Maemo has just released flasher utilities for the following:
- Mac OS X
- Linux on Intel x86
- Linux on PowerPC
You can download them here.
Continue reading ‘Nokia 770 Flasher Utility for Mac and Linux Now Available’
Archive for October, 2005
As previously announced, the Maemo team officially releases Maemo 1.1rc5 today.
Hello!
Maemo 1.1rc5 is available now.
The website, repository, everything has been updated so start downloading and happy hacking!
-the maemo team-
Visit the Maemo Dowload page for more information or download Maemo 1.1rc5 now.
Have to point you to this story. One undaunted would-be Nokia 770 user, with “no mentionable honorable open-source projects yet” to his credit (being still in school), went to the Nokia Direct site, searched on Nokia 770 and using a clever technique, managed to put the resulting “Product not found” into a shopping basket and purchase a Nokia 770.
The story, which extends over four blogs in five days at four dots not in a row, details the steps and the excitement experienced by our intrepid hero as he sees his audacity rewarded by the order being taken, his mother’s credit card being charged, shipping confirmation being sent and so on. His hopes rise (and ours with his).
And then, incredibly, the device is delivered to his home! Wow!
Except, except, he wasn’t at home, he was at school, so the delivery wasn’t, um, consummated. And then, as in all such tantalizing dreams, the wish fulfillment recedes. The shipping company recalls the package. An email arrives regretting to inform him that deliveries are restricted to Nokia Developers ordering with a valid code. His order is cancelled. Alas. Hopes fully dashed.
One small consolation: The Nokia rep sending the email advises him that orders will be taken “at the end of November” — at last, a release date to hang our hopes on again! And showing his true colors, Mr. X points Nokia to his blogs so they can fix the bug in their ordering system.
Got to say this is as gripping a true-life tale as I’ve read on the internet in many a day.
Update: If I’m reading the comments correctly, Mr. X (as “named” in the missive posted there from Nokia) identifies himself as Peritus.
I’m not tired yet of reading the first impressions of what the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is like. I guess since I don’t have one yet, this is as close as I can come (especially when they’re accompanied by photos, like those posted by Karoliina).
Here, for instance, is a photo showing the Flash player at work (Bubs at Strongbad):
And here are the first-impressions excerpts from Mike Rowehl at This is Mobility:
First things first. The screen is beautiful. Simply fantastic. That’s the first thing that really hit me about it, and it makes a great first impression. I just wanted to say that up front
Wifi - it rocks, gimme more.
Opera - I was pretty impressed by the implementation. What really blew me away was that the Google Maps stuff worked. You couldn’t grab and drag the map, but if you had a map with embedded controls they worked. And selecting the markers brought up the details bubbles and all that. Very cool. The flash player worked pretty well also, I tried it out with the defacto Strongbad visit.
The video player worked decently well. The support for 3gp seemed a bit spotty though. It would play 3gp from the 6680 well, but 3gp from the treo and other sources on the net didn’t always work. All the videos play just fine on the 6680 however, so I’m sure they’re good. I couldn’t get videos in other formats to work at all. All the videos I tried out work in TCPMP on my Treo, I would expect the player in the 770 to support at least the same level of capability.
Application Installer - Doesn’t. Not sure exactly what was going on here. I tried downloading the Python packages, I tried the INdT apps, and I installed the Maemo SDK and compiled the sample apps for ARM and packaged them. None of that worked. The only packages that installed were from http://770.fs-security.com/. Not sure what the deal with that is. Everything else kicked back with a “the module is already included†error message.
So, definitely some hitches here and there, but even as it is the device is a lot of fun to use.
Update: Karoliina Salminen provided some additional feedback about the release 770:
There have been some improvements on the hardware side too if compared to the earlier prototype I (still) have (that I had with me in Guadec), including clock speed and display improvements.
Update 2: Did I say I like photos? The Nokia 770 site pointed me to a flickr slideshow of 35 photos of a 770, some compared to a Palm T3, the rest showing various applications and menus and such (in French). The photos were posted by fcrozat, to whom we send thanks!
I noticed Tapani Pälli wrote that he was experimenting with TinyGL (an OpenGL subset) and the Nokia 770, and then I saw on his website some game photos and screen captures of a platform game he’s making for Maemo. Here it’s running on a 770:
Nokia Europe has added a Software Update page page letting current Nokia 770 owners update software to the current release. It is recommended that Nokia 770 owners upgrade their device software to the latest version and keep them up to date.
Update: You can download the latest software directly from Maemo.org since aparently, they make available the latest version compared to Nokia Europe.
