Olli Salli from Nokia presented an official response of dealing with the slowness issues that quite a few of reviewers mentioned:
The OMAP platform comes with a TI CMS320C55x DSP, that handles the decoding of multimedia and some drawing too. It can be used pretty flexibly. Also, the software will probably get optimized a lot more than it currently is, so everything should be faster by the time the device ships.
Johan Hedberg on the developer list explained the inner workings of Nokia 770 Bluetooth module, since a lot of developers voiced concerns that having page scans and inquiry scans disabled for security reasons would make 770 a tough player in home PAN networks.
By default, the 770 will have both page scan and inquiry scan disabled (i.e. be non-connectable and non-discoverable). Enabling those scan modes is just a matter of issuing a simple HCI command. For example using the bluez-utils command line tools you can enable both scans the command “hciconfig hci0 piscan”. However, there will be no way to enable the scan modes from the default 770 UI.
This is definitely one of the strongest selling points for the device, if only they would have a picture of an e-book reader with great fonts and clarity running on Nokia 770. But so far TeleRead provides Maemo screenshots of Plucker running in full screen mode. See this screenshot to get an idea of the look and feel.
770fan site is a good source for short 770-related headlines. Like today it features a picture of white Nokia 770, apparently shipped to a prominent open source developer, who’s also in that photo.
Peter Rojas from Engadget runs a photo report from Digital Experience, and talks about the disappointment of the evening - none of the showcases Nokia 770 devices were working. The picture of non-working N770 follows.
The official 770 page now features a new Flash presentation from Nokia (defaults to just an image for browsers without Flash plug-in). And this Friday, July 1st, is the official first day of Q3, when the device was promised. While no one expects Nokia to actually start shipping the 770 models day after tomorrow, we’re getting closer to the release.
Mike Cane visited the Nokia booth at LinuxWorld Expo in New York City and wrote about his impressions of Nokia 770 Internet tablet. If you have to read just one review of N770, make it this one - with plenty of photos and analysis, Cane does an excellent job of evaluating both technological and business sides of Nokia 770. Among the interesting things that Cane notices:
- Loudspeaker is very loud.
- No hole for hardware reset.
- Putting the cover on places the unit into Suspend mode.
- The screen is bright and Mike calls it “stunning”.
- No portrait display.
- There’s a significant delay in loading programs, but otherwise it doesn’t seem too slow.
- The pre-production demo units froze occasionally.
- Video is too choppy.
Read Can’e review in full, as it does present some valuable technical points that anyone in Nokia should be considering before releasing the device, otherwise they will face a torrent of similar-sounding criticisms and consumer behavior impacted just by constantly reiterated criticisms (like the PSP and its dead pixels). Overall, however, Cane is quite upbeat:
Industry critics have cited other “Internet Appliance” failures as reasons why the 770 will also fail. I think this indicates a lack of foresight. The Newton and the first Jeff Hawkins PDA, the Casio Zoomer, didn’t create a market as they were expected to. Yet Jeff Hawkins’s second device, the Pilot, did. It offered the right size, the right price, and the right features. All of the others didn’t. So it is with the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet versus past “Internet Appliance” efforts. With the 770, Nokia has done it right.
Over at Engatiki Jay Savage contemplates that Nokia is doing the right things with their Maemo development platform and general approach to open source development:
It’s also a clever gimick: Nokia has announced an internet messaging client to be released in Q1 2006. The 770, though, is slated for Q3 2005, so if you want IM before that, you’re going to have to build gaim yourself (or download an rpm from somewhere), which should promote familiarity with maemo and the porting process, and spark some fairly rapid porting of critical and popular apps.
Mobile NewsForge runs a story on Matthew Allum, the developer of Matchbox Window Manager, whose project caught the attention of Nokia and made it into the Nokia 770 Internet tablet. According to the article, the Opened Hand company that Matthew founded is currently working on Matchbox that’s integrated into Maemo and Nokia 770. They list quite a few services on their Web site, even though the NewsForge article seems to imply that involvement with Nokia is the only business deal that Opened Hand currently has.
Looks like Nokia was quite secretive about the device development:
Allum didn’t know exactly what Nokia’s plans for Matchbox were until recently. “In the last year, it became apparent that they were going to make something rather than just pooling ideas,” Allum says. The relationship between Nokia and Allum extends beyond his work on the window manager. “It got to the point where I could suggest new modules and they’d say, ‘go for it.’” Nokia has provided enough work to OpenedHand that it now employs four full-time developers, and it is hiring more. Allum is glad for the opportunity to talk about the project, which has been veiled in secrecy for the two and a half years he’s been working on it with Nokia in Helsinki. “I’m under a whole lot of NDAs,” he says. These days, Allum is tweaking and optimizing Matchbox, though “it got to the point where it was what they needed.” He is working on more upcoming projects with Nokia, but isn’t at liberty to elaborate on what those are.
Maemo Live CD is available from Mattias Schlenker. Get it here.
Important note from Mattias:
I somehow messed up the startup-script, so you have to quit the xterm inside Xnest with CTRL+D and restart maemo GUI. This will be fixed in the next iteration.