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It Does Little and Not Very Well
wiredog writes "A Washington Post (frryyy) review of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, a handheld Linux device. The reviewer complains about the lack of keyboard, poor WiFi implementation, outdated software, non-standard memory card, and almost as many crashes as an unpatched Win98 install."
Someone has ported GPS over to 770 and now combined with a bluetooth GPS receiver it acts as a gps decive showing maps etc. There are plans for VOIP support soon. Combine this with FON router and you are on online at many places and make free calls, check email etc. I was thinking on the lines of hacking this into a car. There is already GPS available, so why not hook it up with car stereo and double it as an mp3 player. And if you have a FON account every time you drive by a FON location it downloads your email.. missed calls etc. This can be pretty interesting. Any thoughts ?
Username: mobb@deep.com
o m
password: mobbdeep
http://bugmenot.com/view.php?url=washingtonpost.c
if those don't work
keyboard? get a bluetooth keyboard.
crashing? dont load mega-websites on a machine with sixty-four megs of ram. lots of sites work fine.
does little? there are tons of emerging third party apps emerging... did that guy even check the maemo wiki page?
most useful third party app on the seven-seventy is fbreader. lets you read any txt files rotated or not, large/small fonts and so on. most of your standard ebook features are there.
another useful app is the xterminal. if you ever use ssh to connect to remote sites to do stuff, you'll find this xterm-in-your-pocket highly useful.
It also seems he was switching it on and off every time he wanted to use it, rather than using the rather nifty built-in power management. Either leave it alone (or give it a clue by sliding its cover on) and it'll slow the processor, shut down devices and the screen and save battery.
In this "close to standby" it awakes instantly and lasts a week or so between recharges.
1. Get a bluetooth keyboard.
:( If I could get one of those then all sorts of interesting uses pop to mind.
2. RS-MMC? I found a 2 gig one for under $100 so that doesnt seem to bad.
Actually this could make a LOT of sense. It has bluetooth. Combine it with your cell and you have internet access everywhere.
It has WiFi. I go to a few places that have free wifi but I never use it. I do have a notebook but it is too heavy to carry with me every where. I could see me using this at those locations.
This could be a very nice little device. I could see it as an ideal car computer. What it does seem to lack is a USB host port
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's not a PDA or a teeny laptop. It's a handheld webbrowser.
I can read news sites, RSS feeds, check my Gmail, all works just fine. It's also servicable as a MP3 or video player - certainly not as good as an ipod, and reformatting videos to appropriate resolutions/framerates/formats can be a PITA...
I think of it as more a compact second (ok, in my house it would be 4th) computer that I can pick up and check my mail and a few news sites without wandering off to another room to log in. I don't generally respond to mails on it - it's bad at that, but that's not the point.
I have a Nokia 770, and I love it. Yes, wiFi drops out, but I have installed ssh, telnet, gaim, gnumeric, joe, and a whole bunch of other things. It will axtually work as a remote X terminal, (gnome proggies, not kde ( it crashes)).
Despite the shortcommings, it is a great way to ssh into my server(s) and fix things.
The browser also works with my online banking, which is rare in portable devices.
It may not be the best consumer device, but if you know what you are doing, then it has a lot more usefullness than many, if not all of the other micro-portables.
It is well worth the $359.00 it takes to buy one.
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
http://www.the-gadgeteer.com/stowaway-xt-review.ht ml
You must not have looked very hard; there are plenty of tiny tablets with keyboards. The tiny Thinkpad X41 tablet weighs less than 3 pounds. I didn't want a 1024x768 screen, so I went with the Toshiba Portege M200, which is 4 pounds and offers a 1400x1050 resolution. Both are convertible tablet PCs with keyboards. After a year of owning the Toshiba, I'm quite happy and have recommended Tablet PCs to many other people.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
GPRS is not an issue for me, since it connects happily to the 'phone in my pocket for that. Since my 'phone has its own battery, the drain on the 770 is quite small connecting to the Internet like that.
Storage is expandable by just plugging in a bigger RS-MMC. Currently this limits you to 1GB.
I also don't know what you (the reviewer?) are talking about with the WiFi drops. I have used mine on WiFi for hours at a time with no issues. Perhaps this means the power saving feature that drops the WiFi connection when there are no active connections for a short period. If you are reading a long web page then you don't want WiFi on draining the battery all that time, for example.
The three biggest things (I think) they need to fix for the next generation are, in order:
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
- Bluetooth GPS and GPSDrive HOWTO
- USB Power Injector 2 (for hooking up USB keyboards, storage, etc.)
- "No Solder" USB Host method.
Firmware/Software Hacks- Manual "mass storage" mounting (using an iPod nano as an example)
- Mass storage mounting scripts
- Application menu "button" creation. (use this with the post above)
- Firmware upgrade notes
- Firmware destruction recovery
Connectivity- Pairing with Windows Mobile devices (requires a firmware patch)
- T-Mobile GPRS use
Ideas and Ruminations:- Portrait of a Consumer
- Ten Simple Suggestions to Nokia
- Google Life
Other fun:What makes Palm OS obsolete, in your opinion?
