Martin Grimme’s blog entries are now appearing in the Planet Maemo stream. A week ago, he wrote his first impressions of the Nokia 770:

[P]utting the protective case over the screen, the device automatically goes into standby mode from which it recovers in less than a second.

The screen is incredibly sharp and has a 800×480 widescreen on the area of two matchboxes. The contrast is great and you can actually use the device in bright sunlight, where most LCDs fail horribly!

The stylus is a simple piece of plastic, yet it is a good pen for clear handwriting. This makes the handwriting recognition actually useful, after you got used to it. You can write several words at once and the device tries to guess the characters. The more you practise a clear handwriting, the less mistakes the Nokia makes. If you spot a mistake, just write over the wrongly recognized letter again to correct it. That way you can even insert spaces or delete characters by crossing them out. However, the writing area is limited and only fits two or three words at once. Because of ambiguities you have to manually switch between alphanumerical and special characters modes. If your handwriting doesn’t fit the predefined rules, you can teach the device your own rules.

Without zooming in, websites are readable, but most often damn tiny. The Opera browser can either zoom the whole contents (excluding flashs), or just increase the size of characters while still horinzontally fitting the page on screen.

The device seriously lacks RAM and the software isn’t rock stable. I saw the desktop hang or crash rather often. Nokia definitely has to work on this! The system also seems to leak memory.

He sums up with what seems a fair and accurate assessment so far: “Apparently the device isn’t a good replacement for a PDA or a tablet PC, but it does work well for the task it was designed for: browsing the web and sending/receiving emails at public WLAN hotspots (or anywhere else, if paired with a bluetooth-capable cell phone). It yet has to be found out for what else it can be useful, though. :)”

Later that day, he posted an entry with these additional notes:

Damn, the N770 is addictive! After hours of hacking, I finally turned the toy into a “real” computer with a SSH daemon. Now I can log into that thing and work on it from my computer! And the other way round works as well. All this was accomplished without even hacking the user or root passwords. The current way to gain root would involve patching the firmware. But I don’t think that I’m in the need of a root account now that I have fully working SSH access, even sftp with nautilus.

Bye bye, USB cable! There is a better way to exchange files.

What next? Maybe I’ll put a webserver on that beast…

Python is also running on my N770 already, so I can start programming tomorrow.