Summary: The Nokia 770 is the best bridge-device yet between mobility and the web2.0 world. It is a solid go-to device for messaging and presence, as well as having a very capable browser. It can appear a bit sluggish at times, but it is a very flexible device with a lot of untapped potential. Having said that, Nokia has been making steady improvements to the device in the form of software updates.
I am running the 2006 edition of the software. I am also only going to cover the things I actually use my 770 for, since it does a lot of things, but I think it may be interesting for people to know how I use the device.
The Nokia 770 is easy to like. It runs Linux and X11, has a slew of little applications and allows easy third-party access, and also speaks WiFi and Bluetooth allowing you to talk to the Internet with ease.
Physically the device feels great, it is a good weight and the build quality is nice. It feels substantial and not cheap. It really freaks me out when I’m using something that feels hollow and brittle. I really like holding and using the 770. There are some minor construction issues, namely that when you have the 770 in its metallic sleeve you can’t reach the stylus because its blocked by the lip of the jacket. I don’t know how something like that got through QA.
So it has a stylus and a touchscreen, and it does handwriting recognition but I haven’t used that yet. It doesn’t have a PIM and it doesn’t sync against anything. It isn’t a PDA but is more of a surfboard for IM, Presence, Browsing, and Email. It can also be transmogrified into a softphone via Gizmoproject or Google Talk.
When you first boot the device up and do some simple configuration you’ll be dumped out to a desktop of sorts, which is also activated by using the Home key on the device. You can run little widgets that do things like pull RSS feeds, access Internet radio, or give you easy access to your favorite search engine.
You can not only access the streaming audio player from the dashboard/home-screen, but it also of course is a full-fledged application, which can play music and podcasts off your RS-MMC card (I put a 1GB card into mine, and since it uses RS-MMC you can use the same storage as modern Nokia handsets, which also means I can view photos and videos I shoot on my N90 on the bigger, nicer display of the 770 and swap it back when I’m done.)
But it is also super easy to browse your favorite radio stations on the 770, and I’d just like to give a shout-out to WAMU in Washington DC, my favorite NPR station of all time. Which isn’t to say WBRU isn’t as good, but, lets be honest. Y’all don’t have Kojo and Diane.
The 770 isn’t a PIM/PDA box, but what it does have a firm grasp of is Presence. It treats IM and Email fairly interchangeably in that you’re notified of both in the same place. That little icon of humanoids on the left will throb in technicolor when I have an incoming message, regardless of what kind it is. Presence via Jabber/XMPP is built-in to the UI of the device making it a very well-integrated communications method.
As someone who has been in love with Jabber for several years, it is really making me all a twitter that the 770 really gets it. Nokia has been screwing up Presence for years with their crazy push into Wireless Village/IMPS, which is probably the least utilized of all messaging/presence systems. I hope Nokia takes a page from the 770 and just gives up and adopts XMPP for Presence and IM in future handsets.
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So the Contacts application on the 770 is more of a general “Who is around and ready for action” application. You can check to see if you have any messages or emails right from the humanoids icon on the left, click and hold and it pops right up. Status and Presence can be assigned by using the little status indicator in the top of the menu-bar.
And yes you can launch from that screen directly into voice-chat calls via Google Talk if you use Google Talk. I am signed into the jabber server we run at hellyeah! networks, as well as Google Talk. It allows multiple services, as long as they’re using xmpp/jabber.
Not only is there a little widget for RSS on the home screen, but of course there is quite a nice reader bundled as well. It can import OPML and there is a package that will supposedly sync against Bloglines, but there is not a method to sync my status up against Newsgator Online.
Newsgator Online is my reader of choice because it allows me to always be in-sync no matter what device or workstation I’m using to read news. Though lately I’ve noticed their mobile newsreader being flakey, I hope this is the result of a lot of development being spent on it and not a service slippage.
At any rate, if my 770 would sync up with Newsgator, I’d be completely delighted. Their website is slow on the 770 for some reason, making it something of a chore to read news online via the built-in Browser, which otherwise is exquisite.
The PDF viewer is ten times better than anything I’ve used on S60 or other smartphones. Period. It does an amazing job, and since the 770 has those rocker switches on top for zooming in and out, you can easily zoom way in on a PDF (or webpage of course) making it a snap to read just about anything.
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So far this device is already pretty good. It is a good communications device, a great portable streaming audio device, and it can play videos and games as well. Big whoop. Your computer does that too. But you know what a computer can do and no mobile device does especially well?
Run a goddamned web-app without crying incessantly!
Thats right! The Opera browser on the Nokia 770 can speak Web2.0 enough to operate even some of the weirder web-applications out there. I have had a great deal of success in using Backpack (and Writeboard as well as the new Backpack Calendar), TracksGTD (which is ajaxy and will not run on the vast majority of non-desktop browsers.)
Love means never having to append /mob to your Backpack URL.
Writeboard is finally a useful application, now that I don’t have to be sitting at a desktop browser, which implies I have a computer, and wouldn’t you know it: a text editor or fifty. I’ve staged a few articles in Writeboard now and then but now I think I’ll actually use it more often.
Still don’t know if I like the Backpack “Calendar” application but it works as expected on the 770.
Tracks GTD actually seems fine, but the way that the browser handles click events and such makes it very difficult or impossible to perform ajax “drag operations”. However, everything else appears to work. I defy you to use that application on anything less than this browser though. Opera for S60 and Nokia’s Services XHTML browser choke on this application and render it weirdly.
So finally I can honestly even begin to consider using Tracks for something, since it I have a mobile device that can access it and use it. I don’t want to have to carry a laptop everywhere. Especially just for something like that.
