Media vs. Nokia 770 fans–redux

Bah. It’s absurd how much this guy just doesn’t get it.

(Warning: extended diatribe below)

Its biggest flaw is the keyboard that Nokia left out. You can enter text only by tapping a tightly packed on-screen keyboard, with help from an automatic word-completion option, or by taking your chances with handwriting recognition that’s either ploddingly slow or wildly inaccurate. That alone should sink anything built for constant Web and e-mail use.

Note that this statement comes two sentences after he talks about how the thing is small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. Yeah, having a real keyboard and being pocket-sized are really compatible. Besides, if you really need a keyboard, that’s what Bluetooth keyboards are for.

WiFi on the 770, however, may not work much better.

Okay, this has nothing to do with not getting it, but one suspects something’s wrong with his network or his review unit. My 770 consistently finds 10 to 12 wireless networks from my apartment, whereas my laptop rarely finds more than 3.

This browser can open multiple pages at once — you switch among them by tapping on identical, unlabeled icons at the left of the screen — but it almost always crashed without warning if left open with too many pages for too long.

The implication here being, I guess, that it would be better if the browser could only open one window at a time? Yes, a handheld like the 770 has less RAM than your desktop…this is news?

It’s also unwise to lean too heavily on its page-zooming option, which often crunched letters together when it enlarged them. Plan on squinting a lot instead.

Personally, I never use the zoom feature. The whole point behind putting the highest-resolution screen on the consumer market into the 770 was so that extremely small text would be legible without magnification (and, obviously, so that the screen was 800 pixels wide, which is perfectly adequate for most sites).

Unfortunately, while Nokia bundled a decent, current browser, it forgot to do the same for the plug-in software needed for a passable impersonation of big-computer browsing. Its obsolete Macromedia Flash player couldn’t display most of the interactive content I tried, such as the game-tracking features on ESPN and Major League Baseball’s sites.

Maybe it’s just me, but those sites regularly crash Firefox on my PowerBook. Yes, in an ideal world, Nokia would’ve dropped 256MB of RAM in the 770, but then it wouldn’t have cost $350, now would it?

But the mail application exhibited grotesquely poor stability (it crashes every time I try to open a message stuck in my outbox) and the RSS reader requires you to add subscriptions by entering each site’s address, instead of just clicking on its link in the browser; it’s also not set up by default to check for updates automatically.

Okay, here he’s finally starting to make some sense. Yes, the email client sucks. But, and I’ve said this before, that’s why we have webmail. As for the reader, there’s an extremely simple workaround to the entering-by-hand problem: export your subscriptions from your desktop newsreader to an OPML file, then drop that in the newsreader. It’ll automatically parse it and subscribe to each of your feeds. As for the updates thing, lots of newsreaders don’t check for updates automatically by default (like Vienna, to name just one example). But the reader on the 770 can easily be set to automatically update at any interval you like (it’s actually more customizable than most readers I’ve played with, which only give you options like every half hour, every hour or every 4 hours).

As for downloadable documents, you can read Portable Document Format files but little else; if somebody e-mails you a Microsoft Word or Excel file, you’re stuck.

That’s true, but irrelevant to me. Oh, wait, Gnumeric can handle Excel files. Oops.

You can employ a 770 as a portable photo album or a digital-music player, but only in the most basic sense. Its Images and Audio Player programs make even the stripped-down programs bundled on most handhelds look like iTunes and iPhoto by comparison.

I don’t have any experience with other handhelds with audio players (needless to say, the old bottom-of-the-line Palm I have doesn’t qualify), but I’ve never had any problems with either the image viewer or the audio player. And there are other audio players available for download on the maemo page.

And because Nokia foolishly included a cut-down “RS-MMC” (Reduced Size MultiMediaCard) slot instead of an industry-standard SD card slot, you’ll pay more for the needed add-on storage (only 64 megabytes of memory are available onboard) and have a harder time finding it in stores.

Just for the record, RS-MMC is also an industry standard. Yes, it costs more per meg. It’s also smaller. Tradeoffs.

The 770 has a handful of other simple applications — a notepad, a clock, a chess game — and that’s it, although you can add more if you look online.

Here, I think, is the single worst part of this whole review. “…more if you look online”…really? You mean that, instead of bogging the 770 down with a bunch of crap you don’t need, Nokia trusted you to be smart enough to download what you want on your own? What a terrifying idea! Looking at the maemo wiki, I see 25 games, a sketchbook app, at least two PIM suites, at least two word-processing programs, Bloglines and del.icio.us clients, VPN and VNC clients and servers, SSH, a BitTorrent client, a GAIM client, a spreadsheet app, an IRC client, a couple of alternative mail clients, a whole slew of terminal apps and utilities and, oh yeah, a simply kick-ass ebook reader. And more. Have I used all of them? No. Are some of them still buggy and in development? Sure. But complaining that the 770 doesn’t come with all the apps you want is like complaining that Dell didn’t preload your desktop with all the apps you want. And somehow I doubt the you’ll find another handheld on the market that does VNC or SSH.

