Nokia 770 Internet Tablets Going Cheap
 

This will be of interest to European members of this board. Expansys is currently selling the Nokia 770 internet tablet for £74. I've just taken delivery of one. It's a European unit with a UK plug adapter and appears in new/pristine condition (i.e. not reconditioned).

http://www.expansys.com/p.aspx?i=141019

It was purely an impulse buy out of curiosity.

And a quick review
 

Three hours charging, near instant setup with my "SonyEricsson" cell phone and wireless WLAN and I'm up and running. Neat hardware and fairly obvious software makes this a nice package. I do find it a little slow though. Handwriting recognition is good but not has accurate as graffiti type input.

One question burns though: Why didn't Nokia go the whole hog and give it full PDA functionality? The infrastructure is there so I don't see the point in not using it! I think as a PDA, this could be what the old Message Pad should have been.

Thanks, I just ordered one.

1000's of these just flooded the market. I wonder where they came from, unless Nokia was holding on to them for some reason? Everyone from Woot to Tiger got loads of them...

Classic end of line... "Oops.. we've made too many of them... time to flog them off..."

Nice 1st Generation unit - I prefer the updated version (N800 i think?) but at the price... hard to say no to....

Interesting. Either someone other than Nokia is cutting and running or Nokia themselves want a lot of these devices in the hands of the masses.

Whatever the marketing politics are behind this, it's not a bad deal for the consumer. Personally, from what I've seen I got a good deal (and I like what I got) but I wouldn't dream of paying the best part of £300 for this class of device.

That said: Is it just me or is there something a little insulting to the consumer that so many of the little gadgets we buy (Palm take note) are artificially by marketing people who must surely be first against the wall come the revolution.....

I couldn't say no. It was worth buying just for knowledge of whether the idea is crap or not (and it isn't entirely bad) at that price.

That's what I thought when I brought of an Apple Newton ;)

If the cash was spare.. it would be brought ... for now I need to save for my studio photography kit :(

I have one for about 2 weeks, bought for $129.00. It is slow and we have a bit to figure out, but we are using the Gizmo phone, surfing the web and checking e-mails. My wife took it on a recent day trip out of town and had multiple opportunties to check and send e-mail and search the web. She now takes it with her on her errands and finds it useful. Best of all, we can both sit on our sofa and check e-mails at the same time. I suspect that eventualy Nokia will get us to shell out larger amounts for succeeding generations of this as we get hooked.

Wikipedia says these are still cheap at:

Buy.com
expansys
amazon.co.uk

Still, not that cheap in Australia, yet. :( - AU$300 most places.

I had mine a year ago,

never could get much more than Internet radio.,,,,,

maybe its time to dig it out and see if there is a software upgrade that might make it worthwile,

anyone know a good website for the 770 ?

thanks

Rally

I can't personally say if it's a good site or not, but a friend got one off woot and insists that the message board there about them is more than she ever needs to know about it in her lifetime.

I picked one up last week from Expansys. If you have a search they sell it bundled with a 1GB RS-MMC card for about 50p extra.

It is a great little unit and was purchased with the hope of being a replacement for my laptop on short trips but I am unable to log in to ba.com with it. Whenever I click in to the BA Exec Number field it causes the page to refresh.

The main reason I take the laptop away is for OLCI! :mad:

If anyone has anyluck then let me know!

Rich

Rich, ditto here why I ordered one as well - Expansys quoting 11 day delivery - I think everyone has the same idea at that price!
Back to your point Rich, I've never had much joy getting access to secure areas of sites on anything smaller than a laptop. PDA's are useless for this, my Blackberry won't play ball either. When I get mine I'll do some fiddling (with the 770 of course!) and let you know how I get on...

Hopefully BA will implement mobile check-in functionality similar to what CO released this year. It is great to check-in and select seats via smartphone rather than logging in to a laptop.

Back to topic, this looks pretty cool!

the 770 is NOT a phone ,

you need an open WiFi signal to use it ,
so really not of much use at most airports unless you are in the clubs,

Has anyone found a way to use it as a VOIP phone ?
at one time Google was going to do something with it , but I never heard if they did,

rally

Unless you happen to have a company funded 3G phone to link via Bluetooth ;)

What about connecting via bluetooth to an EDGE phone?

The newest software for the N800 (the second version of the 770) has a Skype client. The 770 should support voice calls over Google talk.

Yep, that should work. Essentially as long as you have bluetooth between the device and your phone established, the actual network connection type (3G, EDGE, GPRS) shouldn't make any difference - other than the speeds being slightly different of course.

Well, I ordered one last night for $134 from ecost.com. I have to figure out which phone to use it with. ScottC said on another thread I think that it wouldnt work with my WM5 or WM6 phones (TyTN and Dash). I have an old Nokia 6230 that it should get EDGE speeds with. Im looking forward to playing around with it. Does anyone know if there is a Cisco compatible VPN client and SSH application for it? That would rock if I could get that going.

