Hello, as you can probably tell, I'm new here... I've had a look around, read a few posts and you all seem very nice, so I was wondering if you could help me out a little, as I'm a complete newbie to the 770 and also to linux!

I came across this little beast when looking for a cheap second access to the internet at home, I use the internet for my work, and also for keeping in contact with my relatives and friends, as well as keeping up to date with the news etc etc... Now, my girlfriend has just moved in and I thought it might be a nice idea to get something with wich one of us can surf the net or chat with family whilst the other is on the computer.

First I was looking at the Nintendo DS, but reviews have stated that surfing is incredibly slow and audio and video has not been enabled at all, so despite being cheap as chips, that was out of the question...

Then I stumbled across the 770 advert on the Nokia site which promised all kinds of amazing things including VOIP, IM and streaming audio and video from the net!

I guess the questions I have for you are these:

1. Is the 770 painfully slow at loading webpages?

2. Can you stream video content from the internet? Reading posts, it seems not, but the claim is there on their advert!

3. Using a youtube video downloaderand mplayer is it reasonably easy to watch video clips from youtube/dailymotion/myspace etc etc

4. Is it very easy to install mplayer?

5. Now that the n800 has been released is the 700 still worth approx £150 from ebay? I'm not too bothered about being cutting edge, as long as I can surf most webpages, listen to some music (does music genome work on it?) watch the occasional video/download the odd mix from the net and chat with my friends and family. It seems the 770 is good for this, and the price is still way lower than anything else out there.


thanks for taking the time to look!

dan7ape

No, the bottleneck is usually the network. The 770 is quite good
for surfing webpages as long as they don't contain too much flash
or huge graphics. Flash content can be displayed but is often slow,
especially when heavily animated.

It depends on the content. The built-in video player is _very_ picky
about what it will play. MPlayer, however, can play a lot more.
I usually download video content to my computer and convert it
into a 770-compatible format before streaming it to the 770.
That works well.

MPlayer can play .flv videos (YouTube, etc.), but it's not trivial to
tell the browser to open these files with mplayer. I don't recall
the exact procedure but there's a thread about this somewhere
in this forum. But even then, mplayer takes a lot of time (buffering?)
before it starts to play a .flv from e.g. YouTube. It works and playback
is quite smooth for most videos but you'll have to be patient.

As easy as installing any software on the 770. It's really just a few clicks,
after telling the application manager on which server it can find the package. If you know Debian or Ubuntu, it's almost the same procedure
as with synaptic there.

Dunno. According to some statements and blogs from Nokia employees
they still want to support the 770 and release a new OS 2006 firmware sometime (but not OS 2007, which would run slow on the 770 anyway). But since it's the management and not the techs who decide at
Nokia, only time will tell.

thanks for your answers!

so... ignoring streaming video content for the moment, do you think the 770 will serve as a decent browser, with the oppurtunity to listen to music online /download mp3s? (I see there is a soulseek client available!). My guess is that we will be using is mostly for:

accessing gmail
browsing sites like bbc news, forums etc
internet radio
myspace
flickr
VOIP

I did hope that youtube and similar streaming would be possible, but it seems it's not so easy to get it on a handheld... well... on a handheld within my budget anyways! If there's a workaround I can deal with it, or, as you say, download on my PC and convert and stream from there

It can easily do this. I use my 770 pretty much the same way, plus a lot more because of the fact it runs Linux. If you don't mind getting under the hood of the unit, IE working with Linux directly, there is quite a bit you can do with the unit.

That's good to hear!! I can see that it might provide me with quite a bit of fun and I'm sure after a little while I'll get to messing around a bit!

Off to ebay I go!

Sounds like you are in the UK, so I thought I'd mention I have a 770 for sale.

I'm making the jump to the N800. Thought I could resist, but I just can't!

Let me know if you are interested in it. (will provide plenty of feedback)

On the streaming media front. I've had quite a lot of success with the BBC stuff. Never had a need to try and do Google or YouTube .

I mostly stream stuff from PC using Orb. Which is free and works a treat.