770 Question
 

I am looking to buy a 770. I would really like to use it to take notes in a meeting setting. I have done as much research as I can, but I find very little about the notepad application it comes with.

Is this usable for notes, or is it junk?

Can you transfer the note files to a computer for viewing?

Any help would be great, I am torn on this one.

Thanks in Advance!!

Well, the only viable input on the stock 770 is the virtual keyboard. Handwriting recognition is mostly there for show, it doesn't work.

If you splurge on an external bluetooth keyboard (which you can get working on the 2005 OS with a hack) you can type in text quite comfortably. You'd have something approaching a mini-laptop that is much easier to carry.

It's also possible your needs would be better served by a Pocket PC. One of the newer VGA machines have far better screens than the 770 (lower res, at 640x480 instead of 800x480, but qualitatively much better - white is paper white, not a weird sparkly white as it is on the 770) and there is a TON of software out there, including for instance PhatNotes and Calligrapher. The latter is the best handwriting recognition software I've ever seen, and PhatNotes is a great notetaking application - you can categorize, sort and even put separate colors to those notes.

You could even easily use the built-in Notes in the Pocket PC and automatically sync those over to a PC with Outlook, and of course a keyboard would work perfectly on the Pocket PC too.

The 770 is a great machine for what it is, but it can't touch a Pocket PC when it comes to organising your life.

I'd recommend a Fujitsu-Siemens LOOX N560 if you look into Pocket PC's - the high-end LOOX series are fantastic.

Heyy... who's side are you on!
Get a 770, it can do more than a pocket pc ever will!

I really like to use Maemopad+ to make handwritten notes. In the latest version for the 2006 OS Beta it is also possible to export notes as png images.
Maybe you want to take a look at the screenshots on the project homepage: https://garage.maemo.org/projects/maemopadplus/ to get a better impression of what its good for.

I was trying to be on Showngo's side. ;) I have both myself and the Pocket PC will give a more consumer-oriented seamless experience every time.

Obviously it can't give you an xterm, access to tons of Linux goodness if you hack a little and a browsing experience that rivals desktop web browsing, but it integrates beautifully with Outlook and a host PC out of the box and there is massive quantities of good third party software for it.

The 770 is great at some things, but it's not a great PIM / calendaring device.

What you get should in my opinion depend entirely on what the focus for the use of the device will be. Both are the best choice, depending on what you're going to do with the device.

Ok with your point of view kimmoj,
770 is the best web surfing experience I ever had with such incredibly small palm sized device,
770 don't try to be a PIM at first, lots of device can do this,
even my phone can "read" mail ... (ok ... I know it's terribly crap)
770 primary goal, as far as I personally understood, is web surfing and VOIP,
none else can do this actually in a so small size,
PIM, and so on, will arrive after,
and why not to imagine all this applications as web-based ?
if I can access google calendar with my 770 from any place
I don't need anymore calendar application locally ...


just my 2 cents ;-)
Laurent.

I think the best way to take notes at meetings is with pen and paper - incredibly fast! If you have to use an electronic device then a separate keyboard is a must in my opinion. I have tried taking notes at meetings using the handwriting recognition on a Palm and while it works, it's a bit of an effort and you end up concentrating throughout the meeting on correcting errors and catching up with proceedings - it spoils all the fun.

For writing up my notes on the train back from meetings away I have really enjoyed using my Palm E2 with a full sized IR keyboard. I have now bought a Frogpad for my 770 and was keen to learn one handed typing but since I've moved to OS 2006 I have, no doubt temporarily, lost the ability to connect via Bluetooth to the keyboard. I have used it enough though to know that there is a learning curve and, if you want to hit the ground running, I'd recommend a qwerty keyboard.

So while I don't recommend the 770 or anything but pen and paper for meetings, if it serves you as an excuse to get a 770 it's a good thing as the 770 is an unbelievably great little device. I'm currently using it with FBReader to read the entire The Art of Unix Programming which I got for free on the net. I used Plucker to get the hundreds of separate HTML files into one singe pdb file. The whole process took about two minutes and it is so convenient to read on the 770, I definitely won't order a paper copy of the book despite it being an insanely great read and I am now seriously questioning getting an eInk device such as the iRex iLiad ever since I've seen how very slowly they render pages.

