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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 The reviewer complains about the lack of keyboard, poor WiFi implementation, outdated software, non-standard memory card, and almost as many crashes as an unpatched Win98 install."
Inputs like this? Bluetooth Laser Virtual Keyboard.
Excited, I picked one of these up about two months ago. But, I found it extremely lacking and returned it for an ipaq. Why didn't I like it? The email app almost always crashed when accessing my imap accounts. The browser (opera if I remember correctly) had real issues with moderately complex websites. The wifi seemed very slow when using encryption. In general, it wasn't much of a pda. On a positive note, the screen was beautiful and the movie playback was fantastic.
Just for the record, there is NO "off the record" record.
Make a record of that.
Not that I'd expect you to read the article, but the criticisms he has against it are far more than it just won't play Windows Media Player formats:
"The Nokia 770 takes longer to boot up than some desktop computers (nearly a minute) and offers battery life no longer than that of many laptops (4 1/4 hours of nearly continuous browsing). In two weeks of testing, it locked up and spontaneously rebooted more often than any computer I've used in that time."
The "unpatched Windows 98" jab must be from some Linux fanboy who inserted that. It doesn't appear in the article. The only mention of Windows Media Player is in a one sentence paragraph:
"You won't have much better luck with streaming media online because of the lack of playback software for Windows Media and QuickTime formats."
He also mentions the lack of a decent Flash player and comments that it won't play a lot of Flash content that's commonly out there. Maybe it is a good device for geeks who don't mind overlooking its myriad problems and coping with the challenges, incompatibilities, and crashes. And maybe some kernel developer will take a look at the code and work out the reliability issues. However, for the intended audience of that article -- consumers -- the review was spot on.
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I bought one and had to return it after a week of various things. First it was the flaky battery, then the flaky software that ended up becoming all but unusable. To put it nicely, the software is crap. Not only that, but it's incredibly slow. I would gladly have paid an extra $150 for a system based on embedded Qt with 128MB of RAM, a better processor and a real, fast SD card system. Basically, it is a short cut looking for a quality product. They cut so many corners that's nearly a perfect circle.
What the Nokia 770 *is* - it's an internet tablet with an very high-resolution 800 pixel wide display, with a basic email client, RSS reader, multimedia support and some apps thrown in. It does come with expandable memory, and there are other apps you can load onto it for free.
It *isn't* a laptop replacement, nor a PDA, nor a phone, nor is it a games machine or a personal multimedia player although it can do all of these to an extent. Primarily, it's designed to give you a much better web experience than you would get from a cellphone while it fits in your pocket. If you choose to extend it with keyboards, new applications and even things like GPS then it's up to you.
Two words of warning - I bought mine directly from Nokia (I had one of the first) and the first unit was faulty, at which point I discovered that Nokia's customer service is not great. And to get the best out of the N770, some work is required in terms of patching and loading on apps.
One last thing - it's great value. In the UK it works out as £250 including tax and shipping which is cheaper than many mobile phones.
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I agree. I have one and hack on it all day. It's a fun little beast. It's basically the only device of its kind available in the states. It's a next gen Zaurus, except Nokia is sponsoring development of lot's of 3rd party apps. However, I wouldn't buy one for my mom right now. A lot of apps are still being ported and are buggy. I think the first generation of the 770 will probably fail. But once maemo has lot's of apps ported (actually, it already has a shitload, but not so much "business apps" and many aren't hildonized) and Nokia learns some lessons of the 770, it will be a success. The base install is VERY limited and that's what they review it based on. I think the potential for the 770 is in 3rd party support. How much fun is a windows install with no 3rd party apps? I'm working on porting my home automation app to the 770 (perfect example). It's a hell of a lot easier to port to the 770 than blackberry or symbian. There are some hardware issues to address (battery life, gprs, storage), but once Nokia starts including more software and has a second iteration of hardware, this line is going to be a beast. If you want an expensive lame windows box, buy an orgami. If you want another lame calendaring and email device, buy a blackberry. If you want something different all together, buy the 770.
If an officer ever threatens to taze you, say you have a pacemaker.
I got one a few months ago, spurred on by the port of Einstein. If *something* could finally replace the Newton, this might be it. The truth is that Einstein is too slow for normal use, but I fell in love with the 770.
/. crowd, IMO.
I use it *constantly*, because it's has a real web browser (Opera w/Flash) and is pretty easy to connect over WiFi. It fits nicely in my coat pocket, and has a glorious, bright display. And it's an open and well-supported platform for development.
The reviewer makes some good points for his world. It doesn't play well with Microsoft. That's not a factor in my world. Sure, it doesn't play WMV9. But it does play MPEG-4.
