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 The reviewer complains about the lack of keyboard, poor WiFi implementation, outdated software, non-standard memory card, and almost as many crashes as an unpatched Win98 install."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

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.

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.