This is not one of my major uses — in fact, beyond watching the Ice Age 2 trailer, I haven’t tested any video at all. But I can see both that there is some real potential here and that the Nokia 770 isn’t as as optimized as some of the devices with smaller screens.
Before playing, he notes, there is a delay before the playback begins, proportionate to the length of the movie and ranging in his limited experience from 10-15 second for a half-hour show, 25 seconds for a one-hour movie and 45 seconds for a close-to-two-hour movie.
He concludes: “It is not that difficult, but you need a decent computer for doing the encoding, as it does take some resources.”
(A newer post, Nokia 770 Crashes, details four inexplicable crashes just after reboot. Location problem? “I have used it in that spot before.” Spooky.)
When I was looking at Joe as a text editor, I saw all the keyboard shortcuts use the <ctrl> key. Hey, there’s no <ctrl> key on my Nokia 770’s virtual keyboard!
So I wondered if there is any way to effect changes to the virtual keyboard because there are many missing keys — not just the <ctrl> key but also the <alt> key and the function keys (I’ve been wanting to try F11 with Opera on certain pages).
More than that, since the keyboard is virtual, I was wondering if it is possible to customize it at all.
For instance, I use the hyphen a lot more than I do the exclamation mark and would gladly exchange their relative positions. And where is the em dash?
I’ve got to believe this is something that should be available in a configuration file.
The screen capture above — of the Washington Post comics page showing today’s version of Mutts by Patrick McDonnell — doesn’t seem out of the ordinary. I took the screenshot on a Windows XP machine using Opera 8.
Now take a look at the capture below, of the same page and comic strip, taken a couple minutes earlier. This time, of course, the screen capture shows Opera running on a Nokia 770. Significant difference: no comic. Instead a box appears that reads: “Content Currently Unavailable / No referrer”.
What’s the problem here? The image is a simple gif, and other gifs of comics on the same page display without hesitation. Mutts is not the only strip that brings up the “No referrer” message. The Piranha Club, Zits, Sally Forth and Baby Blues among others show the same message. The different comic strips on the page are acquired from different syndicates — Mutts is provided by King Features — and as it happens, all the problematical strips are from the same syndicate.
What does Nokia’s Opera fail to do that the desktop Opera doesn’t? Why don’t these comic strips display? Is King asking for something from the browser that Nokia’s Opera fails to provide? Any explanations out there?
Based on the suggestions we have received from members and guests, Internet Tablet Talk is happy to announce two new features that have been added to the site:
Software Section A lot have been asking about what software are currently available for the Nokia 770 and only the Maemo Application Catalog maintains such a list. Internet Tablet Talk would like to take it a step further and added a software section to let developers and software companies list their software for free.
Software are classified based on categories. Each listing contain the description of the application, version, change log, author, direct link to the website, total downloads, and upload up to four images. Internet Tablet Talk members can search, rate, as well as post replies to the application.
Right now, we only allow the primary developers to post their applications to the Software Section. This is to let them modify the description, change log, and version, when releasing an update of their software.
If you know any developer who is creating or porting an application to the Maemo platform, please inform them of the new Software Section as an alternative place to post their application to inform the Maemo community.
How-to, Tips and Tricks Wiki Section Several members who have received their Nokia 770 have started posting a lot of how-to’s, tips and tricks in the forums, as well as their own blogs and websites, and other wikis. Internet Tablet Talk feels that these kinds of information are really helpful for the community and thus would like to collect all of these how-to’s, tips and tricks in the Wiki Section.
The Wiki Section is a collaborative tool that lets members create how-to’s, tips, and tricks that other members can correct, modify, and improve which, in the log run, provide a more concise and hopefully, easier to understand set of instructions for the community.
If you have figured out something on the Nokia 770 which is not found in the documentation or the documentation fails to explain properly, please don’t hesitate to add them as a Wiki. Visit the Wiki Section now.
For those who haven’t been to the Maemo Application Catalog page, below is the list of applications that are ‘install ready’ for the Nokia 770. Note however that while these applications are available for download, not all are final versions.
Bluetooth keyboard plugin - a Maemo desktop status bar plugin that allows you to connect a Bluetooth keyboard to the Nokia 770.
