A Slashdot user review:
I’ve had my 770 for a week now and so far I’m very happy with it!
I have seen many posts wondering why you’d want one, so here are my reasons.
- I want to have something to browse the web where a laptop is not appropriate, like in the bed or TV couch (I dont want to sit awkwardly leaning down to the coffetable or balancing the thing on my lap)
- I use it as an extra MP3 player in the kitchen, streaming music from my server. When used like this I have external speakers and the power chord plugged in. Since there are lots of wifi MP3 player I can’t be alone in having a need for this functionality.
- It can act as a pretty good divx player on the road but I haven’t really used it for that yet.
- It’s really cool!
This might not be enough for everyone but I have wanted the websurfing part of it since the term webpad was first coined somewhere in the late 1990s. And this is the first one that really delivers on the promise at a decent price point.
I never wanted the tablet pc’s becuse the ones I have seen are all laptops without keyboard which means that they are expensive, heavy and not really designed to surf the web on the go.
The fact that it runs Linux and potentially can do a lot of other things is pure bonus!
Many people have questioned the lack of a phone in the unit, but I can’t really see why I would want one.
If it had a phone, lets say a 3G one, it would need it’s own subscription or a dual subscription if possible, would be heavier and use more battery.I honestly think that it is much better to use my allready existing phone and subscription through bluetooth. Right now that is a GPRS phone but may soon be uppgraded to 3G, if it had been built in I would not have had the possibility to uppgrade it either.
I guess I should include a little min review also, so here goes…
The good.
- The build quality of the thing is excelent. Since most Nokia phones are plastic little massproduced toys that feels like they will break if you look at them funny I was suprised by this. The 770 feels like it could stop bullets
- The browser, so far it has handled most pages I have thrown at it with ease the pages have been shown in all their glory without having to slim them down to the screen. (Try that on a Palm!)
- The battery life, the stated 3 hours must be while stressing the unit hard, for normal use it lasts a looong time. The powermoding is excelent!
The bad.
- The 64Megs of RAM is a bit to little, the browser suck quite a lot of it and becaus of this it has problems with really large web pages.
- Memory handling in general is not the best, it takes a little to long to load programs.
- I expected that it would include a real dockingstation with power but it came a flimsy plastic stand a standard nokia charger.
I was just playing with one of these units (disclaimer: I work for a company making add-on software for the unit, but we’re outside of Nokia’s sphere of influence), and I was pretty impressed with the quality of the device. It’s pretty light, and the screen is readable even at the default level, but zoom buttons on the top of the unit are helpful for looking at something close up. The speed of the unit is sluggish in places–mostly when opening/closing apps–but overall is more than acceptable. It’s not Palm or PocketPC speed, in other words
We tested the browser and were able to view HomestarRunner for Flash content as well as browse Google Maps, the latter of which would be extremely handy in many situations. It also includes an audio player, and I was about to go to Digitally Imported and stream their ShoutCast stations without trouble. The “loudspeaker” is a bit tinny at higher volumes as expected, but with headphones it would make for a very nice portable music player as long as your battery life and signal strength hold out.
My biggest beef just with my initial impression of playing with it for 30 minutes is that there isn’t a microphone built-in. If some sage programmer were to get Skype running on the device…that would make for a very multi-functional device. I suppose a USB microphone could be connected to the mini-USB port on the bottom, but built-in would be much more convenient. In short, my initial impressions were favorable. It’s much better for web browsing than a PocketPC, both in terms of the technology in the browser as well as the screen size. I think the real key that would ensure the success of this device is add-on software to extend the basic functionality.
Alex Lee posted his first impressions to maemo-users:
I know a lot of people have been posting 1st impressions but I thought I’d add my thoughts too.
As a developer I’m very impressed with the device. The power management is second to none and I like the overall user experience. It feels natural and fairly responsive. Browsing is truly impressive. Way better than my thousand dollar jasjar.
email is a bit of a let down. My imap account feels sluggish. My on device mail database has become corrupt twice since last Thursday.
To remove the imap account and start again, you have to load ‘inbox’. however when inbox starts up it attempts send-receive and the mail program would crash. I had to offline-mode to delete the account. I also think there maybe a bug in the account input stage. sometimes it just seems to fail for me (I think it’s something to do with the domain, my username is of the form ‘domain\username’.For such a connected device I feel that the Bluetooth implementation is a little strangled. I’d really like to see better obex support. I want to be able to BT a vcard. I don’t want to drop to an xterm to do it! samba would be super-useful too.
