[KLUG Advocacy] The Nokia 770 a flop?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> I actually bought one yesterday (an impulse buy)  at CompUSA for $349.  My
> employer gives me a small fund for training and research type stuff, so I
> didn't have to shell out my own hard earned dollars.

Cool.  This would be an excellent topic for a presentation!

> In the two hours that I spent playing with it yesterday it has made the
> following random impressions:
> 1.  Beautiful display - by far the best that I have seen on any portable
> device  (800x480 give a decent amount of real estate)
> 2. Text input is painful - you really do need a keyboard.  Tapping out
> characters on the on-screen display gets really old really fast, I hav not
> really given the handwriting recognition a try.

Maybe they will build in a keyboard in a future version?  Having to use
an external keyboard seems like it greatly diminishes value.   I've
found I can do quite well even on the tiny keyboard on my Palm Treo 650.

> 4.  Installing packages is really simple - they are apt packages
> 5. Wireless (Wi-fi) works well for me, have not tried bluetooth (no
> devices)
> 6. Made in Estonia
> 7. Nethack works well
> 8. Web pages (/., yahoo, google) load well and are quite readable, easy to
> scale text size up and down with a hardware button

Pages with javascript work OK?  What about plugins like flash and Java?

> 9. The news reader (RSS)  works even better (probably the best application
> of the device)
> 10. It is rather slow, but the recent v3 of the system software has
> improved this a bit

So you don't think it is as nightmarishly slow as the article suggests?

> 11. It comes with an removable RSMMC card (64 MB) that when plugged into a
> machine via USB appears as a mass storage device

Is this different than the SD card used in most devices like cameras?

> 12. Solidly built
> 13. Much nicer overall package than Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 that I had a few
> years back (except for the missing keyboard)
> 14.  Gaim works
> 15. Image viewer is nice

>> First real review of the much-touted Nokia 770 that I've seen:
>> http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/01/02/01OPopenent_1.html
>> Doesn't sound good.  But it is a cool idea.
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