Also, while kimmoj is right to say you don't get true whites and other bright strongly contrasted colours on the 770 like you get on devices with a lesser resolution I disagree that the screen is inferior in general. It has the resolution of a laser printed page only a few years ago! You can comfortably read even tiny text on it! Go get yourself one and then get a nice Moleskine for your meetings...

Thanks for all the information...the reason I want to stay away from a PDA is because the screen is much to small for me. Also I do not have a need for anything with PIM functions.

That being said, I am not interested in getting a bluetooth keyboard, as that is more to carry around and I want to stay minimal.

Someone mentioned that in OS 2006 you can transfer notes files to a PC, can you do this in 2005?

Also can you write on the screen, without hand writing recognition on?

Thanks again for all the help.

If I just could break into the thread and reiterate my personal take on HWR and note-taking:

I've tried many a computer, but to date the only PDA that will let me take handwritten notes in a meeting faster than I could manage with pen and paper, is the ancient Newton MessagePad 2100. The Newton's HWR engine (well, one of its two engines, really) is basically Calligrapher without the stupid editing window (on a Newton you can use correction gestures right in the main screen) and without Windows screwing things up on an irregular scale.

50% of my motivation to buy a 770 was Paul Guyot's Einstein project to get the NewtonOS working on Linux-based PDA's. The day he gets it at a reasonable beta-stage with all the peripherals working, I'll never go back to stock Maemo.

The screen size on the 770 is not larger in any meaningful way compared to a high-end PDA. Yes, you get a few more pixels, and it's 4 inches instead of 3.6, but that's just details, the experience is very similar (except when surfing, when the wider higher-res screen in the 770 makes a very real difference.)

As I said, I like both my 770 and my PDA, and use them both but for different things.

For notetaking, I firmly believe the PDA + a small foldable Thinkoutside bluetooth keyboard is very hard to beat. Sure, it's another PDA-sized device to carry but for what it gives you it is worth it.

In a meeting, I can take notes as quickly as people are speaking (I'm a touch typist) and I can input any info about followup meetings into the calendar right then and there. If there is something I'll have to do as a result of something that comes up during the meeting, I'll just input that into the to-do list on the PDA - and then sync all that info up to my desktop Outlook automatically when I come back to my desk and place the PDA in the synching cradle.

Heck, I've even used the built-in camera, crappy though it may be, to photograph the whiteboard after the meeting so I would have a record of that too to take with me and then copied that .jpg to my desktop machine to keep as a reference.

I'm a touch typist too. However, I found that I tend to take notes in a very "organic" way, with lots of doodles, arrows, boxes and suchlike. With my Newton, I could take notes in ink, translate the parts I like into text and tidy up doodles with the HWR's built-in shapes function.

I know that all this can be done with a tablet pc and suitable software, but the Newton is less than a quarter of the size of a tablet. Newtons two drawbacks (to me) were the near-impossibility to transfer files in a useful manner and the lack of colour. And the latter was only a minor inconvenience.

You can actually do virtually all of that with a Pocket PC but you have to invest in some software. Calligrapher and the PhatNotes/PhatPad programs are by the same manufacturer and you can write longhand into PhatPad and have it translated by Calligrapher into text. Seems cumbersome to me so I haven't really bothered... I like keyboards, probably because I type well and write longhand abysmally slowly. ;)

I have a Pocket PC (sort of: it's a Siemens SimPad, running WinCE.net 4.1) and trust me: you cannot do, virtually or otherwise, with a Pocket PC what you can do with a Newton.

For starters, the Newton actually has an operating system that is aware that the user will be using -- wait for it -- a stylus...

Wow thanks for all of the responses, they are all helpful. I would love to be using a Newton guys, as I am a Mac user already. But I really want a color screen, so the newton will not work for me.

