Business User of n770 and n800
 

Hi,

I thought it might be useful for other users and developers to share my experience as business user who opted to replace my PDA/Phone (xda IIi) and laptop with the 770 and now a new n800 and a Nokia 6680 3G mobile phone and the ThinkOutside BT keyboard.

The buggest benefit is that my arms no longer ache when I travel and that is worth a lot. I no longer have to carry a laptop bag or even a collection of power adapters. This may seem like a trivial thing but international travel with a heavy laptop bag is a night mare, especially these days with more and more security checks. I have been a user of sony lightweight laptops for about a decade and think they are are amazing and for a laptop light. But if you want to check email on the go you end up with either a separate PDA or a PDA/phone.

I consider a UMPC when initially looking at the 770 but I was put of by the lack of battery life, weight, and the fact that it wasn't small enough to replace my PDA. After extensive searching and product trails I picked the 770 and I am a delighted user and now a mean Mahjong player.

I have found that the RDesktop port has worked well. I use it on a daily basis to access the company's remote access server and to use accounting and sales applications. The screen on 770 and n800 are wonderfully clear and even though they are small I can easily do my work. Getting the RDesktop to run on the n800 initially was difficult. This is because the library libxau0 was not present. I am not familar with the technical side of the n800 but managed to solve the problem using the "keep downloading applications until it fixes it self". I installed Xterminal, MiniMo Browser, VNC client and then retried the RDesktop, it downloaded and worked first time.

My first impressions of the n800 are that it is a big improvement on the 770. The speed difference is very noticable and welcome. I know they has been some disappointment from the hardworking developer community that has supported the 770 that the OS2007 operating system isn't backward compatible. I sympathise and as an end user sincerely hope that Nokia's handling of this doesn't discourage the development community too much. I have been impressed how the applications that I used on my 770 with a little tweaking have also worked on the n800. And would like to thank everyone who over the past few days have been posting help on how to get things working.

I think there is room for improvement and perhaps opportunities for the developers. A full supported RDesktop would be a significant step forward with someway of "right clicking" objects on the host windows pc. The ability to hide the IM contacts or replace it with a PIM more geared towards business contact use would be wonderful also.

The weakest part of the whole n800/770 for me is undoubtedly the email client. Mainly because of the lack of support for IMAP folders. I end up using the web mail support for our company email server because my email is stored in folders on the server and I can't access these via the email client on n800/770.

I hope some of you find this useful.

Regards
Damian

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

I'm still baffled how Nokia comes out with a device they call an Internet Tablet, yet provides one of the worst email clients ever?!?!? Maybe because email is such a new application is their excuse...I mean email is a fairly new application with the first message being sent in 1971 :rolleyes: so it's not like it's been in use as long as the telephone has...LOL! BTW, I find http://www.mail2web.com to be a helpful site to use to pull down email.

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

bac522,

yes I agree, they really have missed with the email client. I managed to get my company to install OWA for PDA (www.leederbyshire.com/OWA-PDA.asp) which is excellent on the Nokia and faster than the email client. But it would be useful to be able to view the emails offline.

Damian

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

Glad to hear of your experiences Damian!

I tried to implement using the 770 as a portable auditing tool in my work environment. Unfortunately, I got all the kinks worked out around the time our plant closure was announced. :(

Anyway, I think Nokia could do better at exploring and supporting business use of the tablets. Lot of potential there...

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

Use sylpheed as a good email client for 770.
http://www.bleb.org/software/770/

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

Hi Damian
That is an encouraging post. I would like to purchase the n800, but need access to remote pcs for files etc and use this software for access.
https://secure.logmein.com/home.asp
Would you be kind enough to test it and tell me if it runs on the N800, as this is the deciding factor to me if the java is supported and can run on the linux installation.

Kind regards

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

Kontorri,

Thanks I will give sylpheed a try.

Texrat,

Sorry to hear about the plant closure.

