Nokia 770

I managed to get my hands on one of the devices I’ve been lusting after, the Linux based Nokia 770 tablet. I uploaded a few images to go along with the story. First things first. The screen is beautiful. Simply fantastic. That’s the first thing that really hit me about it, and it makes a great first impression. I just wanted to say that up front because I couldn’t get a good image with my 6680. Guess I have to get a normal digital camera for the pictures if the 6680 just isn’t gonna cut it. Guess we know the reason for the Zeiss goodness in the N90. Here’s a rundown of stuff that stuck out to me in playing around:

• Wifi – it rocks, gimme more. Oh if only I could have an E70. If the only way I could connect this little beastie to the network was through a cellular connection I would have had a lot less fun with it. The wireless is a bit odd still, but no more odd than the PSP. Sometimes it takes a few tries to connect to a network. But once it’s connected things seem to work quite well.
• Opera – I was pretty impressed by the implementation. What really blew me away was that the Google Maps stuff worked. You couldn’t grab and drag the map, but if you had a map with embedded controls they worked. And selecting the markers brought up the details bubbles and all that. Very cool. The flash player worked pretty well also, I tried it out with the defacto Strongbad visit.
• Bluetooth – It has bluetooth too, so I set it up to connect via my 6680 also. That’s pretty handy actually. However the other Bluetooth stuff was flaky at best. It took me a little while to figure out that the filemanager was the way to interface with most of the bluetooth features. The device doesn’t seem to be discoverable, and I have no idea how to make it so. However if you setup your phone in the connection manager it also shows up in the file manager, and you can browse it from there. However the connection kept going stale for some reason. Even though I was using it between two very recent Nokia devices. That’s Bluetooth for ya.
• Video – There seems to be a good focus on multimedia capability with the device. One of the reasons why Wifi rocks vs. cellular for this. The video player worked decently well. The support for 3gp seemed a bit spotty though. It would play 3gp from the 6680 well, but 3gp from the treo and other sources on the net didn’t always work. All the videos play just fine on the 6680 however, so I’m sure they’re good. I couldn’t get videos in other formats to work at all. All the videos I tried out work in TCPMP on my Treo, I would expect the player in the 770 to support at least the same level of capability.
• MMC – I was happy to find that my non-DV reduced size MMC from my Palm worked in the 770 just fine. Dual Voltage MMC is a pain in the ass to come by.
• Application Installer – Doesn’t. Not sure exactly what was going on here. I tried downloading the Python packages, I tried the INdT apps, and I installed the Maemo SDK and compiled the sample apps for ARM and packaged them. None of that worked. The only packages that installed were from http://770.fs-security.com/. Not sure what the deal with that is. Everything else kicked back with a “the module is already included” error message. And I used the XTerm package from fs-security to make sure, python is not on there. Nor was the package I compiled myself.

So, definitely some hitches here and there, but even as it is the device is a lot of fun to use. I’m sure by the time it’s actually out in the market much of this still will be taken care of. I’m definitely planning to get one myself.