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October 24, 2008Summary: I purchased an older Nokia Internet Tablet (the 770) off of eBay last week. It arrived yesterday and here are my impressions and thoughts after the first 24 hours.
Pros
While the 770 is 3 years old now and the 800 series is in full swing, I still find the unit itself has a nice feel. It is small enough to fit into the back pocket of my jeans, but heavy enough so that you know it’s there. There’s nothing about this device that feels flimsy.
The brushed silver cover is nice. It fits on the front or the back of the unit depending on whether you are using it or shoving it into your pocket. I’m sure the cover is the main reason why there are no scratches on the screen of this unit.
The navigation is pretty good. I don’t really like having to use a stylus, but it just makes sense when surfing the web which is this device’s primary purpose in life. In most cases, I have the option of using the 4-way rocker you can see on the left side of the picture above if I don’t feel like dragging out the stylus.
The operating system. Yup, it’s a Debian GNU/Linux derivative called Maemo. Maemo is in constant development and the Maemo wiki has all sorts of third-party applications for the 770. That might be the coolest thing about this device – the untapped and (for me, anyhow) unrealized potential of the vast pool of third party apps.
The OS is stored on flash and can be updated with bin files from the Nokia site. My unit came out of the box with 0S2005, but in short order I had it flashed up to OS2006. I even played with OS2007, but it was too slow on the device to be practical so I downgraded to 2006 again.
Cons
When the cover is on the back of the unit, it slides up just far enough to block the stylus hole so I cannot remove it without sliding the cover down a bit first. Hard to believe such an obvious pain in the butt was missed during development.
The Nokia 770 is an Internet Tablet and it does web surfing well. Not great, but well enough to be useful. It doesn’t, however, do anything else particularily well. A lot of the applications that I have tried (both those that came with it and third-party ones) are sluggish and not very powerful.
That’s all I have for now. Overall, I like it but I need more time to tweak it and understand the full potential of it by playing with more settings, more applications, and just plain old reading more on the forums and web about it.
Tags: Internet, nokia 770, pda
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[...] was happy to get my hands on a used Nokia 770 recently as I had long wanted an Internet tablet lying around the living room that I could quickly pick up [...]