Eaglesky

I don't think Java is supported, well if it is I missed the fact. But I will give your remote access service a try.

Regards to you all
Damian

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

Thanks Damian.

You know, this is probably not what you had in mind with this thread, but it occurred to me that the tablet platform could be leveraged into the point of sale arena. Not sure if Nokia wants to get into that space, but considering they're positioning cell phones there (one new model has built-in PoS capability) I wouldn't be surprised. Add a card reader, remove the buttons, create a specific OS and voila: you have a color PoS touchpad terminal with high availability to wireless devices and wide-open possibilities. And the more it's platformed, the lower the price can go.

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

Tex: Just occurred to you? Remoteuser has been going on about this for over a year :) He originally used big Toshiba touchscreen tablets for order taking in restaurants and I believe that he wanted to move to the 770. Pretty slick, the XServer on the 770 only renders the app to the screen which it has more than enough horsepower while a server does all the crunching. He'd setup a demo to fire up our imagination... From Toronto, I connected to a server in Oregon, and ran xeyes. Two big eyes popped up on screen and followed the stylus around. All my 770 was doing was rendering the application data to the screen, the processing was done on his end.

Amazing.

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

Sorry, Hedgie, I've been slow lately. A year sounds about right. :p

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

You bring up some very good ideas. I have a friend that owns a coney island. They have a main register and ce enabled systems running terminal services around the resturant. There is no need for text input, everything is entered in the touchecreens. This would make great use of rdesktop on a nokia device, even the 770 could keep up with that.

I am going to try this out on his wireless network, if he knows the password for the register?

remotely displaying x has worked on the 770, almost since its inception. If you connect to a redhat system and run gnome-panel, you will get the whole menu system and you can fire up anything, I used to play bounce alot), its kind of cool, but not really that usefull. I am sure there are already apps out there for linux POS, but it seems the industry is mainly using terminal services in the POS industry.

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

The pos solution with Nokia sounds really useful. Better than the bulky and clumsy hand held devices you often see in restuarant chains.

With good application design it is amazing how little power is needed on the tablet. I can do everything with my tablet remotely that I can do sat at my desktop computer. Like many companies our main systems have web front end or at least web access options and those that don't, like our accounting package which is an old windows application can be made accessible with an application publisher like citrix and accessed with remote desktop.

I think a lot of people are missing the real power of the simple tablet and in many cases where the umpc platform is being hailed as the solution. I wonder why you would want the power of a pc in a handheld format. People should be designing applications with lightweight front ends. Maybe we could call it client and server (or something catchy like that.......what do you mean it has already been done!.........has anyone told microsoft or intel?)

Damian

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

And in my opinion the 770 is actually the better device if you're talking a walk-around input mechanism due to its smaller size and hard cover (which is actually aluminum anodized plastic, not metal as some believe). So this arena could extend the useful life of the 770 model and essentially force Nokia to continue support/upgrading and improve revenue in this area since surely the manufacturing cost of the 770 has gone down and is certainly lower than the N800's. Win-win all around I think.

I am going to explore this further and communicate to the right parties. Any further info, links, etc are very welcome.

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

Here's a selection of threads containing Remote Users thoughts on network driven applications using the internet tablet platform - there are no doubt others that may be more relevant/interesting...

The Internet Tablet could be Sun's iPod
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ead.php?t=1873
(Unfortunately the article referenced by RogerS has disappeared)

Point of Sale
http://www.internettablettalk.com/fo...ead.php?t=1099

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

Nice work Milhouse! I have already passed this on. ;)

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

Sorry to hear about that Texrat, it's going around everywhere. This winter; if you can call it that; has been horrible. This of course will make it much easier for those that are trying to guess your identity ;)

Re: Business User of n770 and n800
 

I wrote some ideas about 770 usage in the Brazilian biofuel industry last November:

Henri Bergius: Solving logistics of Mamona