Atomized

Nokia 770

I bought a Nokia 770 today. It’s pretty cool, but I’m still getting used to the handwriting recogniton. It’s not easy for me, I have horrible handwriting. Read on for the skinny.

You probably already know what the 770 is already. If not, start here. I’ll try to keep this pretty short.

The Good

• The form factor. I wasn’t sure if it would work, but it does. It’s a little large to take with you when you go out and about, but it’s doable. It’s smaller than the PSP.
• Industrial design. It’s more utilitarian than the PSP or 5G iPod, but still quite elegant.
• The screen. Again, it lacks the sex appeal of the PSP or 5G iPod. Perhaps this has to do with the pressure sensitivity? Turning up the brightness helps a lot (though I imagine it drains the battery faster). I just don’t think it will ever give someone an “iPod face” – this is what I call the slack-jawed awe I get in response to demoing the 5G iPod’s video playback.
• Opera. The web browser on this thing rocks. It’s vastly better than, say, IE 6.0 on Windows XP. Some people complained that the D-pad selects links instead of scrolling; There is a fix. It’s much more pleasant now. If you tap-and-drag on a non-linked part of a page, you can pan around the page, which is very handy. My only real complaint with the browser is that it’s stylus scrolling breaks the scrolling on Google Maps. Other than that, Google Maps works on the device. I don’t know if there’s any other portable browser that can be said of.
• Hackable. This is the portable equivalent of the Linksys WRT54G/L. It runs Debian. It has DPKG for package management. Apps are Gnome based. The base platform, Maemo, is FOSS. There is nothing not to like here, and there are only going to be more cool things done with it.

The Bad

• Needs more CPU & ram. The updated firmware helps things significantly, but not enough. My biggest complaint is that it has such a great screen, excellent (for a portable) video codec support, and not enough horsepower to decode video larger than 240×144. That’s pitiful on a device with an 800×480 (that’s 15:9, or 1.66:1) screen. The Ice Age 2 trailer that came with the device seemed a bit choppy during playback. Unfortunately, I deleted it before I upgraded the firmware, so I don’t know if that helped.
• Speaking of firmware… installing that update wipes out any data you have on the device. This is particularly frustrating after fighting the handwriting recognition to get email set up.
• Things aren’t as tightly integrated as they should be. Clicking a RSS link in the web browser just displays some crud instead of prompting you to subscribe to the feed in the newsreader. Same goes for clicking Shoutcast links. With no OPML import, this makes managing your RSS subscriptions much harder than it should be.
• The device suspends when you put it in the cover (that is; when the cover is covering the screen as opposed to the back of the tablet.) This just sucks. It means you can’t put the tablet in your pocket and listen to a Shoutcast stream. I’m not thrilled with the cover overall. It has a beveled edge so you can access the D-pad and menu buttons, but it’s not beveled enough, making it hard to press the left button.

Final Thoughts

I’m conflicted. There’s a lot to like about the 770, but there are definitely significant caveats. I don’t know if I’m going to keep it or not. I’m really disappointed with the inability of this device to handle video. If I could drop XviD AVIs onto this and just play them, I could overlook the other issues.

I’m surprised that Nokia decided to base this around X11 (i.e. X Windows). There is (or was) a port of GTK+ to the Linux framebuffer, specifically for embedded devices. The 770 doesn’t need any of the features X11 offers (except, perhaps, video overlay), and it’s a not insignificant drain on resources. I’d be interested to know why they made this decision; it seems like pure blunder to me.

I think the 770 is getting beat up in reviews a bit more than it should. For example, I was able to bookmark sites just fine from within Opera, and I haven’t had too many issues with the handwriting recognition. Realize I have horrible handwriting, and the recognition is usable for me out of the box.

I wasn’t sold on this concept at first, but I’m a believer now. The 770 has a huge amount of potential, particularly with the open nature of Maeemo. I’m holding out hope that someone can get an optimized port of Mplayer or VLC, and that I can stream decent-sized video over HTTP. But this is a first-generation device, and Nokia is forging new territory with the 770. There are sure to be some bumps along the way, but this is a pretty good start.

Discussion

A couple notes … first, a friend and I tried copying the Ice Age trailer that comes with the 770 onto a desktop computer (a 4Ghz Athlon) and the video was choppy *there* as well, in exactly the same places, mostly toward the beginning of the clip. It appears to be a problem with the file, not with the 770. (What were they thinking? Did they *want* to make their product look bad?)

Second, the handwriting recognition does in fact *suck*. I’m not saying it’s not usable, it is .. I can enter text with it just fine. But if you compare it to even the first-generation Palm Grafiti, it’s just not nearly as usable. I have fairly decent handwriting and I can do text entry on a Palm more or less as fast as I can write on paper. With the 770 on the other hand, there are several characters that have been assigned strokes that are too similar, and it’s “actually impossible” to prevent the device from making mistakes. (trust me, it’s not just your handwriting).

You can “train” it with custom strokes — this is a *fantastic* idea. As it turns out the effort is wasted though because you can only train it with *one* custom stroke per character, most of the characters completely ignore your new stroke, and though you can delete your usually useless custom stroke you can’t delete any of the poorly chosen originals. The one place where custom strokes seem to do well is on the “shortcuts” — where you can assign a custom stroke to work like a macro for whatever text you want.

As far as the cover goes, it contains a magnet which trips a reed switch in the upper left corner. I’ve tested it with a separate magnet, and managed to find where the switch is. I’ve thought about trying to carefully pull apart the layers of the cover and dig the magnet out of there. It’s often nice that it causes the device to suspend, but after a while it’ll suspend anyway if it’s not in use. I’d rather be able to listen to DI.fm with the thing in my pocket. (come to think of it, I’d like to be able to listen to DI.fm at all — for some unknown reason the 770’s audio player refuses to play most, but not all, of their 96kbps mp3 streams).

Chris Robison

2006/03/22

Anyone working with optimized xvid player for ARM 1710?
It could be possible to get bit more performance for video playing

Uris

2006/05/01

You can import OPML:

http://www.internettablettalk.com/wiki/index.php/Internet:RSS_Newsreader_OPML_import

Kesey

2006/06/25

That’s not quite what I would call “support” for OPML, but it’s good to know.

Ian Eure

2006/06/25

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