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Sony Mylo Challenges Nokia 770
An anonymous reader writes "Tomshardware says Sony's Tiny Mylo Internet Communicator is out. "The first page of MobilityGuru's July 2006 review of Nokia's 770 WiFi powered Internet based communicator was titled "In A Class Of Its Own." One Month later the title is no longer correct. With the recent announcement of its Mylo (for My life online) personal communicator Sony joined the battle for the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of people whose major means of communication is instant messaging and Web based phone calling."" I've got a 770 on my desk right now (review forthcoming) so I'm curious to see other takes on the genre.
I wonder which one is better in general use. The 770's large legible crisp 800x480 colour display, or a PDA-esque 320x240 colour display. The former is good for web browsing, the latter is pretty awful. Now if Sony price it significantly lower than the 770 they might have a chance.
Never mind it is Sony that makes it, a company that can do no good these days.
Hardly.
Nokia: 800x480 screen resolution.
Mylo: 320x240 screen resolution.
When will these companies learn to view the modern web with any sort of comfort you need, at the very least 640x480.
--- I do not moderate.
Why would sony release something like this and NOT release a generation 2 PSP with all of this capability? :( not that the PSP is the greatest thing ever but still why have to handhelds like this and not one kick ass one that has all this.. ?
Palm Trio, Motorola Q, etc.... And you don't have to be near a free/open WiFi spot.
Next to UMD and Betamax, Worst....Sony....Product....Ever
Future ruler of a small Asian-Pacific island
and the resolution sucks. Which brings up a few points: recently /. had an article on the Samsung Q1 vs. the Newton MP 2100, i.e. a modern UMPC vs. a ten year old brick with great software. Both the Nokia 770 and the Q1 offer nice 800x480 color screens, WiFi, USB, Bluetooth, etc. The Newton has two pcmcia slots which can take cards to offer similar i/o capabilities.
So, other than predictable hardware improvements over the last ten years, why is it that both the Linux handheld 770 and XP Tablet edition Q1 suck so bad at the software? It just seems like we're taking a huge step back in usability in order to gain that "convergence" factor between desktop and handheld. Is it really worth it? After looking at the Newton and comparing it to these competitors, my feeling is that Mameo on the 770 and XP on the Q1 just don't come close to meeting the functionality of a handheld. Convergence seems not worth the trouble. Desktop PCs will always be faster than a handheld, and software bloat always seems to meet -- and exceed -- recent hardware advances. When will handhelds ever have the CPU horsepower to "converge" with their desktop brethren?
The Newton is dead. Documentation and source at Apple are long lost. Perhaps a good alternative would be a small system based on Smalltalk using Squeak. Better yet if it could be hacked paint directly to the framebuffer, rather than using X on the handheld.
*shrug* - just a thought.
The 770 has a keyboard - you can either use the onscreen keypad with the stylus, use handwriting recognition with the stylus, or use a full-screen keypad with your thumbs.
Why would I *want* to have a fold-out keyboard (one more moving part to break) to access itty-bitty keys (more breakable things)?
And lastly - if you *want* a real keyboard, get a Bluetooth keyboard and you are all set.
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The Nokia 770 (250 MHZ ARM-based CPU w/ 64MB RAM) uses a hildon + gnome desktop. it's a really poor choice because their implementation of gnome is bloated/slow where the 770 only needs a basic lightweight app selector. it does not take much to drag down performance on a 770 because of gnome being on it. ive seen it. if they used something other than hildon + gnome for the gui, something like photon or whatever, people would buy them in droves.
I don't see any plans for free SDK, or open developers community, no support for open source and freeware applications. It's not even close to Trolltech Geenphone.
I don't understand what you are complaining.
Nokia has made frequent and official software releases for Nokia 770. I have had at least five official releases installed on my N770.
There has been bugs but Nokia has promptly fixed those. The new 2006SE release is very good, except one annoying bug with Opera browser but I expect Nokia to fix it on the next release.
What do you mean, "dropping all development support"? They just released a new software image, the maemo.org site is very active, the Nokia developers are regularly posting both to the Nokia forums as well as to the freedesktop forums for both basic X as well as Cairo and GTK.
If that is "dropping all development support" then I would certainly like to see what you consider active development.
And as for you assertion that - again, I don't know quite what you mean. If you mean "many packages are not available for the new build" - then yes, but most of them have been ported. Or do you mean the second 2005 code drop - which was buggy, and was replaced by the 2006 image. Otherwise, I have the IT2006 build loaded, and it improved many things and I haven't really found anything that it "broke". Please give specifics.
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