I illustrated this slideshow, written by Cameron Sturdevant for eWEEK.com. It’s the second in a series featuring Cameron’s ideas for an imaginary tablet product, the “Couchlet”. (Here’s the first slideshow, written shortly before Apple’s iPad announcement in January.) I’m hoping we’ll do a third one comparing and contrasting Cameron’s Couchlet concept with the iPad, once it’s available.

Around November of 2008 I got caught up in web tablet madness. Tired of being tied down to my desktop machine, I wanted a portable, high-resolution, internet-accessing device with a large-ish screen, that I could use for looking up photo reference at the drawing table and for general web browsing everywhere else.

I didn’t want a laptop. I’ve never been happy with the standard laptop keyboard/trackpad layout for one thing, and I wanted something that would be lighter and wouldn’t require opening up to use. Hey, I thought excitedly, maybe I could hack something together myself; I’d seen at least one website detailing a homebrew screen/drawing tablet combo. Maybe I could come up with some new and interesting design ideas! I started making up a parts list and trying to figure out how I could put such a thing together. (I don’t know one end of a soldering iron from the other, but hope springs eternal.)

As I was researching my own tablet, I came across two others that looked promising: the CrunchPad (which may or may not come on the market as the “JooJoo”) and the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. Weary from many days of searching various forums and obscure electronics parts websites, I looked at the CrunchPad’s proposed specs and thought, “OK, maybe I don’t have to do this myself.” But the CrunchPad was still in development at that point, and who knew when it would come out? So I took a closer look at the Nokia.

The N810 was much smaller–pocket-size, just slightly smaller than those pocket moleskines–than the device I was picturing. But it was available, it ran open-source software, and thus it had an active community figuring out what it could do and how it could be extended. In mid-December ’08 I picked one up.

It’s turned out to be a handy gadget and worthwile investment. The screen is its most outstanding feature – it’s not as large as I would like for photo reference use, but it’s fairly high-res at 800×480 pixels. The text size can be adjusted in most apps, and I can zoom in on images and web pages with the + / – buttons on the top of the device. Webcomics look crisper on the N810′s screen than on my desktop monitor.

(Though it’s probably hard to tell from this screenshot. A Smithson page, shown in the excellent Tear web browser.)

The N810 doesn’t really shine at any one task, but it’s a terrific general-use gadget for web browsing, email, instant messaging, playing MP3s and video, VOIP, browsing images, reading e-books, etc. It’s definitely changed the way I consume web content. Before it was akin to sitting down at the table for a formal, extended meal; now it’s a snack here, a snack there. I check Twitter and Facebook on it while I’m making breakfast, to really drive that metaphor into the ground. I use it for work email and IM when I’m away from my desk. I make notes of those just-before-bed story ideas and email them to my desktop, for approval (or junking) when I’m less bleary-eyed.

The community at maemo.org is an active one; developers there have provided new browsers, email clients, and even ported over other operating systems that can complement or replace the one from Nokia. (So if I want to do desktop-like things like edit a document in OpenOffice, draw in GIMP, or browse with Firefox, I can–albeit slowly.) Even though the N810 is probably no longer being manufactured – the newer & zippier N900 phone/tablet came out recently – it’s being kept alive by those folks.

I’m still holding out hope for a fairly inexpensive, larger web tablet to come along in the next year or so. The Always Innovating Touch Book looks promising, though it’s still in the beta stage. It’s also a Linux-based machine so hopefully it’ll grow its own community of tinkerers.

Note that by the final picture it is actually nighttime and the year 2525.