Some specs on the Nokia 770 are underwhelming, especially when compared to devices that cost tons more money or that allocated much less of the overall cost to their markedly inferior screens.

Like any geek, I’d like the CPU to be twice (no, four times!) as powerful with twice (no, eight times!) as much memory. I understand from Marcelo Oliveira that Quake is too big and runs too slowly on the 770 to port. Bigger, faster hardware would solve that.

And several people have noted that when they opened too many browser windows and other apps, things really, really slowed down. Or crashed.

This would seem to be cause for worry. I’m a guy who, on my desktop, usually has forty sites open at the end of the day, in a slew of multiply-tabbed browser windows, and five to ten apps open at a time. And, you know, I want to run GIMP, and maybe GIMP will overwhelm the 770. Beforehand, I had some concern about this.

But you know what? I don’t find the Nokia 770 underpowered. It’s plenty fast for everything I actually do on it.

I’m not running huge spreadsheets or converting video. I’m not compiling programs or doing any of a dozen tasks that require big horsepower. (I’m not running Windows, for one thing, nor using Microsoft Outlook or Internet Explorer, all of which often make me yearn for a more powerful laptop.)

I use the Nokia 770 for reading — websites, e-books, mail. I play games. I adjust things — memos, blog items — created elsewhere, and don’t try to make the 770 my tool for keyboarding. (I went on a trip and I took both my laptop and my 770.) All of these things are just fast. There’s no slow there.

Surfing the web on the 770, I don’t open ten links from a page, but only one additional window and then close it when I’m done. This isn’t how I operate on the desktop but I don’t feel at all limited. I close apps pretty much when I’m done with them, even if I have to open them again ten minutes later — hey, everything launches so fast I don’t really notice it. Apart from the browser, I rarely have more than three or four apps open at once. When I go online, I close all my other apps.

Maybe the physically small size of the screen leads me to focus on one thing at a time. Maybe the fact that I use the 770 for less than an hour at a time — and not eight hours at a time, like my laptop — is why I don’t need to switch apps so much. Maybe the fact that I like to use the full-screen mode, which doesn’t facilitate switching, comes into play.

Whatever it is, the limits don’t really seem to matter. I’ll be glad when future Internet Tablets have more power, but that’s going to make a lot less difference than I used to think.