A little background: I travel 12 states (USA) on business. I have a TREO 650 Sprint and Powerbook. Many times, like all of us who travel, you would like to surf the web, check a few of your fav sites out whie eating lunch, etc. BUT dont want to "bust out the Powerbook" to do so and of course, the browsing experience on the the 650 is not great, actually it is not great on any phone. Email on the 650 is fine. I have a video iPod for pics, music and movie clips, etc. My primary interest in the 770 is browsing the web easliy via WiFi or BT.

I noticed the 770 on the web a few months back and thought..hmmm this may be my solution. I, like many, ordered one when we heard it was "available in the USA"..but of course, it wasn't REALLY available. I cancelled my 770 order a few days ago.

Last night, I purchased a Palm T/X last night for the browsing experience only but I checked out the other features too, of course. To save post time, here are the specs for for the T/X. http://www.palm.com/us/products/handhelds/tx/specs.epl

The pictures and the movie sample looked good. I was impressed. Back to the browsing, the T/X connected to my home wireless network (802.11g) easliy after I put in my WEP password. The screen is 3.8 in diagnonally vs. 4.1 for the 770.

You can orient the screen to landscape or portrait, I used landscape (wide screen). They have some preset "mobile" websites which looked good and worked fine. I put in cnn.com and all the page info is there with very nice pics. There is no hortizonal scrolling , just vertica on all websites. You can drag the pages lke the 770 to scroll. Even though you are in the "optimized mode", the pages are NOT optimized as the "whole page".. like you see on the 770. the page info is formatted such that it is hard to follow or find what you are looking for, much like a phone browsing experience. I tried several sites with similar results. I was not impressed. I am returning the unit tomorrow for a refund.

Since the 770 is not being shipped now until Dec. My plans are to wait, see the 770 at CES 2006, maybe others like it (others we may not know about yet), see what Apple introduces at Mac Expo 2006 (the following week after CES) then decide the next step.

In the meantime, I will be eager to hear about everyone's experience with the 770... "when it ships"....

Had one for a few weeks and browsing is fine. Tapping out this on it at the moment. Sometimes the drag to scroll has a delay but on mainly text based sites it is fine. Have to zoom in to click individual numbers sometimes like multi page forums but this is painless. Have to admit i have not really tried the graffiti. I had lifedrive and can agree about the random palm page optimisation.

I'm siding with 3xNickle on this one. I just tried both the TX and an iPAQ (I don't remember the model number) in an electronics store downtown and they had an open accesspoint. (Awefully nice of them, heh!) The palm's browsing was brutal regardless of screen orientation (wide or tall), though the speed wasn't too bad.

The iPAQ seemed to have a much more feature rich browser, which scaled the pages down, unfortunately the resolution brough me back to the old Game Boy days - - now with colour! I didn't log into gMail as it was a public PDA, but the login screen loaded fine.

The 770's in a class of it's own. I might gripe about it, but I'm waiting.

Thanks for your follow-up comments. The T/X would be ok for occasional casual surfing, but thats about it.

I have essentially the same browser on a palm lifedrive, and it's
not awful, but it is somewhat limited. I've used it to view content on this site and engadget, but it's essentially useless for online banking. etc.... It also has trouble saving links to the the hard drive if the page being viewed is too large, or if it's just feeling finicky.
The palm wifi stack is also kind of unstable, so device resets are common, i.e. about 1 per day, if you power off or switch from the browser to/from other apps.

I also tried an HP IPAQ 4700 with a VGA screen for a couple of weeks. Pocket Internet Explorer, or PIE, was a pretty miserable browser, but there are plugins available that make it much nicer, e.g. for tabbed browsing. The problem is that the cost of the device and the add-in modules for PIE, along with an upgraded PDF viewer, since the bundled one couldn't read most of my documents, was WAY too high for a PDA. Perhaps things have improved somewhat with the introduction of win mobile 2005.

I don't dislike my palm lifedrive at all, but I think the 770 will be much, much better.

I agree. The Blazer browser on the newer Palms just doesn't work well for conventional web browsing. The formatting does work ok, but the res of the screen, the limited fonts, and a buggy browser just ruins the experience most of the time. I've had it crash many a time, usually when turning the device off with the browser still loaded. Think of Blazer as NetFront from BeOS, but less stable and with javascript. Now, even the other browsers for Palm like Xiino are mostly terrible at formatting, though they usually load sites faster.

... and most of the "other" browsers lack full screen support, i.e. are limited to 320x320. Another cool feature of blazer is that it will cause the device to reset if you access an SSL page with a self-signed cert. Palm created my device about 8 months ago, and since then, they haven't fixed any of the obvious problems with the device. It appears that nokia takes a rather different approach to QA.

After using the 770 for two and a half weeks, I find the browsing experience radically different than on a smaller screen. The type is small, very small, for most web pages, and I thought this would prevent my using the display at 100 percent. The first week, I often enlarged the display to 150 percent and scrolled left and right to read everything.

That's as problematic as a PDA screen, of course, or almost. But what I found is that, small as the type is, it is very very readable, and I've stopped feeling I have to enlarge it to enjoy it.

Saturday I tried navigating a few websites on a cellphone and I hated it so much after the 770 that I decided to wait for the information I needed rather than struggle any longer. In this regard, the 770 is like a mini-desktop screen -- everything is there on the webpage and it is absolutely what you want.