New(er) windowsmobile devices have dropped the DUN profile in favor of the PAN profile. But I've already seen some hacks for it that enable PAN on the 770, but they require some low level Linux work.

On XDA-Developers some people have also made hacks to enable DUN again on WM6, so you should have 2 options.

The 770 does voip using Gizmoproject. I have used it and it works, but it is speakerphonelike (have not tried the earphone) and there is a bit of a delay. At .02 a minute I will try in Europe next week for calling home and the office.

I just got an e-mail from expansys that my 770 has been shipped. I actually had begun wavering to get a Archos Wifi PMP instead but all the necessary "add-ons" for the gen 5 units put me off.

Mine came yesterday. I ordered it from ecost. It is very fast browsing off of WiFi. I used it on my home network and at a TMobile HotSpot site. I have to check out the other applications next.

Any suggestions for software, such as office-type applications or GPS?

I am really enjoying my 770 for the price.

It browses the web very well except no internet video player functionality so news video/youtube etc won't work. Also it won't let me log in to www.ba.com. Can someone else try please! When I click the "Exec Club Number" field it causes the page to refresh.

The email client is ok but a bit slow to open and delete emails. Does the job though.

I really like the RSS Reader. Simple to use and handy way to quickly check forums at the start/end of the day.

Need to find out about some apps to as not able to open office docs.

User website, I think, is www.maemo.org.

Rich

Now I've had it for a few days, I find I really like it. Yes, it is sluggish but the facility to to quickly get information without having to boot up one of the laptops is nice. As a web browser, it is far nicer than my HP hx4700.

Me too :D

They had 230+ in stock at 5pm today, now down to less than 30!!

Got mine this morning and have been having a blast figuring out how to use it. Unfortunately it does not easily connect to my Dash, but it does to my company phone. :)

I will try GPS when I get home tonight.

This site seemed to be useful as well:

https://garage.maemo.org/

Did you upgrade your Dash to WindowsMobile 6 by any chance?

Yes, I did, and I know that is the cause of my issue. I tried some of the, uh, workarounds but they didnt work with the official flash.

No biggy as I have a workaround, but it would be nice to get it working with the Dash.

Did you do the workaround on the 770 or the Dash?

Over at xda-developers they seem to be getting close to finally getting DUN working again on their devices.

I got it back on my TyTN after a patch too.

Stupid Microsoft for removing it. They claimed it wasn't necessary anymore now they implemented Bluetooth PAN. But forgot that there are still 100's of devices that only support DUN.

My 770 Experiences
 

A couple of good websites about the Nokia 770 are nokia770.com and InternetTabletTalk.com, along with a couple of threads in FatWallet.com (one is http://www.fatwallet.com/t/18/743064/10982166#m10982166).

Here is some advice I've read or discovered in the few days I've had mine:

• Be sure that the city in Control Panel | Date and Time is set correctly. London is the default.
• The greatest 770 enthusiasts, with the most interesting applications, are linux fans. What is simple and intuitive to them may not be simple and intuitive to most folks.
• Setting the Internet radio to additional "channels" is non-intuitive. Do a search in the forums for "Shoutcast" to learn a method that works.
• For best performance, insert the memory card and turn on virtual memory.
• The 2-pages icon on the left is the doorway to settings, control panel, etc.
• The first time you connect via WiFi to a new access point, the 770 will ask if you want to memorize it. Don't agree until you see if it actually works, because it's not easy to un-memorize those settings.

I am able to get into some SSL websites. The WiFi receiver seems to be very sensitive, showing many available networks.

DHL just dropped the package off. So far it works very well and I'm glad that I bought it. I just wish that I had opted for the Navicore bundled edition since it seems that the car cradle for the 770 isn't readily available. I plan to use it tethered to my Nokia phone seeing that I got unlimited dataplan on it when out and about.

It's a shame that it hasn't quite got the power to play back xvid's and thus requiring conversion.

The formfactor is really great and the screen is bright.

Thanks for the tip!

I tried the Dash as I am not all that confident about working with Linux, though I am sure I can find a Linux geek on my team to play with the 770.

You get the same problem with BA.com on Opera Mobile. If you can, switch Javascript off for the login, then re-enable it after you're in. Annoying, but it works.

Oh dear, yours truly didn't go for the DHL option from Expansys so they sent it Royal Mail...who are on strike in various parts...so nobody has just dropped mine off..hey ho, looking forward to it when it does eventually arrive :rolleyes:

Is the PAN issue only in WM6?

I had been thinking of getting a tablet PC - was looking for something larger than my PalmTX but smaller than my laptop. But after watching the demo video on the buy.com website, the Nokia 770 doesn't seem to be all that much different than my PalmTX. Or am I missing something that you technophiles can shed some light on (especially those of you that already have one)?