I recently bought a Nokia 770 to use as a remote control for MMS (among other things). The first thing one notices is the screen: very clear, big and with great contrast. The built-in IM client is great. It’s excellent for when you’re not near the computer but want to chat with people anyway. It’s quite easy to write on the screen, I’m currently using the virtual keyboard but have also tried the recognition briefly without much succes.
The Opera browser included is very light-weight and quite fast but doesn’t work correctly on all pages, so sometimes one needs to use Minimo (firefox port). Sadly Minimo is a lot more heavy on the system and can cause the system to spontaneously reboot?! I have no clue how a browser can cause the whole system to come crashing down. I thought we cured that when we moved away from Windows 98? 😉
Furthermore the built-in rss reader is quite nice. The font is nice and big which makes it easy to read. I like to read the latest news on the device when I’m eating breakfast in the morning and it saves booting up the computer. The Nokia is ready in seconds.
Before I bought the device, I read in a lot of reviews which claimed that the battery time sucked. That might be true if you’re using it constantly, but if you’re not using it for a little while it will shut down the screen and will wake up in ~1 second again. That way it can easily keep running for quite a few days of rss feed reading and browsing. So you get battery lifetime comparable to a normal phone.
A last thing that I have been using the device for is VOIP. The device has a built-in microphone and speaker so one doesn’t need anything extra to make it work. I would have liked to use my headphones but it appears that for the time being that is not yet supported. By downloading gizmo project software one is able to make very cheap (even free) phone calls to phones in Denmark (and to almost any other part of the world). The sound quality is comparable to Skype.
I havn’t started hacking on it yet but from the brief encounters I have had with the documentation and development enviroment it looks quite nice. To be continued 🙂
2 replies on “Nokia 770”
Opera engine, used in the Nokia 770 browser, is not a “lightweight version” – it is the *very same* engine as in the desktop Opera browser. So whatever is supported in the desktop Opera is also supported in 770, with only one exception: 770 has only Flash plugin, whereas you can also have QuickTime, RealPlayer and other plugins for the desktop.
Minimo browser can crash the device just because it is very heavy – when it eats up all the available memory device might crash.
Besides Gizmo project, there is a built-in VoIP client on 770, which is based on XMPP. You can use either GoogleTalk server or any public Jabber sever (there are plenty of those).
I’m still guessing it’s the opera mini version, right? And if so, do you know when it will be upgraded to 3.0?