when I first got my Nokia770 I started right away with hacking (developing
and porting applications) rather then actually using it. I started being
just a user over the Thanksgiving weekend. Some user things I
noticed where:
We have Flash/Shockwave support, thats kind of nice. I actually didn't expect this. Also web browsing is really nice, just sitting on the couch watching TV
and surfing on the tablet. But unfortunately the browser (Opera) is
sometimes a little picky and crashes or just eats memory when going to some
of my favorite sites.
A PDF reader, yes there is one on the 770. Don't reading the product
manual really pays of - if you like surprises :)
Now for some bad things, the email client. I think I remember somebody
complaining about the lack of SMTPS (SMTP with SSL) support. Yes, this
is unbelievable the email client doesn't support SSL for outgoing mail,
why? This makes the mail client totally useless and just a waste of
storage space. Maybe the idea behind the email client is a email reader
because IMAP supports SSL. Anyway Opera nicely renders my webmail
page (IMP/Horde), so it's not to bad.
Some remarks about the filemanager, especially about the OBEX browser
(this is the thing that gives you access to the files on your phone).
The OBEX part is supper aggressive, it not only gets the current
directory information it also goes into subdirectories. If you browse
directories with a lot of subdirectories and files, the filemanager
sometimes is just blocked totally because of all the pre-fetching.
Also you can't directly use files from OBEX sources, I wanted to play
a MP3 from my phone on my 770 but the audio player complains. I
thought I could just use the big SD card in my phone as network
storage for my 770, but I guess I have to finally finish btfs to get this functionality.
One last thing, I noticed that the wireless antenna (802.11/WiFi) seems
to be pretty good for such a small device.
a rather sad report about my 770, I apologise to all 770 developers in advance for hurting
their feelings (I know how it is like when somebody complains about your software).
The web browser (Opera) continues to crash on me with random sites also sites not always make it crash, its a random thing (digg.com is a good example). I tried to reproduce it but its to random, sorry no decent bug report.
The file manager is slow as hell (with big directories) - I guess this has to do with the pre-fetching which I noticed with obexftp (accessing files on your cellphone). Also I got many very long hangs (no display update or reaction to user input) and crashes, mostly while browsing large directories. The memory usage seems to be pretty insane too.
Device just rebooted/reseted while playing with WPA-PSK - I really guess it was just a coincidence. This happened while setting up WPA-PSK on my parents Linksys WRT54GS (wrt-gg). I had opera and xterm running and the connectivity-settings panel open. Suddenly the device silently reboots (no low memory waring as usual when you do nasty things with opera). No data lost! Just a normal reboot. I tried to reproduce it again - but no luck. Maybe just some problem with the wireless driver where it dead-locked itself and some kernel watchdog killed and resurrected the device (I was heavily messing with the access point settings). This never happened to me with any Linux box I wasn't messing around in the kernel.
Anyway I still totally like this thing also everybody always comes over to look at it :)
More feedback is on the way... I still need to investigate some of the things I want tell you folks.
The web browser (Opera) continues to crash on me with random sites also sites not always make it crash, its a random thing (digg.com is a good example). I tried to reproduce it but its to random, sorry no decent bug report.
The file manager is slow as hell (with big directories) - I guess this has to do with the pre-fetching which I noticed with obexftp (accessing files on your cellphone). Also I got many very long hangs (no display update or reaction to user input) and crashes, mostly while browsing large directories. The memory usage seems to be pretty insane too.
-
I get around using the file manager for browsing large directories by using opera (url=file:///).
Device just rebooted/reseted while playing with WPA-PSK - I really guess it was just a coincidence. This happened while setting up WPA-PSK on my parents Linksys WRT54GS (wrt-gg). I had opera and xterm running and the connectivity-settings panel open. Suddenly the device silently reboots (no low memory waring as usual when you do nasty things with opera). No data lost! Just a normal reboot. I tried to reproduce it again - but no luck. Maybe just some problem with the wireless driver where it dead-locked itself and some kernel watchdog killed and resurrected the device (I was heavily messing with the access point settings). This never happened to me with any Linux box I wasn't messing around in the kernel.
Anyway I still totally like this thing also everybody always comes over to look at it :)
More feedback is on the way... I still need to investigate some of the things I want tell you folks.
ebook reading really seems to be the killer application for tablets and/or big-screen
PDAs (if there is a difference between them besides the lack of PIM tools). InternetTabletTalk
[1, 2] amongst many seem to think this way. Also yesterday at a friends
birthday party (90% IT workers aka GEEKs) we had a short discussion about PDAs, portable media players and friends. Many of us came to the conclusion that we want a viewing devices. This means
mainly: PDFs, HTML and insert popular ebook format here. Everybody complained about their
favorite device either the screen is to small or unreadable outside, the device is too slow when
rendering content, storage is to limited or DRM sucks to badly. Also what about watching
movies on the same device? Na - we don't want that, that just makes the device to multi purpose
and that never works out well.
