News from the portable device land: 10,000,000th Sony PSP shipped.
Koen shares his first impressions of Nokia 770. I will just quote the negative ones, you can read the entire posting on his blog.
- Opera sucks. It’s slow, unstable and evil.
- The email client doesn’t handle imap folders
- The filemanager freaks out on bluetooth transfers
That’s bound to generate a few negative reviews, but nothing that’s a deal-breaker. I went to a speech by Opera CTO recently, where he pointed to the fact that Opera currently enjoys larger market share on mobile devices than this Redmond company. Let’s not misunderstand - Opera is betting on mobile devices, and partnership with Nokia is one of their most promising ones, especially if you consider Nokia’s latest numbers. So hopefully some time soon we’ll see a 2.0 release, if Opera performance is dismal.
This might be a huge boost to the UI quality of Maemo applications: 770 will feature Flash 6. Except Feasible Impossibilities refers to Nokia officially announcing it, and I couldn’t find an official press release just yet.
Alright, early developers, who’s selling Nokia 770 on eBay from Burkesville, Kentucky?
Nicolas: I received today my new shiny toy, the Nokia 770. Large photos.
Nacho: Finally, my 770 arrived today, I’m still testing all features. Highlights? the screen is amazing, Maemo doing his work, WiFi without problems.
maemo-users for October 2005: Tom Rathbone, his followup, Jan Wildeboer.
EnGadget has in-depth coverage of Intel’s Ruby PC.
Built-in wireless with Windows Vista (complete one, not CE version).
Note that this device is a prototype, and Intel has not been very good with pushing consumer electronics. I was at Intel Developer Forum 2001, when they showed off their wireless Web tablet in San Jose. Yes, at some point Intel indeed had a wireless tablet that had a larger screen than Nokia 770. The engineers showed it to the reporters and press, but any question regarding release date or pricing was met with the excuse “We’re just engineers, we don’t know that marketing stuff”. Not too long after that Intel Consumer Electronics division was shut down, and Louis Burns, who never liked me calling him Mr. Burns (Simpsons reference), now runs Digital Health.
Thanks to Henry for pointing out to the list of 12 European countries where Nokia 770 will be available. Note the price difference, like 349 euros in Germany, 359 euros for Austria and 369 euros in Finland.
Gizmondo is 770 competitor inly by a stretch of imagination, but nevertheless they also try to sell a handheld that supports wireless. CNN runs a pretty negative story on Gizmondo:
Two years ago, Nokia introduced the N-Gage, which quickly became viewed (by the community, if not the industry) as one of the worst hardware launches in gaming history. Hold on to your hats, folks: Here we go again.
Thanks to Matt Brubeck for submitting a link to Philip’s blog, where the Nokia 770 price at the checkout is shown at 304.96 euros. It also seems like they slap some VAT tax on top of that. 304.96 euros comes to $365.72 in US dollars, so the $350 sticker seems about right.
Daniel Glassey here points out Nokia charged him a full amount, not the developer discount price. Hopefully just a silly error on Nokia’s side.