The 770 is designed to be an extra Internet portal for your home, replacing a costly laptop. It connects to the Internet via 802.11 b/g home networking or using a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone, and comes with the Opera Web browser, a simple POP3/IMAP mail reader, music and video players and a PDF reader. It runs a variant of Linux, and third-party developers are already hard at work writing new applications. We downloaded the GAIM instant-messaging program off the Web using the device, and it installed without a hitch.
At 5.5 by 3.1 by 0.7 inches and 8.1 oz, the 770 fits in your hand and slips easily into an included protective sleeve. Lest you feel misled, it's not really for roaming, unless you regularly hang out in Wi-Fi hot spots or are a true Bluetooth road warrior. We found it most useful on the arm of the couch at home, where we could check e-mail or find out who that guy on Lost was via IMDB without getting up or booting a PC.
The 770 looks good in an Ikea-meets-Bang-and-Olufsen way and the interface is simple. A truly breathtaking 800- by 480-pixel screen dominates the unit, and that screen makes the 770 a far better Web-surfing gadget than any PDA: you don't have to reformat pages or scroll horizontally. Really, you have to see this screen to believe it. A 4.1-inch, 800-pixel-wide panel delivers smoother edges and subtler colors than you've ever seen on a handheld.
There's a cursor pad and home button on the left, but no hard keyboard: You enter text by tapping an onscreen keyboard with a stylus or by using handwriting recognition. The handwriting recognizer kept inserting upper-case letters into the middle of words, so we mostly used the on-screen keyboard. The lack of a physical keyboard adds emphasis to the point that this gadget is for consuming data and content, not for writing e-mail. You could attach a Bluetooth keyboard, but then you'd be carrying two pieces.
We connected the 770 to Wi-Fi networks using both WEP and WPA encryption without a problem. Bluetooth connectivity was a little tougher—we had to dig up our wireless carrier's dial-up networking settings. We eventually got it connected to the Internet via Cingular's network, using both the Nokia N90 and Sony Ericsson S710a phones as modems. We totally failed to connect it to Motorola V551 and V557 phones, receiving the message back from the tablet that it could not complete "service discovery."
We found the 770's interface a little bit gummy, but more worrying is that the device can easily max out its 250-MHz TI OMAP 1710 processor and its 64MB of RAM. Opening two browser windows and starting a mail session brought performance to a standstill.
It was nice to see that the 770 accepts RS-MMC memory cards through a slot in the bottom, for storing MP3s and videos. A 64MB card comes with the unit. If you hook the 770 up to a PC or Mac with a USB 2.0 cable, you can see the RS-MMC card as a drive, but not the 770's internal RAM or its 128MB of internal Flash memory.
Battery life with the 770 was very good: we got more than five and a half hours of surfing, reading e-mail, and listening to Internet radio and MP3s. Nokia promises seven days of standby time.
The 770's Internet radio player has some real potential, but at present it's pretty limited. Shoutcast or Real-format radio stations can be streamed through the unit's tinny little speaker or over headphones plugged into its standard, 3.5mm jack. Unfortunately, there's no station directory anywhere on the device, so you're reduced to either wandering the Web in search of radio links or listening to the single preprogrammed built-in top-40 station.
The video player is also promising, but hobbled. It played Real format streams from the BBC's Web site well, but failed to play video downloaded from our PC. Though it supposedly plays 3GP, MPEG-1 and MPEG-4 formats, it's extremely picky about which MPEG files it will play, allowing only files with specific codecs and frame rates.
The RSS viewer looks good and displays news feeds on the device's home page, but entering new feeds is a chore. You can't click on new feeds in the browser and send them to the viewer, nor can you copy and paste links—you need to copy the feed addresses down onto a piece of paper and enter them into the viewer's "new feed" box.
The Opera Web browser handles multiple windows, JavaScript pop-ups, cookies, and Macromedia Flash animations, but more advanced features like the Ajax extensions used in the new Yahoo! Mail interface don't work. Folks with poor eyesight should be aware that Nokia uses tiny text to squeeze a full Web page onto a 4.1-inch screen. You can zoom in on pages to make the text bigger, but then you can no longer fit the entire width of a page onto one screen.
The mail reader hooked up to both POP3 and IMAP4 accounts easily and downloaded mail with attachments, which popped up in the appropriate viewers. The music player handledMP3 and AAC format songs (with Nokia's AAC extension, not Apple's M4A) without trouble. The 770 also comes with a PDF viewer, image viewer, and file manager, all of which worked well.
- Type: Linux
- Screen Size: 4.13 inches
- Operating System: Linux Internet Tablet 2005
- Processor Class: TI OMAP
- Processor Speed: 244.1 MHz
- RAM: 64 MB
- Networking Options: 802.11g
- Flash Memory Type: RS-MMC
- Bluetooth: Yes
