I borrowed a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet for the weekend. I had read mixed things about the device, so I wanted to make my own opinion. And the device has an attractive geeky touch, running Linux.

First I must say the Nokia 770 looks nice. It’s slim, light and seems to have the right size. The screen is really nice, big and a really cool resolution for such a small devices, 800 x 480. Some of the reports I had read was that the device was sluggish, but I didn’t find so. Sure it takes a few seconds to start the browser, but after it reacts fine. However the devices could use a bit more RAM to be able to keep more applications simply in memory and load complex pages (for example it had issues with Flickr slideshow). Some compromises were made there to keep the price low.

It includes a video player and in full screen it looks great. Contrary to my Nokia 6630 phone, the firmware had sample video and a mp3 files included so that one can immediately try it out.

One cool thing is the full screen button, which puts any application in full screen, removing the task bar and menus. This is nice for using the screen estate as much as possible.

One big think missing is a scroll wheel, which is really required for web browsing. The scroll key (joystick) selects URL instead of scrolling the page, which is very annoying (note that after looking in Opera configuration files I saw that scrolling was possible by keeping the scroll keys pressed for a second).

Here is a full list of things that Nokia could improve with the devices and I agree with most of them.

One thing I would add to the list is the choice of RS-MMC for memory card format. Nokia probably has its reasons, but this is annoying. RS-MMC cards are not as common, cheap and available in bigger sizes as for example SD cards. This leaves me the feeling that the customer was a bit forgotten there…

The great application of this device is the Internet. The Opera browser is good, even if he could use more memory. Something frustrating was that an older version of Flash was installed, preventing me from using some sites, such as Google Video (which would be a great thing to do on it). Windows Media should also be supported, as it seems to become the favorite method for audio or video streaming.

Another great application is ScummVM, which allows to play to all the old Lucasarts games from my childhood, such as the wonderful Monkey Island.

So my verdict. This is definitively a nice device, much better than the Zaurus some years ago, especially because the Nokia 770 does much better the main use case of these type of devices, web browsing. But for me it’s still not comfortable enough to give up my laptop for web browsing:

• Many web sites have issues, a lot due to the bad Flash support;
• A retractable keyboard like the Zaurus had would be very nice, because today’s web experience means entering text;
• And it really needs a scroll wheel.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 9:28 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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