Nokia770

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet 2006

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I upgraded my Nokia 770 to Internet Tablet OS 2006 and it's fantastic. It's faster, more responsive, and more stable. Additionally, there's an application manager that downloads from a repository just like Debian which is _hugely_ awesome. The browser is faster, too.

My only issue so far is that I haven't quite got the knack of launching the thumbboard. At some point, I'll look into that.

Well-written review of the 2006 release here.

Experiences with the Nokia 770 on vacation

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Carrying a Nokia 770 through airport hoo-ha is much easier than carrying a laptop, so that was really nice. I packed a series of pdfs onto it (Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation, Free Culture, Open Source Development with CVS, ...) and read through a good portion of only one of them.

Also, the Nokia 770 comes with two stylii (not sure why), which allowed S and I to play Mahjong together. That was a little comical since there were two of us huddled over this little tiny screen. Still, it was really fun.

I also had WIFI and web-browsing capabilities everywhere I was which was really nice.

Batteries held out pretty well. I went two or three days of medium usage with the light set to low and the WIFI off without any problem. I brought the charger which is pleasantly small and charged the battery at the airport before the return flight home.

It's been helpful at school, too, since I can check my gmail account wherever I am on campus.

I read A 770 is ultra-small and mobile, but not a UMPC over at Internet Tablet Users Blog and they mention a series of issues people are having... but I'm not having any of them. My browser has never crapped out, the device has never hung, I'm not having problems loading any web-sites that I look at (though I don't look at Palm Addict), no problems with memory or speed of the device, ...

I have to admit when I first saw the Origami marketing, I wondered for a bit about whether I should have waited and bought a UMPC, but... the Nokie 770 runs on free software and I can write programs that run on it without having to purchase Microsoft software licenses and that's a big plus for me.

Additionally, I think I'll look for a digital camera that takes the same kind of MMC card my Nokia takes when I'm in the market for a new digital camera. That'd be really neat: take a picture, put the card in my Nokia, email it to people I know--all with devices I put in my pocketses.

Anyhow, happy so far. The only minor issue is that the text for books is so small that it's hard to read if I'm in an airplane going through turbulence.

Got my Nokia 770

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I've been reading about them for about 6 months now and I've been tossing around whether to get one or not since they started selling. I have a Sharp Zaurus 5600 which I never use and so I figured I'd pine over but never actually buy a Nokia 770.

Then I had a change of heart. I bought one because it's easy to use, small, has a full-blown Linux distribution that takes .deb packaged files, has a great web-browser, is in constant development as an Open Source project, and someone's gone and ported Python to it.

I ordered it on Sunday and it showed up on Wednesday. I've been getting to know it for a little under a day now and I'm really impressed--it both fits my needs and extends my ability to do things very nicely. I'm planning to bring it travelling next week with a load of PDFs on it of things I want to read. Additionally, I've been able to check email which helped me get to a meeting yesterday night after I had forgotten the location.

w00t!