Bluetooth xfer - a simple UI utility to OBEX send/receive files from/to n770
Bluetooth OBEX server - OBEX push/pull and ftp (folder listing, etc…) server. It allows you to send, receive and browse the files on your 770 from your desktop. Also if you install the desktop version (for the Linux people) you can browse and download files on your desktop from your 770 (just tell the 770 your desktop is a phone and you will be able to browse it via the builtin filemanager).
Crimson Fields - a tactical game in the style of Battle Isle.
X Terminal Emulator - an X terminal emulator for Maemo. Applications under this subsection do not have a Graphical user interface, but are instead designed to be used under xterm.
Plucker Viewer - an offline Web and e-book viewer for PalmOS® based handheld devices and PDAs. Plucker comes with Unix, Linux Windows and Mac OSX tools, scripts, and conduits that let you decide exactly what part of the World Wide Web you’d like to download onto your PDA (as long as they’re in standard HTML or text format). These web pages are then processed, compressed, and transferred to the PDA for viewing by the Plucker viewer.
GPE PIM suite -GPE is not a single piece of software, but an entire environment of components which make it possible to use your GNU/Linux handheld for standard tasks such as Personal Information Management (PIM). Downloads are available for GPE-Todo and GPE-Contacts.
GPE-mini-browser - GPE-mini-browser is a gtk-webcore based web-browser aimed at handheld devices. It tries to use the maximal screen estate, minimize memory usage (both RAM and Flash) thus making it usable for small devices.
ScummVM - a program which allows you to run certain classic graphical point-and-click adventure games, provided you already have their data files. The clever part about this: ScummVM just replaces the executables shipped with the game, allowing you to play them on systems for which they were never designed!
PLCreator - finds mp3 files on your 770 and creates a playlist for them.
AbiWord - a free word processing program similar to Microsoft® Word.
Nako - native Nokia 770 memory game. Install and play.
CPU/Mem load applet - status bar plugin showing the CPU load and memory usage. Has also a menu for taking of screenshots. In future should allow for process killing, etc
Ogg Vorbis Player - a simple player for music files in Ogg Vorbis format. The user interface is quite spartanic but will be enhanced soon.
This picture of the Plucker Viewer running on the Nokia 770 probably doesn’t look all that exciting, since it merely shows solid text in the application area of the screen. But it is exciting, because it shows the largest, most readable display for reading text ever in the under-ten-ounce/handheld category. What we see here is very exciting for readers because it makes electronic texts vastly more readable and coming close to the number of words displayed on a paperback page. (And of course the full-screen mode shows even more text.)
OK, “coming close” means approaching the 50 percent mark. But it’s also on a general-purpose machine, not dedicated-ebook reading device, thus allowing the 770 purchaser to allocate the expense across a number of uses.
I’ll be providing a fuller report on Plucker Viewer on the Nokia 770 soon, as well as future reports on FBReader when it comes out and on reading books online. Until then, you can see some of the screen captures I’ve been making at Plucker Viewer on Nokia 770.
Thanks should be proffered to Bill Janssen for his GTK+ version of Plucker Viewer and to Nils Faerber of Kernel Concepts for the Maemo port. Instructions on using Plucker Viewer and for operating the Plucker distiller are included in the partily outdated online tutorial, Making eBooks for the Nokia 770 in Plucker.
Let me draw an analogy here. Motorola has been making mobile phones since, oh, about 30 years ago. They finally made one that they can’t manufacture enough of — the RAZR. They’re a reborn company today as a result of that achievement. Many, many companies have been making handheld devices for many years, too, starting at least as far back as the Apple Newton.
Nokia has finally made a handheld that they can’t manufacture enough of — the 770. Nokia is about to be catapulted to the top of the wireless mobile device market — a market that could dwarf the PC desktop market.
I hope Nokia is having a weekend meeting now, an emergency meeting to figure out how to rapidly make a LOT of 770’s (with the new OMAP 2420, of course), how to not screw up their achievement by being unable to make enough of these devices before their competition sees the opportunity of Nokia’s manufacturing contract group with their pants down around their ankles.
