Country: Italy
Purchased From: ebay.it (PowerSeller)
Purchase/Arrival Date: 2 feb / 13 feb 2006

Well, I think I can not be objective: I've loved this small piece of tecnology since the first time I've read about it on LinuxJournal...

Likes: the touchscreen and the design, but I think the most important thing is that it's linux-based ;-)

Dislikes: the dimension of the charger's jack... just now I'm triyng to recharge (after a full-descharge) and the screen is totally off... I'm starting to be scared... I hope it's not an hardware bug!

Favorite apps: browser (but in the future, I think I'll find many interesting things to install :-P )

Country: US (Houston, TX)
Purchased From: Fry's
Purchase/Arrival Date: January 30, 2005

On the whole I really like the 770. I've used a Zaurus for several years but find that I prefer the Nokia. In part that's because of the built-in connecti\vity but it's also the case that the Nokia are doing a great job of really making the device open (at least software wise) as well as producing a really sol\id device.

I've owned the portrait mode and landscape Zauris and while I can say that I miss the thumboard occassionally it's not a major loss. I have a ThinkOutside \Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard that I keep handy. It's much easier to type on for longer messages (although not handy when you're at the store). Perhaps the most telling difference between the Zaurus and Nokia for me is I carry the Nokia everywhere. The Zaurus, espcially the clamshell, has been left behind numerous times.

I'll echo the comment about RAM but really it doesn't cause me much trouble. I have a 32 Mb swap partition and that totally eases the pain.

Likes:

• Screen - 800 (rather than 640)x480
• Size and weight -- thin and light
• Debian and gnome/gtk based -- makes porting apps easier (not easy just easier)
• Bluetooth -- connected to both a T-Mobile and Verizon DUN
• 802.11b/g
• Usable dev environment and good documentation

Dislikes:

• RAM (needs more)
• USB 1.1
• USB-host mode requires power

Favorite apps:

• Video Player
• FBReader
• Opera
• AbiWord
• XTerm :P

Discoveries:

• 'User' must have a shell of /bin/sh -- I'll post a separate message detailing the boot troubles I had after setting the 'user' shell to tcsh after I comp\iled and installed it (and no, it's not a bad compile)

Tips:

• Don't set 'user' to a shell that's not compatible with sh -- invoke the new shell from your .profile

What I would add without increasing the price:

• USB 2.0
• Powered USB-host mode
• Additional 32 - 64 MB RAM

I've had my 770 for about a week now, so here's my first impressions:

That screen: Everyone says it, but "zowie!". Just gorgeous. The rest of the device is just a box to carry that screen.

Overall construction: nice and simple. I'd like a slightly more rugged case, but that's an aftermarket thing (I'm thinking like the PalmGlove that's kept my M105 alive for four years of abuse...). A bit of neoprene, a little magnet to turn the screen off, and a rigid bit to protect the screen. Are they on the market yet?

The openness of the platform is of course totally addictive (you should see the faces of geeks when I spark up XTerm). It turns the device from a consumer product into a community product. The potential of this thing is eye-bleeding. But I'm just as stoked that the out-of-the-box interface is slick and works well. Good work, design team: the various bugs and interface clunkiness can (and doubtless will) be ironed out in future firmware releases. Who do we refer those to?

Handwriting: If I get another capital-P mid-sentence I'll cry. The recognition doesn't seem too good at x-height (the height of the lowercase "x" and things like the lowercase "p"). A dotted line on the recognition window, and user-settability of that line's height, would IMO be a big improvement.

PIM: Yes, I know its not a PIM, but I don't want a bag full of devices. In fact, I think the 770 is intended to access any PIM functionality just like anything else, via the web. Which is an interesting idea, but I'm not putting my personal phone book and password list on Yahoo! The GPE PIM is clearly work-in-progress and desperately needs appropriate sync for this class of device. Encrypted sync to an arbitrary FTP destination which also hosted a web PIM app - that would rock.

What am I using it for? So far I've been using it as the "magic magazine" - its designed use - IMDB from the sofa, recipes from the kitchen, news on the loo, and so on. But I've used it just as much as an ebook reader, and that did surprise me. The screen is the first one good enough to read for a decent length of time, and I've been chewing through weighty texts (the Iliad, the Hacker Crackdown) without getting a headache. FBReader, full screen, portrait mode, the zoom buttons for page up/down: sweet. The return of reading in bed

The other use it's had so far is as an ad-hoc notepad. The Sketch app is ideal for taking down who's having what in a round of drinks: nothing to learn! (And beery fingerprints all over that screen... weep!)

So, what do I want from this thing that I don't think is currently there?

* Some UI tweaks that have come up on a zillion other reviews and posts. RSS news feed and Internet Radio station subscription come to mind first.

* More reliable handwriting recognition.

* Bluetooth networking. The how-to's work but aren't exactly a slick user experience. Yes, this is outside the original spec, but I have a specific need: 802.11/x isn't permitted at work, Bluetooth is.

* That PIM. It really really needs sync of one sort of another. But the developers know this already.