I’m also interested in the distinct lack of ‘wake-up’ features. I’m praying someone writes an alarm clock app soon! Some old screenshots showed an ‘alarm bell’ icon in the top title bar, where did it go?
I think my development tinkering will venture into the networking side of things. If I could readily stream video/music/files from my pc that would be a big bonus for the device. currently it’s close, but not quite there, to replace my pocketpc.
A lucky owner reports from Europe:
My Nokia 770 finally arrived. lts the first time l experience Linux as a consumer product, even though l’ve been using Linux as my primary OS since 1992. The sensation is quite strange.
My first impression is: WoW!!
Anza posted a review here:
Wifi works nicely with my PC using a shared Internet connection over WLAN ad hoc network. Pages open nicely on the browser. Speed and rendering are as good as one can hope.
Got my 770 today and I was genuinely surprised. I have seen all the previous Nokia multimedia devices based on Symbian OS. N770 on linux really kicks the ass of the communicator lineup when it comes to browsing.
The UI is conventional and easy to use. No nonsense buttons scattered on the device.
Video and audio works nicely, considering that the 770 is not optimised just for this kind of use. I guess a bigger memory card has to be aquired.
Thanks to Nickster for his review here:
Got mine yesterday. Haven’t tested wifi yet as my wifi modem is currently being delivered, but played about with the video player.
The built-in video player tries too hard to display a perfect image. With a 25fps 352×288 MPEG, it drops frames, but gives a crystal-clear image. I’d have forgiven it if it produced a few artifacts but maintained the framerate.
DivX’s aren’t any better - right now I have to encode them to 352×288 @ 15fps in order to get something that would play. It plays flawlessly though, which implies that the image quality/framerate balance is tilted too far over to image quality.
But hopefully there are/will be other media players out there which can handle DivXs that are 702×576 @ 25fps - I’m open to suggestions here.
The display as a whole is fantastic, very bright, very clear, no dead pixels like the PSP has.
Handwriting recognition doesn’t work too well for me, but then again I have untidy handwriting so I’m going to have to adapt.
The User Guide is lacking where it comes to the RS-MMC card usage - it doesn’t tell you that you have to remove half of it before inserting it. I thought the card wasn’t going all the way into the slot, and it wasn’t until I measured the depth of the slot that I realised that half of the card is meant to slide off.
The built-in speaker is very loud and clear, which surprised me.
Charging was very quick, and it’s great that you can use the 770 whilst it’s charging.
The plastic stand that comes with it is cheap and nasty, but is at the right angle for desktop use, but I want a sharper angle so I can rest it on my chest whilst watching a movie in bed.
That’s my review after six hours usage - tonight I sort out wifi:-)
InternetTabletTalk runs a compilation of user reviews.
Daniel Smith posted a “first-impression” review here that’s worth quoting on its own:
Got mine too yesterday - regarding the screen - it is fantastically high res, but one thing IMO lets it down a little (I’d liek to know if other people have noticed this.. :O)
I think it’s the layer that does the touch-sensitivity, it looks as though it’s adding some sort of odd polarisation or moire pattern over the screen - in simple terms this means that as you tilt the screen, you get an apparent ‘grain’ of rainbow-colours - particularly in bright/white areas. It has the overall effect of making photos look like they’re a lower resolution that the fantastic 800×480 screen underneath…
Don’t get me wrong - I’m making a total idiot of myself in the office acting like a kid-at-christmas now that it’s arrived (I was hitting refresh on the DHL page every 15mins for most of the day!!), and the screen is still awesome, but this point does let it down a little - what do other people think?
“First impressions” review from a new Nokia 770 user. Apparently so far it’s pretty good:
- Device is smaller than expected. Although it has a 4,13 inch wide screen, it definitely still is a very portable device (fits in a shirt pocket)
- However, it does feel quite heavy, especially with the metal cover
- Casing looks very solid, sleek and professional
- Screen resolution/sharpness is impressive and reacts very crisply to stylus input
- Setting up is extremely easy, based on wizards (I was surfing the web literately within minutes)
- User interface is very intuitive : Nokia at its best!
Interesting entry by Roger Sperberg in his blog regarding the usefulness of upcoming N770:
I check email, certain websites, rss feed, etc. every hour or so all day. I get away from my computer and I still have that urge — better check now!. Maybe it’s web addiction; the 770 will be my methadone. But you know, I’m not the only one with this itch; by giving us web access at all hours from most any location, the 770 will let us live with our addiction.