I know what you mean, dude.
 

Yeah, Apple "suckered me" in 1977 when they sold me an Apple ][ that only had 4 Kilobytes of RAM in it for the equivalent of about $10,000 of today's US$. I had to pay the equivalent of about $2,000 and throw out that memory and replace it with 16 K. Then I had to pay the equivalent of about $1,000 to buy a 'floating point' card so that it could deal with decimals and numbers outside the range of -32768 and +32768. Christ, I had to put 7 power supplies in that thing over the next few years, at $250 each! And Apple didn't even make a 100K floppy drive available for it for
almost a year! And it came with NO APPLICATION SOFTWARE. It couldn't even do color Bitmaps - I had to use my television to see its output!

Dude, I did EXACTLY what you suggest; I told them to call me when they had their act together. Earlier this year they finally did - after 28 years - and told me to buy an IPOD. I already had an RCA MP3 player that takes SD flash in any size, though, so I didn't. Boy, did they lose out by "Suckering ME"!

Maybe I'm a sucker, maybe I'm not. My opinion is that these approaches to product releases are inevitable while engineering and business constraints do not keep up with the growing complexity of the products. I don't personally mind skirting around some issues; one of the reasons I got this tablet was because of the platform and the fact that I'd be able to do something about it, which I have.

This is a bit different to bugs in another tablet release by a company Karel mentioned which you couldn't do a great deal about ;)

Upgrade with every opportunity.
 

I bought a couple dozen Hitachi VisionPlates this year at about $1,800 each. They can be ordered with Minix (er, make that Midori Linux), a mobile Linux put out by a group which included Linus himself when he used to work for Paul Allen and which can be used as wireless touchscreen X terminals. They only have a 802.11b wireless connection and they do work pretty well, but it is very difficult to upgrade the firmware in them. Compared to the VisionPlate the 770 represents a revolution in price, in speed of connectivity and in ease of connectivity. By the weigh, the VisionPlate weighs almost 3 pounds whereas the 770 weighs half a pound. So, you are absolutely correct when you stress the importance of being able to easily upgrade the 770's firmware and apps. The 770 is a HUGE step forward in many, many ways, not the least of which is its upgradeability. As people figure out how to access and make use of devices as network resources instead of as peripherals they will appreciate the 770 more and more. A laser printer is much more valuable on a network than when it is attached to a PC - it's the same with any device. When the network is wireless then it's an even bigger breakthrough. The tipping point though, that makes the 770 such an innovation is that it fully implements Richard Stallman's vision that anyone who needs to depend on a software system is entitled to be able to understand it and fix it without having to get any licenses to do so and without having to further pay for the right to do so.

You're now free to innovate. It wasn't always like this. A lot of people spent a lot of time and fought a lot of battles to make possible everything that the 770 represents. It didn't just 'happen'.

We could all go through what each of our respective opinions are on what early adopter or some other nebulous terminology means, or how polished a finished product should be. These are the differences between those who buy a product on the possibility of what it might become vs those who buy based on what a product is right now.

I have made my decision. I see the 770 as a work of art. The melding of all the things I might want right now in a handsome package. Think about it. Sure we can disagree on the choice of storage medium, the size of processor, the amount of ram - but here is the beauty of that argument: The fact that a large amount of people that I have read on this site are so invested in what this product is or isn't shows me that Nokia has come pretty damn close to a bullseye for a first generation product.

It seems that many others have made their decision also. Figure out what your purpose is and buy accordingly. There is no shame in waiting for the second generation.

Hopefully we (as in the actual users / outside devs) will have beta tested all of the niggles out of the system for you. :D

Oh, so young and so arrogant. Don't want to sound too arrogant myself, but for 350 dollars/euros this thing is really a bargain. Don't know what problems Karel originally had (he never mentions them particularly), and now when new update is getting for example "My official YAY!!!!'s" from Cuckoo ( http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...3&goto=newpost ) , who had severe problems, isn't this thread getting old? Or did I fall into the ITT forum's first troll hole?

Minix was a UNIX lookalike, developed by dr Tanenbaum and aimed at educational use. Linus Torvalds had nothing to do with its development, other than that he mentioned Minix as his inspirational source in the (now famous) 1992 email in which he announced his Linux OS. Are you sure you didn't mean Midori Linux, Transmeta's embedded Linux distro, on which Linus is rumoured to have contributed significantly?

I have tried disconnecting-connecting the wlan and it seems to improve the rapidity of my 770.
Thank you Titus

Yep, I misspoke. I'm replaying Final Fantasy X today, while listening to Carole King's Living Room sets, putting down the Winter carpet in my home theater and browsing the net, so, naturally, I carelessly stepped on my history there. Midori is what I meant, as you deduced. Thanks for catching that. I'll go back and correct it.

Hey, I should thank you. How often do I get the opportunity to correct someone more knowledgeable than me? :D

One final question about those VisionPlates: did they come with RitePen HWR? And if so, how does it perform in Linux? (I once wanted to buy one of those just for the HWR, but eBay only had WinCE versions at the time, so naturally...)

We're in the wrong forum, but hell
 

Hitachi had contracted for handwriting recognition with at least 3 different companies that I'm aware of. We don't do anything with HWR at ViewTouch but we did try Xscribble just to see what it looked like; it installed and worked without any difficulty. I prefer to think of it as Hand Printing Recognition. As far as how it works in real life I can't say but it's a project that any of us can join and contribute to. Perhaps the 770 will add impetus to it. It's here...
http://www.handhelds.org/projects/xscribble.html
I have no doubt that if the need exists for a quality input method then Xscribble is a good choice to begin and to build on.

I've been fascinated with touchscreens for a long time but I also think that voice commands and voice recognition have to be used to further enrich our user input experiences. The way I'd do it is to have the remote X link established, use the 770 as a network-attached microphone, do the command and recognition processing with a specialized voice processing application cluster somewhere on the net, and just send an acknowledgment of the processed result back to the remote 770's speaker & display. The TI chips in the 770 are designed to do stuff like this, of course. We're not yet thinking of the 770 as a device for voice but that will certainly change. The 770 already exceeds most of what Captain Kirk was doing on the Enterprise with his communicator.

Reggie; is there a way to push a conversation like this to the proper forum when it gets off topic?