Since I wrote my first comments about the Nokia 770 (BTW MobileBurn has some more pictures), more people have been posting their impressions and unsurprisingly most of them have been negatives.

Russel Beattie for example finds a lot of defaults to the device: no cellular connectivity, no hard drive, another OS, etc. But I think he’s missing the purpose of the device. This is nor a phone neither a PDA: Its main use will be at home connected to the home Wifi network. As one of the comments on Russel’s blog writes:

It doesn’t *need* a hard drive, because it’s already *got* one, back on the server.

But Om Malik thinks the device is coming at the right time:

It is a device which has the right idea at the right moment. Research shows that WiFi usage inside homes is only going to increase. There will be 160 million broadband enabled, networked homes by 2010, according to The Diffusion Group. This trend offers opportunities to sell devices specially designed for this type of environment.

Exactly! I want it lying on my living room table, accessible when I want to google something I saw on TV, check the weather, skype with my mother, read the morning news… Do I need a hard drive or a keyboard for any of these?

Interesting too what Martin writes about it:

I look forward to more devices that signal to the market “this is what we can do when the handcuffs are taken off”.

Exactly! I have been writing it many times, having the operators telling how the phones should be built to the manufacturers is a bad thing for the user. We get features that push us to spend money (MMS, original WAP, etc), not features that we actually want like a phone that is also a good hard drive music player.

The Nokia 770 is obviously not perfect. The battery life could be better, and the choice is a weird storage medium instead of SD cards is just plain stupid. But I really wish it will work enough so that they make an updated version, at 200 Euros, with more battery, SD card support, Skype integrated…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 1st, 2005 at 10:24 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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