To check what OS version you currenlty have, you need to tap the 
icon on the task navigator, and select Control panel > Device > About product. To download the update, you need to enter your Nokia 770’s 12-digit product ID located under the battery of the device on the software update page.
The downloadable software updater from Nokia Europe is only for Windows. If you are using a Mac or Linux, you can find instructions on how upgrade Nokia 770 software here and here respectively.
Alberto Garcia Hierro writes that “a lot of people are asking about the X-Chat status.” We’ll take a wild guess and relate that not to our recent report on XChat, the multiplatform chat program, but to devices hitting developers’ mailboxes and their natural interest in the app.
Basically, he says, only two things remain to be done:
- Tweak the ‘Preferences’ dialog to fit in 800×480
- Fix the bug with the channel windows (X-Chat won’t open a new window when you join a channel).
He adds, “The first one is easy to do, but the second one seems a bit more difficult.” The feedback he’s getting indicates when it’s running on the 770, no warning messages are printed. He awaits the arrival of his 770 to solve this bug.
The blog entry notes that the code can be accessed at svn://svn.rm-fr.net/maemo/xchat — is that a typo? Not a protocol I’m familiar with, anyway. svn:// indicating it’s a Subversion repository and must be accessed with a Subversion client, Subversion being a version control system at http://subversion.tigris.org/. Thanks to aflegg for explaining that to me.
Update: The maemo-xchat package is now released! You can download it at http://zeus.rm-fr.net/~skyhusker/maemo. Noted that there are still some problems.
This time it’s Sil53r Surf3r (5=V and 3 is E reversed, so it must be pronounced Silver Surfer) has posted a first impressions report entitled “My own Nokia 770″:
The software that comes with the developer device still has some flaws, but that was to be expected. Localization is perfect, but the video player crashed the OS the first time I tried to access the IceAge2 trailer video clip, and the unit rebooted. … The second time I tried to watch the trailer I got an “unknown file type” error, but it worked afterwards. On testing I’m still getting occasional “unknown file type” errors. The audio player lacks a convenient method to add whole directories for playing, or I was not able to find it, which would mean it might be not intuitive enough. I put some MP3 files on the RS-MMC card and built a playlist by hand. The player seems to forget this list occasionally, however. At least I had to rebuild it three or four times until it kept stable….
I will comment on the hardware tomorrow, as I’d like to do this in detail.
We’ll check back tomorrow and add updates here. BTW, please let us know about any other reports not already noted in Planet Maemo blogs.
Over at Übergizmo we saw an item discussing the shipping of developer devices and the video that Ari Jaaksi posted showing the Nokia 770 in use. Since it referenced an item here at Internet Tablet Talk, as well as one at Portable Gadgets as its source, we’re not clear how they came to use the photo of this shown here mistake this 7710 with our 770 Internet Tablet.
Is this a future look for the Internet Tablet? Or is this a Nokia phone mistakenly picked up? Anyone who knows, please advise.
Update: Cybersystem and Karel Jansens quickly pointed out that this is a photo of a Nokia 7710, which Karel noted is “a smartphone running the Symbian O/S with Nokia’s Series 90 user interface on top. It is both the first and the last of the Series 90 phones, as Nokia has decided to merge it back into its Series 60 interface.”
He adds, reasonably: “Confused? Well, so is the rest of the world…”
The first people obtaining the Nokia 770 are developers, with naturally enough a developer-centric view of this first-of-a-kind Internet Tablet.
In the six days since developer devices have been shipping, we have seen very little reported from the non-developer-centric view.
This being the Internet Tablet Users blog, we fall into this “non-” category. We’ve dived into descriptions so far of how surfing is keen and what it’s like to listen to internet radio and watch video. A couple of lines about email. A couple mentions of the three included games. One reference to the sketching app.
Which means I’ve got a few questions:
What is it like to use the handwriting recognition software? Does the 225-pixel-per-inch resolution make this work better than previous renditions, or is it so-so-results-as-usual? And what about that sketching app? Aren’t there any artistic-inclined developers to show this off? Can an untutored user install an app like Abi Word (aka Maemo Word) or Plucker Viewer? Or games like IceBreaker, Crazy Parking (Rush Hour-like), MaemoSweeper (Mine Sweeper-like), MaemoBlocks (tetris-like)? Or, for goodness sake, Doom? If GNUchess is the engine behind the chess application, can another engine like Crafty be installed? What is that front-end display used in chess? (It doesn’t look like X-Board.) Is it an open-source interface? Can a font simply be copied into the system? Does that mean only by connecting directly to a desktop computer? Or is that something denied the uninitiated user?
I hope some reviewers get devices in their hands soon and can write about these issues (and those games-loving Brazilians!). Maybe some developers will read this note and post some observations about these questions too.
