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 The reviewer complains about the lack of keyboard, poor WiFi implementation, outdated software, non-standard memory card, and almost as many crashes as an unpatched Win98 install."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

The Input/Output Hurdle

[TripMaster Monkey]

From TFA:

Its biggest flaw is the keyboard that Nokia left out. You can enter text only by tapping a tightly packed on-screen keyboard, with help from an automatic word-completion option, or by taking your chances with handwriting recognition that's either ploddingly slow or wildly inaccurate. That alone should sink anything built for constant Web and e-mail use.

This latest failure underscores once again the main problem with miniaturization...that while we can continue to make things smaller and smaller, their interfaces (input - keyboard/mouse, output - screen/speakers) must remain large enough to be useful, and the larger, the better. Even if you totally discount other problems like removable data storage, the main problem of user interfaces will continue to stand in the way of true miniaturization.

I'm still wondering why we haven't seen a personal data device marketed with either a roll-up or projected keyboard, fingertip mouse, and VR glasses? Freed of these constraints, the device itself could easily be made small enough to be wearable.

Re:The Input/Output Hurdle

[monoqlith]

Miniaturization is a problem, but it seems mostly for people trying to make many-purpose devices like these ones. It's not as difficult to build a very usable, very tiny interface on something that only performs one or a few specialized functions, such as the iPod or a cell phone. Trying to make a productivity tool, however, requires some ingenious compromise of size and functionality. Make it too small with two few buttons, it's too hard and not worthwhile for people to pick it up and learn. Make it too big with too many and it ceases to be truly portable.

I've thought about this for awhile and for the life of me I can't seem to come up with a compelling way of making a small, multi-purpose interface with a dealable learning curve. For these devices to succeed they have to be amenable to absolute manipulation in the same way that standard, non-digital physical objects are, and that's a mighty challenge that I don't think anyone has been able to succeed at to date.

Re:The Input/Output Hurdle

[jalefkowit]

It's not as difficult to build a very usable, very tiny interface on something that only performs one or a few specialized functions, such as the iPod or a cell phone.

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.

"Review" misses the point.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

For those who were wondering - yes, the summary is a troll. For those who missed it:

and almost as many crashes as an unpatched Win98 install.

1) Since when was their a patch for Win98 that stopped it from crashing? (apart from this patch)

2) And - the review did not mention the O/S crashing - just applications crashing. Linux is not the problem here.

Anyway, on to the meat:

Nokia's 770 platform is only just starting. The 770 is available for retail sale, but not really intended for the general public.

There's an upcoming release of the linux derived O/S it runs (in 2006) and Nokia are actively courting developers. (including discounts for gnome hackers)

I say kudos to nokia - they're (as the review shows) releasing a cool bit of hardware kit and they're going to let the software developement community (both free, open & proprietary) fill in lots of gaps. I hope it works out.

Oh - and rereading the review - it appears the reviewer's "biggest complaint" was the lack of keyboard. That's what seperates a tablet from a tiny laptop retard

Re:"Review" misses the point.

[garcia]

Oh - and rereading the review - it appears the reviewer's "biggest complaint" was the lack of keyboard.

I'll tell you what -- I use a fairly excellent mobile device for my daily needs (it has basically replaced my need for a laptop and I rarely use my desktop). The biggest draw is that it has a full Qwerty keyboard that, while being very small, I can easily use to communicate easily.

If I'm going to move to a device like the Nokia 770, I would *expect* that it have a hidden/retractable keyboard that I could easily use when I wasn't just pointing and clicking on links or scribbling a quick note.

If no keyboard is what seperates a tablet from the rest of the exceptional mobile devices out there these days (including my Sidekick) then I'll stick with what I have and wait for EDGE/wifi support.

Re:"Review" misses the point.

[spiritraveller]

The 770 is available for retail sale, but not really intended for the general public.

If you sell it to the general public, then you are intending that they will buy it.

The fact that it is open source should NEVER be an excuse for putting out a buggy retail product.

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:"Review" misses the point.

[Otter]

And - the review did not mention the O/S crashing - just applications crashing. Linux is not the problem here.

Read down to:

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.

Admittedly, that comes after multiple problems of applications crashing separately, which is why you may have missed it.

I say kudos to nokia - they're (as the review shows) releasing a cool bit of hardware kit and they're going to let the software developement community (both free, open & proprietary) fill in lots of gaps. I hope it works out.

Oh, yeah -- this is fantastic! It may be buggy and useless as it's currently sold, but the important thing is that they're giving discounts to GNOME developers who will hopefully then fix it for them! I'd better buy one right now!

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.

Different strokes for different folks

[N7DR]

I have seen several reviews of the N770 that for the most part come down "this device is no goo because it doesn't do X", for some value of X that the reviewer seemed to think vital.

All I can say is that I finally saw one of these about three weeks ago, and immediately (as in, next day) went to CompUSA and bought one. I love it. It does exactly what I want, and the only complaint I have is the lack of software -- but that will be quickly solved as the community ports apps to it. www.maemo.org is very active.

So it does what I want, and I think it's great. Obviously, if it doesn't do what you want, you'll think it's awful/pointless/a waste of money.

It has replaced my Zaurus (and has the added benefit that the form factor is almost identical to the Zaurus, so I can even use the same case for the N770).

I have to agree

[mehip2001]

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.

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).

My Nokia 770 is great

[Dynamoo]

My Nokia 770 is great - it does exactly what it's designed to do. It's a great, portable way to access the web via WiFi or Bluetooth, *much* more convenient to carry around than a laptop and the great thing is that it's really an accessory to your phone, so you don't have to have a cellphone as big as a housebrick.

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.

Re:Easy to fix

[MankyD]

Just plugin a thin USB or bluetooth keyboard and the problem is solved. Next question, please.

That completely defeats the purpose of having a single portable device that you can carry with you. Next thing, you'll be telling me I have to carry a keyboard, mouse, printer, speakers, ethernet cable, portable optical drive, usb hard drive and a power cord. This is one of those things that is supposed to "just work".

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.

Re:It still is pretty kewl

[Technopundit]

Thank you. And I hope you have a long and prosperous career with Nokia.

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.

He doesn't get it, which isn't a surprise.

[n6mod]

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.

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 /. crowd, IMO.

"Does little and not very well" for $200, Alex!

[jpellino]

Ooh Ohh I know this one!

What is "Apple ///"?
What is "Karl Rove"?
What is "Windows 1.0"?
What is "Windows ME"?
What is "Microsoft Bob"?
What is "Moeller SkyCar"?
What is "3DO"?
What is "Buran"?
And the Daily Double,
What is "FEMA"?

VUI

[zogger]

It would about have to come from a voice interface then. One that worked. A bluetooth or wired headset and just...talk to the machine. Then it could be small.

I so much agree on the tiny, I detest having to go get new cell phones, it has gotten to the point I can barely use them they have gotten so small. All this new really small stuff is designed with young humans with tiny fingers and great eyes in mind it appears. It doesn't matter how tiny the device is if you just can't use the thing, doesn't matter how many features it has if you can't see the screen or manipulate the buttons.

Note to hardware companies-look around the western world, the population with a lot of disposable income is neither real young nor do they have great eyes. Stiff fingers/arthritis and bifocals are *common*. You want those folks business, keep that in mind when you are designing stuff. These companies are telling folks who think nothing of dropping 100 grand on an RV that their market segment isn't worth releasing products designed with them in mind. Pretty much a huge missed business opportunity there near as I can see..with my bifocals. Keep saying FU to that market and it will reply in kind. Cater to it, you *might* get some bizznezz...

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