Now think about what’s not on this eye-catching gadget: a real address book; a calendar; any new, name-brand games; a cellphone.

Yeah, the first two are shortcomings but, then again, I’ve already got a cellphone with address books and calendars. Which, given everything that Nokia’s said about the 770, is something they’re obviously banking on. It’s obvious, from this list, that this guy wants the 770 to be either a PDA or a PSP. If that’s what you’re looking for, then the 770 is definitely not for you (seriously: I’ve talked at least one person out of getting a 770 when it became clear that they were looking for a fancy new PDA).

The Nokia 770 takes longer to boot up than some desktop computers (nearly a minute) and offers battery life no longer than that of many laptops (4 1/4 hours of nearly continuous browsing). In two weeks of testing, it locked up and spontaneously rebooted more often than any computer I’ve used in that time.

This first would be an issue if you ever actually turned your 770 off. Which I haven’t done since the last time I flew in a plane. The battery life thing is something of an issue, somewhat ameliorated by the fact that the 770 uses a standard cellphone battery, so extras are cheap and easy to get (well, that and the fact that battery life and screen quality are, inevitably and irrevocably, inversely correlated). As for locking up and spontaneously rebooting, I’ve used my 770 daily for the last two weeks, and it’s crashed once or twice in that time. Which is, admittedly, more than my laptop, but it’s hardly an outrageous amount. One has to be aware that the thing does have limitations and that they’re more, well, limited than those of a GHz computer with 10 or 20 times the RAM. If you want one of those that fits in your pocket, OQO will be happy to take your 2 grand.

Yes, it’s quite easy to add applications from the list at http://www.maemo.org, though Nokia seems to imply the application installer is meant only for the use of developers 🙂

Still, even some long-time Linux users seem to wonder why there is no PIM suite pre-installed. (Currently there would seem to be 4 alternatives for the platform…) Maybe Nokia will add one when the functionality is on par with your regular PDA devices.

It’s not hard to find some stability problems etc. with the software. But fortunately not too much to bother regular usage. The device makes for a very good web browser at a low price.

The upcoming 2006 software release for Summer will hopefully fix some issues, in addition to giving the 770 users VoIP and instant messaging functionality out of the box. Not too bad I would say!

Yes I also own one, and therefore am probably somewhat biased.

Having said that, here is one mayor observation after reading a lot of 770 bashing reviews:

They don’t seem to get the concept of “price point”, at this moment it
is simply impossible to build a compact device like this and sell it for
$300 with desktop like performance. Nokia made some choices,
they chose a certain compact formfactor & opted for a very high dpi lcd screen. This resulted that there was less money to be spent on CPU & memory. Comparing the 770 to any one of unreleased UMPC’s proves this.
Samsung is currently claiming a introduction price for their UMPC’s of
$1200 and it’s close to a kilogram! and while the 770 at least fits in your jacket pocket a UMPC most certainly does not.

I think Nokia made a bold move with the 770, it is somewhat underpowered, but at that price it couldn’t be helped. There is
a great future for ultra portable devices, Nokia in many ways has shown us what is to come.

GPE-Calendar is missing some key features (and besides it is hard to install).

My Bluetooth keyboard works almost perfectly with nokia. Not with my Dell axim.

Abiword is not ready for prime time, so I don’t think you can read MS Word files. (I’ve lost a lot of abiword files there).

I miss being able to change my browser from landscape to portrait.

Also, the buttons are useless for scrolling down a browser page (because they scroll to individual links). there might be a solution to this. I don’t want to have to use my stylus every time I want to read down a page.

The bold idea behind the 770 is letting users rely on the linux community to provide the applications while Nokia provides hardware specific stuff. Time will only tell if users and developers come through. So far, signs are looking good.

As an FYI to Robert, holding down the bottom direction arrow jumps down the page rather than the next link with a single press.

To amplify what David said, holding down the arrow buttons in the browser (and most other apps) causes a continuous scroll (just as if you’d used the stylus to press the arrows on the scrollbar). Between this and jumping to links by pressing and releasing the arrow buttons, I only very rarely use the stylus while browsing.

This is now also a Slashdot story.

The power of the Nokia 770 has little to do with the hardware specs of the device and everything to do with it being a portable portal to the web. It’s very clearly aiming to take advantage of the increased focus on web services, which help fill in the functionality ‘holes’ it’s seen as possessing.

The WP author’s criticism of the 770’s handling of MS Office format files can be addressed by GMail (which has a ‘preview as HTML’ option for office docs). Opera support for ThinkFree Corporation’s ICdocs service (http://icdocs.thinkfree.com/) would also provide this, I’d be surprised if there weren’t others providing similar services right now.