Nokia 770 - Is it any good?
Like lots of other people I decided that the latest Expansys price for the Nokia 770 was too good to ignore and I snapped one up for about £65.
The promise of a large bright 800x480 touch screen in a silent, lightweight package with great battery life and WiFi/ Bluetooth was very appealing. Also the third party software scene looked mature and rich, which is usually what makes or breaks a device for me.
The promise of a large bright 800x480 touch screen in a silent, lightweight package with great battery life and WiFi/ Bluetooth was very appealing. Also the third party software scene looked mature and rich, which is usually what makes or breaks a device for me.
Now that I have owned the device for a couple of months I can share my views about it.
The Nokia is a strange beast. It doesn't fall in to the same category as anything I've owned before. Its not a PDA, its not a phone, its not a media player. What is it? Nokia call it an Internet Tablet...which I would narrow down further than that to simply a portable web browser. I would leave it at that.
I have tried expanding the Nokia to do more...FTP, VPN client, RDP client, YouTube viewer, ebook reader, MP3 player, word processor, etc. and I have failed!
I have ended up disenfranchised with the open source world which in this case seemed only to serve up half finished unstable apps which did nothing but give and then dash away high hopes.
I can't really blame anyone...I mean it is all free...but I found this very disapointing. The upshot is that I now consider the 770 as "Opera for by the bed".
The Opera implementation is surprisingly good, Flash and Javascript work and most websites fit full width and look great on the screen, but there are still frequent crashes and there are bugs in the software. For instance, the option to change windows to view a different open web site simply doesn't work - this seems like pretty poor quality testing to me!
The Nokia doesn't support Bluetooth PAN, which unfortunately is the only kind of Bluetooth my phone (HTC TyTN) supports. There is a workaround involving installing a patch on my phone to give it Bluetooth DUN and also upgrading the Nokia firmware to the hacked N800 firmware "OS2006 Hacker Edition". I did eventually get this working and I found that the newer firmware fixed several items (including the browser bug mentioned above) but this OS is even more unstable and unfortunately I had to downgrade again to make the device useable.
I haven't mentioned the quality of the hardware itself. Its actually very good, but disapointingly its nowhere near the build quality of a Nokia mobile phone. The 770 feels very cheap in comparison...which is OK, because IT IS a cheap device these days! If I had paid £300+ for this device I would certainly have been disapointed!
The battery life is great, the screen is superb, the weight is ideal, it IS silent (which means my girlfriend will tolerate me using it in bed) and the buttons are well placed for web browsing.
Its a good device but it somehow feels like a prototype. The build quality isn't quite there and the software certainly isn't!
Its a shame that the Nokia 770 isn't just a little more polished and that the software community isn't producing software thats a little more stable. I can't help but think that if there were a few commerical companies producing software for the platform things would progress and quality would be better.
I will continue to use the Nokia 770 as an internet browser by the bed. Its ideal for quickly checking your ebay items, or your favourite news sites. Its not quite up to my hopes of having it with me at all times and using it with my mobile phone to connect to VPNs and then RDP into servers, unfortunately.
Roll on the next gadget...OQO Model 01+
The Nokia is a strange beast. It doesn't fall in to the same category as anything I've owned before. Its not a PDA, its not a phone, its not a media player. What is it? Nokia call it an Internet Tablet...which I would narrow down further than that to simply a portable web browser. I would leave it at that.
I have tried expanding the Nokia to do more...FTP, VPN client, RDP client, YouTube viewer, ebook reader, MP3 player, word processor, etc. and I have failed!
I have ended up disenfranchised with the open source world which in this case seemed only to serve up half finished unstable apps which did nothing but give and then dash away high hopes.
I can't really blame anyone...I mean it is all free...but I found this very disapointing. The upshot is that I now consider the 770 as "Opera for by the bed".
The Opera implementation is surprisingly good, Flash and Javascript work and most websites fit full width and look great on the screen, but there are still frequent crashes and there are bugs in the software. For instance, the option to change windows to view a different open web site simply doesn't work - this seems like pretty poor quality testing to me!
The Nokia doesn't support Bluetooth PAN, which unfortunately is the only kind of Bluetooth my phone (HTC TyTN) supports. There is a workaround involving installing a patch on my phone to give it Bluetooth DUN and also upgrading the Nokia firmware to the hacked N800 firmware "OS2006 Hacker Edition". I did eventually get this working and I found that the newer firmware fixed several items (including the browser bug mentioned above) but this OS is even more unstable and unfortunately I had to downgrade again to make the device useable.
I haven't mentioned the quality of the hardware itself. Its actually very good, but disapointingly its nowhere near the build quality of a Nokia mobile phone. The 770 feels very cheap in comparison...which is OK, because IT IS a cheap device these days! If I had paid £300+ for this device I would certainly have been disapointed!
The battery life is great, the screen is superb, the weight is ideal, it IS silent (which means my girlfriend will tolerate me using it in bed) and the buttons are well placed for web browsing.
Its a good device but it somehow feels like a prototype. The build quality isn't quite there and the software certainly isn't!
Its a shame that the Nokia 770 isn't just a little more polished and that the software community isn't producing software thats a little more stable. I can't help but think that if there were a few commerical companies producing software for the platform things would progress and quality would be better.
I will continue to use the Nokia 770 as an internet browser by the bed. Its ideal for quickly checking your ebay items, or your favourite news sites. Its not quite up to my hopes of having it with me at all times and using it with my mobile phone to connect to VPNs and then RDP into servers, unfortunately.
Roll on the next gadget...OQO Model 01+
posted by Simon Dale @ 18:15
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