Nokia Booklet 3G Review

Do you know what MikroMikko is? Surprise! Nokia, which is one of the world's leading mobile phone manufacturer, used to produce computers by that name. MikroMikko 3, manufactured in 1987 by Nokia, was a state-of-the-art MS-DOS machine with 1MB of RAM and 20MB drive. It's been about 25 years since Nokia's made a computer bigger than an N900, but it's back in the game with its first netbook, the Booklet 3G. So how is the Nokia Booklet 3G?

Let's first look at the chassis, which is carved from a single piece of aircraft-grade aluminum. On top of the aluminum lid is a high-gloss plastic cover (available in white, black, and blue) which unfortunately gets covered in fingerprints. Probably that is the reason Nokia included a soft cloth in the box. Although the aluminum makes the Nokia Booklet 3G heavier at 2.8 pounds, it's still comfortable to hold and carry in one hand.

The Booklet has three USB ports, an HDMI port, a headphone jack, and SD and SIM card slots, but there's no VGA or Ethernet ports. So in case of a weak 3G connection and an absence of a WiFi network you would really face a challange. Although you can obviously buy a USB Ethernet adapter, but after spending $599.00 why go through that pain!

The Booklet has an attractive 10.1-inch edge-to-edge glass display. While a smaller bezel could have sufficed, the 1280 x 720 screen is high quality and much roomier than the usual 1024 x 600 netbook resolution. The LED-backlit display are easier on the eyes and the 720p video clips looks vivid and crisp.

The Nokia Booklet 3G uses the lower-power Intel Atom Z530 instead of the usual N270 or N280 to increase the battery life. But that makes it very sluggish in performance. Running Firefox and Word simultaneously is fine, but adding another application like Seesmic Desktop causes things to drag. Moreover, you would often get a "not responding" message while trying your hands on something like streaming a movie on Hulu while running Tweetdeck, AT&T's connection manager and Microsoft Word. And the 4,200rpm, 120GB hard drive that's slower and smaller than the 5,200rpm units in most other netbooks adds to it's woes. And so does the Windows 7 and F-Secure security suite.

The battery life is good though, which can run for about 8 hours at 75 percent brightness to browse the web and edit documents. Nokia also bundles the Ovi Suite for synchronizing the Nokia phone and its Social Hub software, which is useful for centralizing your social networks (Twitter, Facebook) to one desktop application. It also lets you easily send text messages from your SIM. You can find detailed specifications here.

In a nutshell, things would look fabulous with the Nokia Booklet 3G until then time you start working on it. Once you do, you would simply wonder whether it's really worth the $599.00 price tag.