It could use some additional memory. I moved the root fs onto a card to deal with that, and it's much more stable now.
The network messages are a little obtuse. Basically if any connection has reached a timeout (why there's a timeout for WiFi I'll never know), it says "Network Connection Error" when you try to send a packet. So you click 'Connect', pick a network, and you're off.
It uses RS-MMC because that's what the rest of Nokia's products use now.
It works flawlessly with my RAZR on Cingular, and the thought of EV-DO has me looking at the Sprint/Samsung RAZR clone.
Make no mistake, this is a 1.0 product, and not really ready for prime time. But it *is* ready for the
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I don't even know about that -- there's definitely a non-trivial market for cellphones with big, big buttons, for example, which implies that cellphones haven't exactly nailed the UI thing even for single task devices. Nokia has even started making this an explicit part of their marketing; see their new "Buttons for Humans" campaign for an example.
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It did reboot and crash . The whole piece . Not just the Apps . You are blindly defending it just because it's Linux . The product is not something of quality any of us would actually pay for.
Not everyone that says MS products are good or Linux sucks are posting flamebait/trolling . Plenty of people actually hold this opinion .
"unpatched win 98" . Oh no ! He said MS doesnt suck enough ! OMG ! Kill him !111!!!!11!!one!
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Here is what the article did say: "In two weeks of testing, it locked up and spontaneously rebooted more often than any computer I've used in that time."
In my opinion, if a computer locks up, or spontaneously reboots, or crashes, it is indeed the fault of the operating system.
Saying that it is not the fault of the O/S is like Microsoft saying that bluescreens aren't the fault of the O/S, they are the fault of those nasty third party applications and drivers.
A good O/S shouldn't dump or hang, no matter what the applications do. It should just allow the application to blow up, and protect other running applications.
The price point is actually decent. If Sharp had only priced their newest Zauruses (the C1000/C3xxx series) at the same price point and actually sold them in the US, they'd sell like hotcakes. Pretty much every complaint about the Nokia is gone with the newest Zaurus series. Sharp missed the boat on that one.
Kudos to Nokia for actually selling and supporting such a device to the Western market.
We did.
The Pepper Pad has an 8.4", 800x600 screen, a 624Mhz Xscale CPU, a 20GB disk, Wi-Fi, bluetooth, USB, and a full keyboard for about $800. It runs Linux and includes both Firefox 1.5 and Flash 7.
I've had one of these since just about Christmas. It's a great gadget for what it is: a wireless web browser on a Linux platform. The screen is crystal clear, the web browsing works and I've had no issue with network connectivity. To the extent there is a problem it is that Nokia seems to be marketing this as a consumer-ready device. It isn't. Mail is flaky, the PIM functions are missing, etc, etc. If it was only sold to its target audience (alpha geeks) everything would be cool.
All that said - I love it. I can pick it up and check the news, turn the internet access on or off for my kids or even VNC into a server if I really feel I must. Would I spend $350 of food money on it? No. But - if you can affort $350 for a cool toy - this is one.
I remember looking at these things and seeing a somewhat functional citrix client...
Has anyone tried to get something like this up and running?
I've been deploying tablet PC's in an industrial enviornment that are essentially expensive thin clients, it would be nice to find a replacement at almost a 10th of the price.
Comments like these are why linux hasn't yet broken in the consumer main-stream. The reviewer says the main apps on the device (opera, mail client) seem to crash all the time. Add to that the apparent platform instability (os crashes too) and, yes, the apparent lack of a media player, and it's *not* a good consumer device.
Yes, we could probably load onto it a more stable kernel version, and better apps, but what consumer would do that? Linux advocates should be pissed that this device gives such a bad impression of the platform.
it's yet another poorly conceived, badly implemented device from Nokia - a company that has proven time and time again that they make good phones, but haven't got a clue when it comes to making anything else. Seriously, in a former life I wrote applications for cell phones, and the Nokia devices were THE WORST. Everything was non-standard; every model had a unique twist. They touted their Symbian operating system as an "open and standardized" platform, but our sourcecode was riddled with #ifdef NOKIA3650, #ifdef NOKIA6600, #ifdef NOKIAinsertmodelnumberhere ... blah blah blah. Nothing they do surprises me anymore and I wouldn't carry anything with a Nokia name on it other than a cheapo bottom-of-the-line phone (which they do a pretty good job on).
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
One option is to use chord-based keyboards, such as the Frogpad or others. That way, you can have fewer (and larger) keys but still be able to do most, if not all, of the same keys as a traditional keyboard.
Perhaps in the near future we will start to see built-in projectable keyboards such as this (http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/input/8193/) in our miniaturized mobile devices.