Marc Maurer of AbiWord fame received his developer version of Nokia 770 yesterday. Ikke is also waiting for his to arrive, and so is Samuel and the owner of this blog with unpronounceable name.
Ari Jaaksi from Nokia:
Featuring 770 — some random acts in AVI or MPEG (same acts — different format).
Perhaps Nokia could surprise us by a similar deal when the 770 (now scheduled for Q4) launches.
McDonald’s will offer free Wi-Fi to Nintendo DS users.
“This is such an interesting direction for McDonald’s,” said Anita Frazier, an entertainment industry analyst with the NPD Group, a research firm. “This could encourage kids to go to McDonald’s to play games. It is like the kids’ version of Starbucks’ wireless hot spots.” As with the toys that have long been packaged with McDonald’s food, the relationship will help draw customers to the restaurants, she said.
PortableGadgets runs a guide on doing a remote wireless VNC connection from Sony PSP.
Have you ever wanted to get online with a smaller device when you’re at home? Laptop doesnt’ seem small enough, while the Nokia 770 isn’t available yet.
Sony PSP seems to be one of the devices to give N770 a run for the money, if the Internet browser and productivity apps will ever successfully run on that platform. Bright screen, large user base, pretty significant availability of games and WiFi support make it a hit today and might impact 770 sales tomorrow.
Baptiste Mille-Mathias says here Google’s GMail rich interface was causing memory problems on his Nokia 770 (earlier release, I guess), but eventually worked.
They just recently got Gmail to work in Opera, so I guess Nokia really went through an effort to provide proper JavaScript support for rich Web apps.
Are you a happy N770 owner? Get your software updates here, official page from Nokia is up and running. Need the serial device number, though.
Latest version: 0.2005.40-18. This update features enhanced performance.
The first devices went out, Tommi Komulainen from Nokia writes, but not to the United States yet.
770Fan (man, you’ve got to change the URL to something easier to remember) points out some specific features that make Nokia 770 stand out from other Internet-enabled handhelds in the market right now.
Number 4 is the Nokia 770’s 800×480 screen. No PDA on the market has a 800×480 screen. The highest resolution is VGA at 640×480. Does the screen really matter on a handheld device? In this case it does. Most web pages are designed for 1024×768 and pdas have a really hard time shrinking the page to a considerably smaller size.
Three companies contracted by Nokia to improve the software base of 770 are joining the GNOME Foundation advisory board, Ziff Davis Media reports.
Last week, three embedded software companies contracted by Nokia to improve Gnome for use in the slightly delayed Nokia 770 Internet Tablet announced that they had joined the Gnome Foundation’s advisory board — these include Matthew Alum’s OpenedHand, Imendio, and Fluendo.
Matthew Alum’s OpenedHand is the developer of Matchbox and had been working with Nokia for quite a while, as this May 2005 press release points out.
Imendio issued a press release regarding joining GNOME Foundation board. Back in May 2005 Imendio had another press release describing the type of work they would for Nokia. As you can see, the small group of developers are an elite bunch:
The main areas in which Nokia has been assisted are:
Using a comprehensive graphics library is the key to building attractive and functional applications. Nokia has selected the graphics libraries originally designed for the GIMP called GTK+. These libraries are used for widget creation and general graphics management in all GNOME applications. Imendio has built a persistent, rich text capable, clipboard and corrected bugs in the libraries them selves.
To achieve a low-overhead and low-latency protocol with developer-friendly qualities Nokia uses D-BUS as an interprocess communication (IPC) mechanism. D-BUS is used to facilitate a standardized bus for communicating data between processes. Imendio’s work involved the implementation of several enhancements and improvements. Imendio has continued working with D-BUS integration in both GnomeVFS and GConf.
The virtual file system used by GNOME is called GnomeVFS. It is used to abstract and supply a uniform view of different file systems and equivalent data resources. Access to data via OBEX protocol has been implemented. Imendio has also added support for D-BUS as an internal IPC mechanism for GnomeVFS.
To store configuration data the platform uses the same model as GNOME. The GNOME configuration repository available to all applications is called GConf. To strive for a uniform IPC handler for all purposes, Nokia has added support for D-BUS as an internal IPC mechanism for GConf. Imendio realized this project.
Fluendo is an open source multimedia streaming company and, unlike other companies, Nokia 770 is not their exclusive commitment. They are the guys behind GStreamer on Nokia 770:
The GStreamer framework is a central part of the Nokia 770 internet tablet providing its multimedia processing and handling facilities. As the central multimedia component in the Maemo development platform on which the Nokia 770 is built GStreamer will enable developers to create all sorts of multimedia applications for this innovative device.
This time they’re official - the charger adaptor (to use your existing Nokia chargers with the new Nokia phones with smaller charger interface) for 10 bucks and a car charger for $15.