:)
I'm not trying to specially qualify my comments by saying this - I merely feel like sharing my background on the subject. From 2000 until early 2002 I was a professional programmer working on the XMap Handheld (AKA Solus) mapping product for PalmOS. I followed the product line pretty closely for a few years, from the tail-end of OS3 up until the period in which OS5 was being introduced to developers. It's a system that I love for various reasons but lately I've felt that it has some real issues that need to be addressed.
Top on the list is PACE - the m68k emulator/translator that runs on all the ARM-based OS5 devices. It's fantastic that they were committed to providing this level of backward-compatibility. The problem is (and I could be quite mistaken here, if my knowledge is as outdated as I would hope it is) that as far as I know they never rolled out a full-fledged way to write fully-fledged ARM applications. PalmOS6 came out in 2003 (according to Wikipedia) but no devices use it - including the recent and upcoming Treo models. The only way to get native ARM code into a Palm app these days is with "PACE Native Objects" - chunks of native ARM code stuck into an emulated m68k application. The result is that people still mostly write m68k code for their Palms, even though the platform moved to ARM years ago.
Next is the lack of a multitasking, protected environment for programs. There's a limited capacity for multitasking (IIRC the underlying OS for both OS 1-4 and OS5 both provide this support, but PalmOS operates on top of this layer, providing the entire environment within one "process" and not enabling access to that functionality) Sure, I believe in the "Zen of Palm" and all that - I think the PalmOS design makes sense in many ways in that it limits the portable device from accumulating a lot of cruft in the dynamic heap by essentially limiting it to one application at a time - but I am also a bit of a tech nerd and it does bug me that they haven't modernized this thing. A reboot shouldn't be necessary when an application crashes. And if a particular application is better implemented through real multi-threading as opposed to having execution jump all over the place in a single thread, then that's how it should be done.
Then there's internationalization. I know the importance of this will be quite a lot less for the majority of people - but I greatly enjoy the ability to properly represent and process foreign text using Unicode. I find the continued lack of it on PalmOS to be disappointing.
Internationalization and PACE were the two main factors that almost stopped me from buying a new PalmOS device to replace my defective and long-ailing Tungsten T2. (It's only defective because I bought a refurbished device from overstock.com, and it's always had issues.) The availability of things like an up-to-date Python interpreter on Windows Mobile was also a big draw. In the end, however, I decided that Palm is still the right portable platform for me, so I'll be receiving a Treo 650 soon.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
spelt (chiefly Brit.) past and past participle of spell(1).
The world has changed and we all have become metal men.
I didn't understand these at all. I have had exactly one freeze/reboot -- immediately after installing a 512MB card and symlinking a bunch of system files so that they actually resided on the card instead of the N770's internal RAM. I did have a nasty moment when that reboot occurred, wondering if I'd broken something badly, but in fact after it rebooted everything was fine (and actually the instructions said to reboot anyway, so it's possible that it may even have been added to the install script to save one the effort of booting manually).
So, apart from that one instance: no freezes, no reboots. Battery life is not great (like 3-4 hours browsing; but then I can't imagine why anyone would want to browse for an extended period with a pocket device anyway).
Boot time is quite long -- but then how often does one reboot? I've only done it about three times while messing around with hacky sorts of things, and under normal use I don't know why one would want to reboot.
So I'm really happy with mine. And BTW it does take standard cellphone batteries, so one can always carry a cheap spare if one wants to, although I really don't see the need.
Perhaps a Palm LifeDrive will suit your needs: $400? Check. Wi-Fi & Bluetooth? Check. Mass-storage device? Depends on how you define "mass" storage. It has a 4GB HDD, with expansion via an SD slot. (tentative) Check. 4-5 Hours battery life? Check. Keyboard It has a virtual keyboard and graffiti. A free wireless keyboard came with mine. Check. Landscape mode for surfing the web or looking at pictures? Check. Plus it has a drive mode for acting like a USB mass storage device, a camera mode for use with digital cameras, and comes loaded with software. Want to edit your office documents? Use Docs2Go. Want to listen to your music? It comes with PocketTunes. It's even got solitaire.
I've been carrying one of these around for the last 6 months or so, and while it has its flaws, it's still a great device to have.
When I'm wandering around with a baby/toddler strapped to me/in tow, the last thing I need to be lugging around is more stuff, even the lightest of laptops, nor do I want to carry anything as fragile or expensive as a laptop.
On the other hand, all the coffee shops around here are temptingly WiFi enabled, and there are a plethora of open networks around.
Having this device comfortably stowed in my pocket means that I can get some surfing and email in while the little guy takes his naps, just about wherever and whenever that happens to be. If I'm out of range of an open Wifi network, bluetooth to the cellphone works just as well.
It might not be a desktop browser, but it absolutely beats the pants off of ANY browser running on a cellphone, and the 800 pixel wide screen is enough to open webpages without side scrolling.
The email client sucks. I've been using webmail which works just as well until the software update comes out.
This is not a consumer level device yet. I would probably best describe it as an open beta-test. But for the price and convenience it's a great thing to have around if you know how to work with it. That, and it can run nethack.
While I agree with most of what you say, there's just one thing I have to point out that makes you look really stupid:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/spelt
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.