As a comment to Russell's review, I really think Internet access is the killer application for the Nokia 770. All the other features are just add-ons. Of course you need the special viewers (web browser, rss reader, audio streaming client and all the different format readers).
Finally what I would like to know is, if people carry around their 770 during the day (when you are not at home/office)? Are you carrying it around with your cellphone or do you keep it at home close to your couch and fast wifi access? I personal only take it to places where I know wifi is available for me.
As a comment to Russell's review, I really think Internet access is the killer application for the Nokia 770. All the other features are just add-ons. Of course you need the special viewers (web browser, rss reader, audio streaming client and all the different format readers).
Finally what I would like to know is, if people carry around their 770 during the day (when you are not at home/office)? Are you carrying it around with your cellphone or do you keep it at home close to your couch and fast wifi access? I personal only take it to places where I know wifi is available for me.
after all the bashing against some of the 770 bugs I again have something nice to
say about it. I finally installed FBReader
and a bunch of e, pdfs and html-books. Now I use it as a handy reference manual,
search ability is so great (let's quick check which RFC xyz was specified in). It's not perfect
yet (perfect does not exist...).
To enjoy your 770 even more you need to be really nice and: don't open multiple websites at the same time (most of the sites just have too much junk and make opera eat your memory), be patient if things seem to hang it will recover faster if you don't try to switch apps, open the menu or change back to normal screen. Disabling flash in opera is also a good idea (I don't like it anyway - sometimes only for games).
Also by now I prefer the 770 over my h6315 for listening to podcasts. The 770 doesn't completely freeze when playing mp3s. It now happened multiple times that it suddenly stopped playing, every time I thought damn it it crashed again. But it didn't I only drained the battery to the ground - I guess thats a good sign :-)
To enjoy your 770 even more you need to be really nice and: don't open multiple websites at the same time (most of the sites just have too much junk and make opera eat your memory), be patient if things seem to hang it will recover faster if you don't try to switch apps, open the menu or change back to normal screen. Disabling flash in opera is also a good idea (I don't like it anyway - sometimes only for games).
Also by now I prefer the 770 over my h6315 for listening to podcasts. The 770 doesn't completely freeze when playing mp3s. It now happened multiple times that it suddenly stopped playing, every time I thought damn it it crashed again. But it didn't I only drained the battery to the ground - I guess thats a good sign :-)
while playing around in my home network I noticed that wireless is kind
of slow, I only have 1.5Mbit DSL so I didn't noticed it before. But now
I tried to download stuff from my laptop via FTP and boy this sucks. I
did a few tests with different security settings, since I use WPA and
WPA is done in software, I though this could be the problem. Here are
the results:
setup
I didn't try WPA-EPA (radius). Also I noticed that the download destination also impacts the speed. When writing to memory I couldn't get more then 160KB/s, so all test downloads were done to MMC.
setup
-
WRT54GS - with wrt-dd #22 prefinal4
computer running Debian with proftpd (xinetd)
N770 with Opera as ftp client
-
WPA-PSK TKIP+AES
ftp ~80KB/s (cpu maxed out)
WPA-PSK TKIP
ftp ~150KB/s (cpu maxed out)
WPA-PSK AES
can't connect
WEP 104bit
ftp ~400KB/s (peek ~560KB/s)
WEP 40bit
same as for 104bit
NONE
same as for WEP
I didn't try WPA-EPA (radius). Also I noticed that the download destination also impacts the speed. When writing to memory I couldn't get more then 160KB/s, so all test downloads were done to MMC.
IpHome is a small and simple hildon homepage plugin that shows the current IP and
TX/RX bytes and errors. Its meant to be a first try homepage plugin, also I am an
information fetishist so I like to know whats going on on the network :-] I also
want to keep an eye on the network because of the wireless speed issues.
For those who don't know what hildon is, its the GUI system used by the Nokia 770.
Download is in my Nokia770 section, have fun.
Got my Nokia 770 yesterday, played with it for hours, first impression is very good. Upgraded the system and enabled root access, then installed additional Maemo applications. Very nice device, bought it because it's Linux-based, open and extensible. I'll comment again after using it some more, but so far, the best gadged I ever had. Kudos!