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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 The reviewer complains about the lack of keyboard, poor WiFi implementation, outdated software, non-standard memory card, and almost as many crashes as an unpatched Win98 install."
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
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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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-dave
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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 *
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
You have violated Robot's Rules of Order and will be asked to leave the future immediately.
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.
Read my blog.
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...