delicious

When I got home from work today I had a FedEx door hanger on my door letting me know that my Nokia 770 had finally arrived. I almost forgot I had ordered it since demand is so high for the device that orders are taking up to 2 months to fill. So after scurrying over to FedEx and getting the package home, I tore into it like a kid on x-mas morning. Here are some first impressions after setting it up and playing with it for the past few hours.

Hardware: High-resulution (800×480) touch screen, 128MB flash memory (>64MB user) expandable by RS-MMC (currently available up to 1GB). Package includes 700 Internet Tablet, extra stylus, battery charger and 64MB RS-MMC card.

Software: The operating system is ‘Internet Tablet 2005 Edition’ which is Nokia’s commercial name for the maemo linux distribution. Applications include a Web browser (Opera 8), email client, internet radio streamer, rss news reader, media players, image viewer, file manager, search, calculator, world clock, PDF-viewer, notes (notepad), sketch (drawing tool) and games.

Within about 15 minutes of taking the unit out of the box I was online via a bluetooth connection to my cell phone seeing as how I have no wireless ethernet in my condo. And despite reviews that may say otherwise, the 770 isn’t strictly compatible with only Nokia phones. It works like a charm with my Mororola RAZR v3’s GPRS connection through CellOne, though it’s a bit slower than what I’m used to. The 770 also works with WiFi connections (802.11b/g) and web browsing with the added throughput is fantastic. I figured this out by hopping on one of the many insecure wireless access points my neighbors saw fit to set up for me. Considerate bunch.

The email client was easy to set up to read my rudeboy.org email address though it, though it’s functionality is pretty basic. You’re limited to viewing headers only or downloading the whole message attachments and all. Given the limited storage space available on the 770, a few large spam emails or downloading complete messages from a highly active account could be a problem. I’ve already put in a feature request to be able to browse the email headers and then choose to download the message text only.

GAIM is also available for the 770 and I couldn’t be happier about that. It allows me to keep in contact with all of my friends anywhere my cell phone can get a signal to pass a GPRS connection to the 770. Most people would think “why the hell not just call them?” which is a valid point, but I’m often in places where I can’t accept calls and instant messaging is much more convenient.

The Opera browser renders pages great in full screen mode and the included flash player doesn’t lag the system except for the most media-laden sites. I’d really rather the browser be a mozilla derivative, but I’m thinking that Firefox may be too large and Minimo may be too small. I’ll have to do some testing.

Aside from that I’ve installed X-Chat as an IRC client since I’m not a fan of irssi. I’m going to look into getting BitchX repackaged for the 770.