• • •
We cited Cellnn on Wednesday, quoting a couple analysts who were doubtful about the chances of the Nokia 770. But today the site includes it with “the new iPod,” the Xbox 360 and Panasonic plasma televisions and such in its holiday gift-giving guide of electronic goodies “you should definitely try to check out”:
The Nokia 770 Internet tablet: The essential purpose of this device is to give users fast access to all kinds of Web content without actually having to whip out a laptop. It features a stylus and a decent-sized touch screen, so your hands and eyes will thank you. Aside from just checking e-mail, you can download and watch videos as well as listen to Web radio. The “Internet tablet†category is still relatively undeveloped, but this device has received acclaim from many industry critics. The tablet will cost $350, and is available online at www.nokiausa.com.
There’s too much to quote here (6 screens’ worth), but I’ll quote this paragraph about the handwriting-recognition software:
The other major disappointment is the handwriting recognition. The thing this most reminds me of is the imp in a Terry Pratchett novel which, when asked to demonstrate its handwriting-recognition feature, exclaims ‘Yes, that’s handwriting all right.’ It is certainly capable of determining that you have entered some letters, but telling what they are seems beyond its capability. I handed it around [to] a few people to see if it was just my — admittedly poor — handwriting it was having problems with, but it seemed to be a universal failing. Hopefully this will be improved on in a future firmware release.
A few quibbles with the review — he’s mistakenly identified the browser as being the future version derived from Apple’s Webcore instead of the current Opera. Of course, I don’t recall that you can get an identifier on the browser from the 770 itself. And he faults a port of GAIM for being “somewhat unpolished” but neglects to identify which port that is, there being at least two so far (and both, of course, third-party, not official Nokia).
One surprising note is contained in the discussion about the limited memory and how it copes with having too many apps open (especially browser windows): “Launching the browser uses up another 12MB, and loading a reasonable-sized page can take this up to 20MB or so. A couple of browser windows and a PDF viewer later, the device has slowed to a crawl. Task switching can take several minutes.” I haven’t had that experience, but I’m surprised anyone would stomach such a delay (and also that it didn’t seem to affect the rating all that much).
Not sure there’s much in the review to surprise anyone who’s been following the 770, but it should be very useful, especially in its completeness, to those who have only just begun to look into purchasing it. He provides an overall introduction and then looks into each of these aspects separately, discussing what he found, noting his expectations and assessing each: usability, connectivity, hardware, input methods and applications.
His conclusion:
Overall: The most important functions of an Internet Tablet work well. The rest should improve with future firmware updates. Some parts of the software still feel a bit like beta releases, but the hardware seems solid and ergonomic. 7/10.
Still, I don’t see that Chiswell really gets into what makes the 770 different from other devices, either in its conception or capabilities, and although he talks twice about using free apps available because of its streamlined porting path, he alludes to this insuperable advantage only obliquely. I already spend as much time in free, outside-supplied apps as I do in the Nokia-supplied ones, and that’s with the tablet in developer hands only a few weeks.
I took this screen capture of my desktop a few minutes ago, using the CPU/Mem load applet from Jakub Pavelek. (Of course it’s 800 pixels wide in the original, without a border, and I’ve reduced it to 500 pixels. As you can see, I personalized my desktop by pointing to a photo of my kids rather than one of the default images.)
This screenshot taker is really easy to use, and to install. Apparently an earlier version was buggy, but this version works fine for me.
Once it’s on your 770 (I put downloads on my MMC card), use the Application Installer control panel to install the app. Then restart your 770.
A new double-icon now appears in your Status Indicator Area (that’s the right half of the top bar on your screen). The icon, btw, is the other aspect of this tool, representing the cpu-load and memory usage. Clicking the icon brings up a one-item menu to take a snapshot. The screen capture is stored in your Images folder as a .png file (and automatically named — in this case screenshot00.png).
This is a really useful tool right now, while there’s so much going on in 770 development and people need to show what apps look like to explain their use (for instance, with these three recent posts on Evince, remote X sessions and accessing your PC via the web).
Thanks, Jakub, for getting us over the hump on this issue.
And thanks to SillYcoNe for reminding us to try it!
He acknowledges the work isn’t complete, with these known problems:
* The application does not respond to 770 special buttons, like Fullscreen, Zoom In and Zoom out.
* Find toolbar does not work.
* Include some pixmaps for actions like fullscreen and rotate right/left.
Evince promises to be faster than the PDF viewer currently on the 770. As you can see from the photos at (void *), although Fullscreen and zooming keys don’t work, they are available through the menu.
