google Talk; my friends list was uploaded to the N810 automatically. The Chat application is designed by default to run in the background at all times, so you can get IMs whenever you have a Net connection. You can turn this off it you want, though... more>>>