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

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 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.

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

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...

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

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

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

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.

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.

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