Google and Nokia formed a partnership for a version of Nokia 770 to have Google Talk on it. Google Talk currently incorporates text messaging and VOIP features.
It’s not yet clear how the partnership will work out. According to MSNBC report,
Nokia expects the device to go on sale globally and cost about 300 euros, or about $390, the person said. Nokia also is talking to other companies about incorporating their Internet communication software onto the device.
$390 is a hefty price, and one would expect that with such significant branding and sticking to just one kind of VOIP client Google would subsidize at least part of the cost to get its client out there.
Nokia and Linksys are forming a partnership, where Linksys (a Cisco Systems company) will now bundle 770 with some of the wireless gateways Linksys is selling, Nordic Wireless Watch says.
Nokia 770 is featured on CNET’s worst tech of 2006 list:
This thing, it surfs Internet. You want to make phone call? You can’t make phone call. You like Ethernet? No Ethernet. You get Wi-Fi. Wi-Fi is nice. No wires! You like slow load times? Yes? It is good for that. You like battery that lasts more than three hours? It does not have one. Nice screen, though.
Al over at 770Fan asks where is MobiPocket for Nokia 770:
They have stated that we need the Java Virtual Machine on the 770 before they are gonna develop a reader.
AOL’s EnGadget named Nokia 770 the handheld of the year. What’s exciting is that it won both the editors’ and the readers’ picks.
Three site visitors wrote in to say that CompUSA introduced a price drop on Nokia 770, which is $349.99 now.
Want to save even more on a CompUSA buy? Head out to FatWallet, register for an account there (which is free), then go to their Stores section and click on CompUSA page. If you click on the affiliate link from FatWallet, they will share the affiliate revenues with you. The current rate is 2% cashback payable through PayPal (get a PayPal account as well), which means $7 cashback 90 days after the purchase has been confirmed and you have not returned the product.
A lot of people are e-mailing with questions and advice regarding Nokia 770. Please visit newly opened Nokia 770 forums for questions and answers. The content currently is a bit sparse, but hopefully it will grow on your participation. I am thinking of ways to encourage active participation (mainly answering others’ questions), if you’ve got an idea of what you’d like as far as reward, let me know.
In playing with the Nokia 700, it seems silly that Nokia has limited the device to two connectivity realms - wifi and bluetooth phones. There is another type of bluetooth access- via a PAN, or Personal Area Network. I’m only just starting to see what the 770 can do with BT, but already I’ve found that it’s too dumb to connect to a PAN with the Hildon-based Connection Manager. I’ve tried connecting to my Belkin F8T030 BT Access Point, to no avail. The 770 reports that there are no useful profiles on the device (which it sees). I don’t think the Connection Manager is looking for a PAN BT profile.
Matt Johnson wrote to maemo-users describing a boot up problem:
I got my Nokia 770 a few days ago and was having trouble connecting to Wifi. Tech support told me to shut down, remove the battery, and restart. This was annoying, but it worked. While online, I installed a few apps (xterm, ssh, GAIM, etc.), and tried setting my path in /home/user/.profile to include the install directory, as well as \bin and . I didn’t include \sbin, but my change to .profile didn’t seem to have any effect anyway.
The next day I had the wifi problem again, so I removed the battery and tried to restart. Now it fails to boot. The Nokia screen (not the hands, just the Nokia name) comes up and the progress bar starts moving, but at a certain (apparently random) point, the screen flashes, and the progress bar starts over, at the left. This continues to repeat until I remove the battery to turn it off.
I called tech support again. They said they had never heard of this problem, and told me to exchange it at CompUSA, which is difficult for obvious reasons. (Also, I’d like to find out exactly what caused this, so it doesn’t happen again. I don’t have a lot of Linux experience, but could the .profile be messing up the boot script?) I tried running the update software from the Nokia Europe website. This starts up, but fails at a certain point with “error code: ?”. There’s the flasher software, with which I could reboot r&d mode and get root (and delete .profile or at least see debug info on startup), but I don’t have a Linux box or Mac handy.
Has anyone seen this behavior? Any advice?
Neil McAllister writes:
I received the following e-mail this afternoon. When I called the Nokia number, the operator on the phone guessed right away that I was calling about the 770 and told me that the e-mail I received was probably generated because I was one of the very earliest people to order the tablet.
She said that when people originally ordered the tablet the Web site said delivery was expected on November 17 and people had “misinterpreted” that do mean that delivery would actually happen for sure on that date. “Due to unforeseen circumstances,” the units hadn’t yet arrived at the warehouse, and they were sending out the e-mails to confirm with people that they still wanted to receive the tablets.
I asked when they were now expected to arrive and she said there was no firm date, but that it had been suggested that the warehouse could expect them December 30. Even that, she said, was not a firm date — the fact that the e-mails were being generated now could be interpreted as a sign that the units would arrive sooner — but basically, nobody should get
their hopes up.