Overall, though, it's just gorgeous and I'm stoked

Aha - the WiKi has been updated with info on how to network via USB.
http://maemo.org/maemowiki/USBnetworkingWinXP
Shame it requires getting root access though - as I haven't done that yet.
So - more reading and playing to be done - will have to wait for the next return flight though.

Country: Germany
Purchased From: Saturn (local electronics store, not the planet)
Purchase/Arrival Date: 23.02.2006

Likes: Well, the screen of course. It's so damn sharp and big, albeit hard to read outside in the daylight. But my greatest surprise was how well streaming radio worked, especially over UMTS. I even was able to watch the BBC video news, which are broadcast in 16:9 format and fit well on the wide screen. What I also like is the developers community at maemo.org, and all the interesting projects going on there.

Dislikes: The CPU is somewhat weak, especially to display more complex pages. I tried watching an episode of Happy Tree Friends (in flash format), which didn't work out too well. I also would have appreciated a bigger memory card than 64MB. I am about to buy a 1024MB card soon.

Favorite apps: web browser, audio player, ScummVM

Well, I love the 770 for all it can be. A mobile web radio, a on-the-go browser (better than opera mini), a game platform (although the PSP is still prefered by me) and a media player. By the way, at the time I picked it up, it was probably the only one being for sale in our whole town! I almost walked my feet off trying to find a shop selling these.

Country: Netherlands
Purchased From: Nokia website
Purchase/Arrival Date: 16 Feb 2005/27 Feb 2005

Likes:
- Brightness of the screen, I have to turn it down in the evening not to be blinded by the light (.. "revved up like a deuce, another runner in the night", Manfred Mann, in case you're wondering).
- The touch-screen is very responsive.
- Resolution of the screen is really good (no news there)
- I like the default font for some reason, nice and smooth (Nokia Sans, pretty similar to Verdana).
- Wifi connect/disconnect icon is conveniently located. Easy to switch it off to extend the battery life.
- Size and weight are perfect. Feels solid and it's truely pocketable.
- No phone. If you want a phone, get a phone. If you want to walk around with a pc on your ear, be my guest but get an HTC Universal instead. Nokia used to sell timber, an internet tablet is not such a great leap from mobile phones, get over it.

Dislikes:
- Default browser font is too small and cannot be changed as far as I am aware. This makes it unnecessarily inconvenient to read long text files. I plan to use the 770 as a portable reading device for text documents through the browser or pdf reader allowing me to walk around or lie down, hang upside down or whatever, anything but sit down all day long. Try reading a 10-K on sec.gov and you'll know what I mean. The width of the screen is similar to typical text width of a pocket book (that is the page width excluding the margins) so it's quite sufficient. But on full screen mode there are about twenty words per line on the Nokia as compared to around ten words in a pocket book. I have to zoom to 200% to get the same font size but this would require me to scroll the page left and right to be able to read it, not a good idea. This problem could easily be resolved by allowing the minimum font size to be determined by the user.
- So far the battery life has been sufficient because I have been using it exclusively at home. However, I foresee this becoming a problem on trips. I am not looking forward to carrying around even more cables. I know this is a problem that is not easily resolved. Moore's Law does not apply to batteries.
- The screen should cover the whole device in the next generation. Take a cue from the iPod video mock-ups on the net. The buttons on the front can easily be moved to the sides.
- A scroll wheel on the side, bottom or top of the tablet would make scrolling through websites a lot easier.

Favorite apps:
- so far I've been using Opera exclusively. I have not even set up the email client as I use Gmail. There's no need for an email client these days.

That doesn't seem to be true; at least, there's a UI for entering an IP address. Connection manager > Connection manager > Tools > Connectivity settings > Connections. Then Edit the connection you want to change, tap Next until you get to the "Connection setup: Complete" screen, then tap Advanced. Tap on the "IP Addresses" tab and you can uncheck "Auto-retrieve IP address:" and/or "Auto-retrieve DNS:" and set your own values. I haven't checked that this actually works, but it sure looks like it ought to.
Well, the flash is probably slower than the disk on your PC, and comparing MHz ratings for different processor architectures isn't very useful. Also, your PC in 1996 was probably running less-sophisticated apps than the N770 is -- I'm thinking of stuff like anti-aliased text (a big deal on a small screen), the preferences infrastructure, Bluetooth and WiFi (dunno how much CPU they require, but probably some), today's Opera versus whatever version of Netscape was common in 1996, and so on.

Personally, I think I'd rather have my N770 than a 1996 PC if I had to choose, because the N770 fits in my pockedt and is with me all the time. (Well, I might insist on a Bluetooth keyboard if the N770 were my only computer. :-)

Drag up on the semicolon instead of just tapping, and you don't have to hit
shift first. (I.e., put your stylus on the semicolon, drag upwards a bit -- it's fine to leave the key as you do this -- and release.) Works for all the other keys, too. I never tap the shift key any more.

Bloody hell! That works. Never knew that one, thanks for the tip

Heheheh that's been brought up several times. Drag right for a space, down for a line feed and back for backspace. Also scribbling left to right has the same effect as tapping backspace repeatedly. (Maemo, alternate input methods). Tnx Beowabbit, but that post of mine was ancient and I caught onto the alternates a week or two later. I'm going to go back and re-read my first impressions now that I've had the tablet for 10 weeks.