In playing with the Nokia 700, it seems silly that Nokia has limited the device to two connectivity realms - wifi and bluetooth phones. There is another type of bluetooth access- via a PAN, or Personal Area Network. I’m only just starting to see what the 770 can do with BT, but already I’ve found that it’s too dumb to connect to a PAN with the Hildon-based Connection Manager. I’ve tried connecting to my Belkin F8T030 BT Access Point, to no avail. The 770 reports that there are no useful profiles on the device (which it sees). I don’t think the Connection Manager is looking for a PAN BT profile.
David Chisnall wrote a week-long review for InformIT:
Pros: Superb screen. Nice overall UI. Good portable web and email device.Cons: Experiences slow-down with several applications open. No PDA functions (yet).
Overall: The most important functions of an Internet Tablet work well. The rest should improve with future firmware updates. Some parts of the software still feel a bit like beta releases, but the hardware seems solid and ergonomic. 7/10.
A review from an actual 770 owner on Slashdot:
I was a day 1 zaurus owner and this is exactly what the Zaurus should have been but was not. Out of the box, you pop in the included 64meg memory card, turn it on, and boom right in front of my face is my web browser, my RSS reader and e-mail. Best of all since its Linux they support all the secure e-mail connections (tls, ssl, imaps everything) so I don’t have to compromise my security while using it. It has a huge library for something that has only been out for a short while. It’s package management is 100x better than the zauruses! I jump on WIFI or Bluetooth to my phone to the internet, browse to the maemo.org site, click a package and it asks to open it in the package manager! It uses Opera 8 with Flash support. Plays full screen videos just fine, and let me tell you the screen is incredibly bright and detailed!Its a 800×480 display, just beautiful! Not to mention the browser is a full one! No PDA versions of web pages, no side scrolling. You can zoom in, browse history and book marks it works!
I installed very easily mind you, GAIM for IM, Doom a bunch of other little games, an xterm, they have SSH for it, and the library is growing!
Drawbacks:
Occasionally, when using it not as intended, say using the not-ready or polished GAIM, or lets say loading up 20 web browsers, with your rss feeder in the background its going to run out of memory. This is an internet tablet, it has RSS feeder, web and e-mail and its all fully featured and ready to go out of the box. If you use it as intended it works and thats that!Contrary to any reviews I have NEVER encountered any wifi flakyness or bluetooth crazyness. I have used it every day for about a week now, and it is just SOLID. Its design is slick as snot! check out the screen shots below, and check out nokias own site for the 770, its silver metal case and its included pouch is just awsome.
and of course, it runs linux! all my Ipaq and palm friends are very jealous!
Review with multitude of pictures from Gizmodo:
The screen on this thing is excellent. Quite bright and crisp. The UI is simple, if a little bleak. The icons and design is reminiscent of Nokia’s earlier super-smart phones. As this is apparently running Linux, I’d very much like to figure out if I can install a terminal client, but that’s for you h/\x0rs to discover.
NewsFactor runs a pretty detailed review of Nokia 770:
The Nokia 770 takes up the cause of an emerging market of Web surfers who are tired of having to lug a laptop everywhere they go, and does so with success.
Yahoo!’s Russell Beattie is a proud owner of a Nokia 770, and after the euphoria of getting new device is gone, he confesses:
Personally, after a few weeks of fascination, I haven’t used the 770 much because it simply lacks a killer app. It’s so cool to play with and has tons of potential, but I (like everyone else) would need a very compelling reason to use this device daily. The on-board apps (web, email, etc.) are just the basics, not a killer app. That’s where I think Silicon Valley should really step up and embrace this device so it doesn’t go away. Really, the 770 is a gift from Nokia to the Valley, with a big bow on top.
Enthusiast technology news site ArsTechnica runs a review of Nokia 770 today:
After spending a few days using the 770 intensely, I feel conflicted about it. I want to love it, and some aspects of it exceeded my expectations. At the same time, the 770 has some serious shortcomings that need to be addressed in v2.0 of the 770 (or in the 771) if it is going to have wide success.Performance can be sluggish. It is capable of multitasking, but as you might surmise from the hardware specs, that comes at a price. As I noted earlier, some web pages suck up so much of the 770’s resources that you can’t even open another window without closing the page you’re working on. Waiting 15 seconds for the bookmark manager to load or to view an e-mail message is an eternity for someone accustomed to a modern OS and not-quite-modern hardware. In that regard, it’s significantly slower than my Audiovox XV6600 at some tasks.
Matt Johnson wrote to maemo-users describing a boot up problem:
I got my Nokia 770 a few days ago and was having trouble connecting to Wifi. Tech support told me to shut down, remove the battery, and restart. This was annoying, but it worked. While online, I installed a few apps (xterm, ssh, GAIM, etc.), and tried setting my path in /home/user/.profile to include the install directory, as well as \bin and . I didn’t include \sbin, but my change to .profile didn’t seem to have any effect anyway.
The next day I had the wifi problem again, so I removed the battery and tried to restart. Now it fails to boot. The Nokia screen (not the hands, just the Nokia name) comes up and the progress bar starts moving, but at a certain (apparently random) point, the screen flashes, and the progress bar starts over, at the left. This continues to repeat until I remove the battery to turn it off.
I called tech support again. They said they had never heard of this problem, and told me to exchange it at CompUSA, which is difficult for obvious reasons. (Also, I’d like to find out exactly what caused this, so it doesn’t happen again. I don’t have a lot of Linux experience, but could the .profile be messing up the boot script?) I tried running the update software from the Nokia Europe website. This starts up, but fails at a certain point with “error code: ?”. There’s the flasher software, with which I could reboot r&d mode and get root (and delete .profile or at least see debug info on startup), but I don’t have a Linux box or Mac handy.
Has anyone seen this behavior? Any advice?
From discussion on maemo-users:
There are three ways to perform this action:
1) As a USB removable disk.
Connect 770 to PC with the provided USB cable, and power-on the device. This will cause the 770 to act as a standard removable device. On Windows XP this will cause the 770 to show as a removable disk, and on Linux you could use the command-line utility pumount (”man pumount”) or the tools provided by your desktop environtment and HAL (KDE’s kicker applet “storage media” or gnome’s equivalent).
2) Network-based
When networking is enabled there are infinite options to copy data from/to other computers or Internet (using mail or webmail perhaps the more obvious one).
For example, you coud install the excellent Dropbear SSH client and server. After this, you could use
scp MY_FILE user@770_CURRENT_IP_ADDRESS:/media/mmc1
To copy files to the mmc card (reverse the arguments order to copy FROM the 770 to disk). You could know the current IP number of 770 via the Connection manager -> Internet connection -> IP address.