HackADay provides a good opinion on why Nokia’s foray into the digital appliance world is important:
not nearly enough noise has been made about how easy hacking this device is. Nokia has opened up almost everything even placing the graphics under a Creative Commons license. Nokia has also constructed a firm foundation to develop on.
Wall Street Journal provides a clue on why Nokia is not supporting VOIP or Skype right out of the box. Actually, it’s Ben Wood, a Gartner analyst from the UK:
“Perhaps they were reluctant to upset some of their existing customers,” Mr. Wood said, referring to the cellphone service providers.
We mentioned before that Movial is already working to fix the problem.
Michael Parekh has several pieces of advice for Nokia on 770 design and marketing:
- Support VOIP and Skype.
- Support some cellular networks.
- Put a hard drive.
- Come up with a name, don’t name it 770.
Nokia 770 will help the device manufacturers reclaim the userbase from the mobile operators, Martin Geddes from Telepocalypse says. Very good analysis of what 770 means for the market in general, not just for Nokia. It seems that at some point Martin does get carried away with it, forgetting that 770 does not offer any cellular capabilities and doesn’t have voice features to boot. So while it’s a newcomer to the market, it’s a newcomer to a totally different market than the one where Cingulars and Verizons of the world operate. It’s a mobile gadget market for entertainment on the run, direct competitor to Sony PSP.
However, Mr. Geddes pinpoints the applicability of Nokia 770:
In the home a laptop or PC isn’t always the right thing. You just want a really quick piece of information; to check what time that flight is supposed to leave, etc. This is a “third place” device (after “home” and “work”), but that third place could be in the non-traditional parts of both home and work. Again, the cell phone or smart phone doesn’t do a good job.
Would be even cooler if they showed Google Maps with satellite overlays on this photo.
Forbes magazine says Nokia’s strategy impressed Bank of America, who put a price target of $23 on Nokia stock.
Nokia stressed that it was not pursuing the all-inclusive “Swiss Army knife” approach to designing handsets. Instead the company plans to implement six elements into its new products: photography, music, media, connectivity, productivity, and add-on software.
Om Malik, a well-known technology journalist, contributing to Business 2.0 and other publications, suggests we give Nokia credit for what they’ve designed with 770 model. You can see that Malik works for a business publication, not a personal technology digest, as he goes straight to the money, avoiding the usability/applicability discussion:
It is a device which has the right idea at the right moment. Research shows that WiFi usage inside homes is only going to increase. There will be 160 million broadband enabled, networked homes by 2010, according to The Diffusion Group. This trend offers opportunities to sell devices specially designed for this type of environment.
Russell Beattie, currently at Yahoo! but famous for his blog on mobile technologies long before he joined Yahoo!, shares his thoughts on Nokia 770 Internet tablet. As Russell is pretty heavily involved with developing for mobile devices, this is one of the voices Nokia should pay close attention to, since support from people like Russell usually makes or breaks the platform.
So far he’s critical:
Why no cellular connectivity? WiFi and Bluetooth are nice and all that, but Nokia’s expertise is in mobile. Why go backwards? No hard drive and no support for any cards with decent sized memory (i.e. SD Cards). RS-MMC maxes out at 512MB or maybe 1GB soon. That’s not enough.
Support for relatively niche RS-MMC and lack of support for relatively huge Secure Digital cards is definitely one of the drawbacks of the new device.
ZDNet kicked in with their own review, diligently listing the pros and cons. A big problem that they see? Lack of support for Microsoft multimedia formats. This is fair criticism, since if you’re buying your music, you’re likely to buy them from Napster in WMA format, and if you’re buying your digital movies, you’re more likely to get them from MovieLink.
Packed to the gills with a host of productivity applications and multimedia features, the N770 is a promising device. That said, while it works with a myriad of multimedia, its lack of support for native Microsoft file formats such as WMA and WMV will limit its appeal.
Looks like quite a few analysts are puzzled on the real applicability of Nokia 770. Good Morning Silicon Valley then says:
After all, the Linux-based device does nothing you couldn’t already do with a PDA that has integrated Wi-Fi.