Now, sure you can do voice-chat with Google Talk but you can also install Gizmo Project and use all the features of that service as well. The only difference is that I can’t configure the 770 client to connect to a local Asterisk PBX, but I’m not sure why. I don’t know if is a feature that will eventually come to the 770 client or not. I certainly hope so, because it would be the first pretty SIP client to do so on this platform, and I think a lot of people would find it useful, though I’m still trying to figure out why.
But that’s another conversation. GIzmo is there, it works, and it is easy to answer calls but I find it hard to dial people. It isn’t reliable unless you’re tapping a number in the profile of a user, which means you have to burrow down one level to call people all the time. Sometimes I can dial someone by double-tapping them in the roster. Usually I can’t. I am glad it is there but don’t find it especially useful.
All applications can be bumped out to full screen, which looks great when your full-screen is 800×480. Can you believe this thing has around twice the resolution of my old Mac Plus? Yow. Browsing is nice and easy and you can drag pages around by grabbing them with your finger or using the stylus. Its very nice but is what adds to the confusion of drag-able elements in web pages.
Gmail’s web interface is fully functional via the browser. I don’t use Gmail other than as a place to send spam, but a coworker had me try it out and it worked quite well, even while piggy-backing off my N90’s EDGE connection via Bluetooth.
So I’ve told you the really cool parts of this device, but this is the part of the show where the 770 takes its top off and does a little something for the nerds in the room.
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It is very easy to get Xterm and ssh on a 770. And since the 770 uses X11, you can tunnel X11 over SSH and run remote applications on the display of the 770 with some caveats, namely that the window manager doesn’t really know what to do with them, so if you minimize them, you’re out of luck and will have to restart the application. Heh.
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It does quite well, using my mobile EDGE connection or WiFi depending on where I’m at and network availability. I’m a little weirded out that sometimes it refuses to get an IP address over WiFi connections, but I told it to use a static address when I’m at home until I have time to figure out what is going on.
The “virtual thumb-board” input method is pretty good, it launches when you mash your big digit into an input field, and you can easily thumb out letters and numbers and send the input off to the form or prompt. You rarely need the stylus, though honestly the display will get all funky looking from the prints if you don’t use it. I usually use the stylus-tap input method.
// End nerdery
Nobody will tell you the 770 is fast. It is slightly under-powered. It also only goes 3 hours or so of heavy use before requiring a charge. The upside is that the batteries are available anywhere so its easy to get a spare. It charges off the new-school Nokia charger cable, the tiny one.
It is a well made device though, and one that is easy to carry and can connect to webapps with ease, which is very difficult on most other devices out there. It isn’t a PDA and doesn’t even try to be one. It is more of a portable remote display for the Web, which also keeps you connected with other people via IM and presence.
The email client couldn’t possible suck harder, unless they didn’t have IMAP connectivity at all. It does not support folder sync. It does support X.509 certificates! But it does have a very half-assed IMAP implementation. Nokia really never gets email right anyway, so I’m not totally stunned. But it will let you keep up on your Inbox, which makes it (kind of) better than nothing at all.
Bluetooth keyboards can be used via 3rd party drivers. When you plug it in via USB it mounts your RS-MMC on the desktop. I use SyncTunes to push podcasts and iTunes playlists to the card. It plays MP3 audio better than my N90 does. iPod still wins, but its nice to have a backup.
I keep thinking that one day the mobile phone will be nothing more than a radio element, and a device like the 770 will just use it for voice/data hand-off and I could have a portable keypad or keyboard for text and number input and talk directly to the “display bit” or radio bits with a headset making the mobile experience more abstract and flexible. I do wish my SMS and MMS messages would show up on the device, so that it could be more of a unified platform for my mobile communications. It is getting close finally: Using the file browser I can navigate the filesystem of my N90 from the 770 without having to do the card-swap.
Has the 770 changed my workflow any? Not in a profound way, yet. I did find it very useful to pull that PDF on Crossbeam while I was in the middle of a meeting with some people in the office about that product, I generally frown upon taking laptops to meetings because I don’t like a room full of people barricaded behind liquid crystal cubicles.
My hard-landscape still lives in iCal and the Calendar application on my N90. My tasks still live in 3×5 cards and I still capture on a notebook. It occurs to me now that the 770 would be perfect for viewing my archived 3×5 cards that I scan for posterity.
This is the first chance I’ve had however to actually change that aspect of my workflow, since now I have a truly portable device that speaks Web2.0 enough to get by. If you make heavy use of online applications, it is certainly worth a good look.
Right now there appears to be a drought on the 770 farm. Either Nokia is having a hard time keeping up, or they’re about about to launch an updated version of the device, which may address the hardware weirdness (that stylus issue for example, why not use a spring-loaded model like the Newton 110/2000?) and perhaps a better CPU? Everything else appears fine, though more battery life would be welcome. It has enough RAM and storage to do what I want to do with it. I wouldn’t shun 4GB of flash onboard for music and videos though, if Nokia gave it to me.
With the 2006 software rev, Nokia has a pretty good hand here. I’d rather carry this than an OQO or UMPC, and I certainly prefer it to any PDA or Windows Mobile device out there. And unlike my PowerBook, it is pocketable. It compliments a mobile phone perfectly, especially if you have a Nokia S60 device.
I’ve only had it for a couple of days now, so I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on it later, and will update my workflow document accordingly if it warrants a review. As of today I’m still slinging cards, but playing around with the other options a bit more earnestly now that they’re actually viable.
For more information on the Maemo OS and great resources, check out their website which has pointers to package repositories, applications, how-tos and more information.
