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 The reviewer complains about the lack of keyboard, poor WiFi implementation, outdated software, non-standard memory card, and almost as many crashes as an unpatched Win98 install."

Comments

More uses for 770

[dotslasher_sri]

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 ?

youu dont know how to use one

[xshader]

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.

Re:"Review" misses the point.

[Jaffa]

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.

Re:Give me a fucking keyboard

[LWATCDR]

1. Get a bluetooth keyboard.
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 :( If I could get one of those then all sorts of interesting uses pop to mind.

It still is pretty kewl

[kurt555gs]

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

Re:It still is pretty kewl

[TheRaven64]

My 770 was effectively free, and was well worth what I paid for it. The good:

• The browser. I like Opera, but the UI sucks. The 770 has Opera, but a much nicer UI than the desktop version.
• The battery. It lasts 3 hours of active browsing. Using the device as an eBook reader I've got around 10 hours out of it; great for travelling.
• Bluetooth and WiFi both Just Work(TM).
• Full set of development tools available.

The bad:

• The mail client is appalling. The UI is dreadful and it refuses to work with SMTPS.
• The browser doesn't seem to be able to remember passwords. Very irritating when I was visiting somewhere that needed a username and password entered to connect to the WiFi, especially since the 770 turns off WiFi to conserve battery after a short while if there are no open connections.
• The handwriting recognition is the worst I've seen. Someone wrote a handwriting recognition engine in under a hundred lines of Smalltalk, and it was better than the 770's version.
• No bluetooth file transfer protocol server (there is a command-line one available, but with zero documentation I was unable to get it working). This makes moving files between it and a full sized machine cumbersome.
• Dev tools are Linux only and don't really work nicely with anything that's not Debian.
• It runs Linux. This means you get the braindead Linux out-of-memory handling. Opera just asked for a bit more memory to render a web page? Pop! The text file you were editing has just been lost because the kernel picked the text editor app to kill.
• The text editor can only have a single document open at once.

I don't know what version of the firmware the author had, but I haven't had any crashes with the latest one, and I only had one with the version my preview copy shipped with. He also seems to be grasping at straws claiming it has a non-standard memory card. RS-MMC is as close to a standard as anything else I've used; I have more devices that take RS-MMC than anything else, and it works fine with my cheap USB card reader.

Tiny tablets with keyboards

[SlashChick]

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.

Re:I have to agree

[TheRaven64]

I am not sure what the grandparent meant by listing those features. Mine gets at least 3 hours of active browsing (WiFi) on a single charge and went for about 10 hours of eBook reading on a long trip recently (low CPU usage, no WiFi / BT).

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:

1. Handwriting recognition. The 770's handwriting recognition is worse than other devices had 10 years ago with CPUs a fraction of the speed. Fix it.
2. Add another 64MB of RAM. 64MB is not quite enough. Adding 32MB of swap on Flash makes the entire device a lot more useable. RAM is cheap, don't skimp on it.
3. Replace the mail client with one that isn't a complete waste of space. Ideally completely re-work the UI; this is a device that people will look at mail that's stored online with using IMAP, not something they will download their mail to. Design the UI around that. Oh, and make the underlying libraries actually work (e.g. actually support SMTPS, instead of having configuration boxes to set it up and then suggesting disabling SSL as soon as I try to use it. SMTPS is essential for a device that is going to be used in a variety of locations, since open SMTP relays are not that common anymore).

Does little my butt.

[DemonWeeping]

Same as previous N770 posts... I've been blogging howto's like mad.

• 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:

• Customizing the Nokia 770 (Good for new 770 owners)
• Notes on Accessories
• Free video content and conversion
• iBlue GPS kit from buygpsnow.com