Venerable Walt Mossberg, known for his ability to make or break companies and their products, reviews Nokia 770 this week:
I have been testing the 770, and I found that it performs its main function, Web browsing, better than any other pocket device I’ve tried. But it falls down badly on many other tasks, partly because of kludgy software and partly because it is agonizingly slow at almost everything other than surfing the Web.
Bowie J. Poag wrote in to mention he wrote a rather detailed Nokia 770 Internet Tablet 2006 OS review. Quite a few details, and you can tell Bowie went into all the details:
Figure this one out. Taking a normal, 512×512 JPEG and making it your background on the desktop takes an unusually long time.. But bringing it up in the image viewer doesn’t take long at all. It was slow on previous versions, but seems even worse now. What gives?
Washington Post today has an article completely dedicated to Nokia 770:
But while this $360 gadget might fit in great on “Star Trek,” in the real world it competes with a galaxy of other handheld devices - most of which do more than the Nokia 770, and do it far more reliably and gracefully. The Nokia 770’s aptitude at providing a pocket-size window on the Web can’t overcome its ineptitude at almost everything else.
Quite detailed review from TuxTops with an extensive wishlist of features that are currently missing:
Grainy touchscreen! While the LCD underneath is indeed beautiful, the touchscreen layer above it, is extremely grainy. Very visible mostly when the background is white. It irks me.
No ability to install applications on the MMC card. Just by installing a few third party apps the other night, I was over 50% of the 64 MB of allowance and it resulted in a very limiting experience. No, adding more flash memory to the Nokia internally won’t do it for me because it will always be a finite number of bytes to deal with. I would need the ability the install apps on the flash card, as I can with the Zaurus and PocketPCs.
Now that 770 has arrived and shipping, the reviewers are taking a more critical look at the device. Neil McAllister from InfoWorld points out that while the Linux geeks might love it, the general public is likely to question the performance and capabilities at this price tag:
Geeks who have seen this device often fall in love with it, so much so that it’s been heavily back-ordered since its release. Unfortunately, however, the Nokia 770 is a disaster as a consumer product. Although designing it to do very few things was a shrewd move, sadly it doesn’t do any of them well. Opening a single browser window taxes the device’s limited resources; open the bookmarks window too and you’re likely to get an “out of memory” error. Complex pages can crash it altogether.
Some initial issues:
The comment on Nokia770.com mentioned trouble with Google Maps, so I checked that out too. It seemed to work ok, but I wasn’t able to drag the map around with the stylus. After tapping on the map, it did react to the rocker button, but this was terribly slow.
David Chisnall wrote a week-long review for InformIT:
Pros: Superb screen. Nice overall UI. Good portable web and email device.Cons: Experiences slow-down with several applications open. No PDA functions (yet).
Overall: The most important functions of an Internet Tablet work well. The rest should improve with future firmware updates. Some parts of the software still feel a bit like beta releases, but the hardware seems solid and ergonomic. 7/10.
A review from an actual 770 owner on Slashdot:
I was a day 1 zaurus owner and this is exactly what the Zaurus should have been but was not. Out of the box, you pop in the included 64meg memory card, turn it on, and boom right in front of my face is my web browser, my RSS reader and e-mail. Best of all since its Linux they support all the secure e-mail connections (tls, ssl, imaps everything) so I don’t have to compromise my security while using it. It has a huge library for something that has only been out for a short while. It’s package management is 100x better than the zauruses! I jump on WIFI or Bluetooth to my phone to the internet, browse to the maemo.org site, click a package and it asks to open it in the package manager! It uses Opera 8 with Flash support. Plays full screen videos just fine, and let me tell you the screen is incredibly bright and detailed!Its a 800×480 display, just beautiful! Not to mention the browser is a full one! No PDA versions of web pages, no side scrolling. You can zoom in, browse history and book marks it works!
I installed very easily mind you, GAIM for IM, Doom a bunch of other little games, an xterm, they have SSH for it, and the library is growing!
Drawbacks:
Occasionally, when using it not as intended, say using the not-ready or polished GAIM, or lets say loading up 20 web browsers, with your rss feeder in the background its going to run out of memory. This is an internet tablet, it has RSS feeder, web and e-mail and its all fully featured and ready to go out of the box. If you use it as intended it works and thats that!Contrary to any reviews I have NEVER encountered any wifi flakyness or bluetooth crazyness. I have used it every day for about a week now, and it is just SOLID. Its design is slick as snot! check out the screen shots below, and check out nokias own site for the 770, its silver metal case and its included pouch is just awsome.
and of course, it runs linux! all my Ipaq and palm friends are very jealous!
Review with multitude of pictures from Gizmodo:
The screen on this thing is excellent. Quite bright and crisp. The UI is simple, if a little bleak. The icons and design is reminiscent of Nokia’s earlier super-smart phones. As this is apparently running Linux, I’d very much like to figure out if I can install a terminal client, but that’s for you h/\x0rs to discover.
NewsFactor runs a pretty detailed review of Nokia 770:
The Nokia 770 takes up the cause of an emerging market of Web surfers who are tired of having to lug a laptop everywhere they go, and does so with success.