Vincent Oberle’s blog
Nokia 770, it just feels right
This is very exciting! Nokia announced today the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It’s not a phone, but some internet appliance aimed at the living-room. It has Wifi and Bluetooth connectivity and a big nice screen.
It includes a web browser, Flash support, email, internet radio, application for RSS reading and media players for MP3, MPEG4, Real Video, etc.
It runs a TI chip, which is not so surprising for a Nokia device, the OMAP 1710. It’s from the OMAP 1 generation, so it has an ARM9 and a DSP C55 to run the multimedia stuff. Expect future version of this device to run an OMAP 2 chip, which has an ARM11 and even more hardware multimedia accelerators.
One of the things this device does right is the price. $350 is quite cheap for such a great looking device. Some of course complain about the lack of hard-drive, but I think this is a good thing. A hard-drive would make the device heavier, bigger and more expensive, while the real use case of this device is to be always connected through Wifi, in particular in your home. I don’t take the subway currently, and if I would, I wouldn’t want to show such a device, a newspaper is more discrete. But I really see myself reading blogs from my couch with this device, and such a price is not a blocking factor. Too bad it’s only coming out in the third quarter of 2005, it would have made a perfect birthday gift (in a couple of days!).
Expect also to see some streaming solutions appearing soon to watch videos stored on your PC. And of course this will make a wonderful device for Skype.
For the software guy, the most exciting is that all this runs on Debian Linux and that Nokia has taken a very open and smart approach by providing all the software under open-source licenses on the Maemo web site. An SDK is already available and apparently it’s well documented and well packaged.
The Maemo Development Platform white paper gives an overview of the components that Nokia has chosen. GTK, some Gnome components, GStreamer, Opera for the browser, etc. These are good choices.
Sexy design, nice price and open-development platform, this will be a winner!
May 25th, 2005 22:22
Hi,
I have just seen the news too. I think it has three big problems:
1 - Battery. Just 3 hours it is really too short ;
2 - No phone inside. You need an external one. So, it looks like more an home appliance for me and then I don’t see why no hard drive ? 4 Go it is just 1 inch. No, it is not heavy. I don’t think 4Go in HD is really far more expensive than in flash ;
3 - It is trying to do too many things and since I know phone designers I think it won’t do all these things very well (I mean from an user friendlyness point of view).
But, it is a good open development platform so for a geek it is very nice. I think that’s really a geek product. They don’t really know what they want their product to be.
May 25th, 2005 22:29
I can’t see why I would buy one of these for £200 when I could get a phone or PDA to do the same tasks and which won’t look like a brick. Connected think the same http://www.connectedinternet.co.uk/blog/_archives/2005/5/25/885151.html and so does Silicon Valley http://www.siliconvalleysleuth.com/2005/05/nokias_useless_.html
October 10th, 2005 11:16
Nice blog.I like this.
Nick
http://www.yahoo.com
December 13th, 2005 14:55
I think battery is really for too short.