As far as the PDA route goes, that calligrapher software looks promising. I might have to look at a PDA again, which ones to you recommend Kimmoj?

Notes works fine.
 

I just returned from a conference. During some of the talks, i sketched out an outline for a PowerPoint presentation in the Notes app. When I got home, I FTP'd the file to my Mac using MaemoFTP. Works great. I have a Powerbook (Titanium), but now I just take my 770 on the road--less weight, less bulk, etc.

The 770 form factor is crying for a notepad application. It's an excellent form factor for taking notes -- I prefer portrait to landscape, but whatever! Taking notes in meetings sometimes means checking things on the Net or looking up other things -- all things the 770 is great at.

Good HWR does exist in a modern (sorry folks, the Newton is not modern. Although someone is trying to raise its soul, it's still a dead platform) usable platform. The Sony Ericsson line of smartphones -- P800/P900/P910 -- have excellent HWR. And, I cough when I say this, Microsoft Window XP Tablet PC version has awesome HWR. It can be done.

Some features that would make a great note-taking app: Note taking with HWR or digital ink, allowing the page with ink to grow indefinitiely (sort like MaemoPad+, but with the growing notetaking surface and without the confusing node tree). Organizing of notes in arbitrary fashions. Sending of notes to other applications on other computers. THe ability to import Web pages and PDF and annotate them.

Tall order...I know. Imagine how cool that would be on a 770.

-F

Excuse me, but the P910 and its predecessors do not have good HWR. Strictly speaking they don't have HWR at all: they have character recognition, essentially the same thing as Palms Graffiti. The engine has no idea about words, has no dictionary built in and is basically only good for short and occasional text entries. I should know, I've had a P910i for more than a year now. Even Decuma Alphabetic, though immensely superior to the built-in character recognizer, is not strictly HWR.

AFAIK, Windows Tablet comes with a scaled-down version of PhatWare's ParaGraph HWR, IMO one of the best HWR engines in the world, because it is based on one of the HWR engines that is in the Newton. Mind you, ParaGraph is only really useable in Windows as part of the (to be paid for) PenOffice package.

You do realize that in the paragraph above you are describing the Newton's Notepad application, don't you? Although you did leave out the shape-recognizing ability of the Newton, which would transfer squiggly attempts at drawing geometric shapes into perfect circles, squares, etc...

OK...I don't want to get into a religious war over what is HWR. To me, character recognition is HWR. If you say HWR needs dictionary support, that's fine.

My point is that the current versions of the 770 OS have neither. I am able to sit in meetings and keep up with notes with My SE P910. I am stuck correcting problems with my 770 -- either OS. HWR or character recognition, you pick. It still could be a lot better on the 770.

And my original point was that it can be done. And in a note-taking application, it would be great on the 770.

That could be. I was actually describing GoBinder on Windows Tablet PC. I'm not a fan of Windows; I have to use Tablet PCs for work. But GoBinder is a very nice application that would make the 770 glow if it were squeezed into it.

While I don't go in for Newton-worship, I did own a Newton back in the day and fell in love with many of its features (which are still waiting to be duplicated). The 770 has the potential to be groundbreaking like the Newton. It's not there yet. I hope Nokia and other developers can get it there.

Well, I've used a Fujitsu-Siemens PocketLOOX 720 myself for quite a while now and it is in my opinion the best one out there. Small, fast, great screen, lots of good features. Its successor is the LOOX N560 which is more of the same but with the new WM5 operating system, a faster (624 Mhz) CPU and a built-in GPS (though no camera.) I think the LOOX machines are incredible PDA's. A thriving community of owners at http://www.firstloox.org if you want to take a look.

Calligrapher and the other Phat-apps are at http://www.phatware.com/ - not free, but really good stuff.

I wouldn't get a machine without a VGA (640x480) screen though, so you are looking at the high end of PDA's. It is very possible the cost for one of those will almost double what you'd pay for a 770. Whether or not it is worth it to you is something you have to decide.

Character recognition or true HWR is actually quite important for what you want: AFAIK without true HWR you cannot have ink text with deferred recognition.

Amen.