As noted in a thread here at itT forums and apparently on the #maemo IRC channel, there’s a new firmware image 3.2005.51-13 available for download at the Nokia Europe support pages:
Are e-books mainstream? Despite a small commercial market I think so and so does consumer electronics giant Sony. According to today’s top story in BusinessWeek the company will announce an e-book reader at the Consumer Electronics Show next week. BW wonders, “Can Sony make the iPod of digital books?”
“With everyone from Google to Microsoft to HarperCollins digitizing books, plus the arrival of slick new display technology, Sony figures the time is right for a handheld e-reader in the U.S.,” BusinessWeek says. Since I’ve written about how a Nokia 770 can replace a dedicated e-book reader, this has repercussions for the 770 market I think.
BW compares Sony’s approach to Apple’s iPod/iTune combo because the company will also set up an online store to sell books from major publishers Random House, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins, who have committed to offer tens of thousands of current and backlist titles. (Having worked at Random House and for Simon & Schuster, I can report their efforts at electronifying the books they publish has been going on for six years or longer. There will be plenty of good books for sale.)
Sony’s E Ink-based device will sell for $300 to $500, a price BW compares to a full-size iPod and which I compare to the color-screen Nokia 770. The company’s reluctant nods to openness are to include a PDF reader and to accept standard SD memory cards in addition to its proprietary memory sticks.
The article notes some difficulties — the small commercial market currently, Sony’s “string of recent misses” in digital media, and customer discouragement with the high price and loutish antipiracy technology of Sony’s Japan-only Librie e-book reader. But the big worry according to BusinessWeek is the onslaught of competitors preparing to release their own devices with similar or superior capabilities. At least four additional devices will soon come on the market.
As the company’s rationale, BW quotes JupiterResearch analyst Michael Gartenberg, who says “e-books are an untapped market” that can be compared to the online music market four years, before Apple changed the music business.
Companies expert in this gadget-size space seem already to be keenly aware of Gartenberg’s point, I would say, pointing to the recent announcement by Nokia about e-books on smartphones as evidence. And also to posts inthis blog about the solid user interest in e-books and how well FBReader-on-the-Nokia 770 performs as an e-book reader.
To quote myself, the lassitude we see today in the e-book market is not for want of demand or desire. I think the fact that Sony and four other companies are introducing these specialized devices — they’re not made to surf the web, or play games, or run a word processor, or watch video, or play music, etc. — is confirmation of this unmet demand.
The books sold for Sony’s proprietary e-book reader won’t be able to be read on any other device. Sony will be chopping the price of the new device to half what its Librie is now, yet it will still cost as much or more than a 770 and won’t have any color. Nor can it be used for anything other than reading books. There’s a market for that, likely enough a huge one, but I bet a device that could surf the web AND read books would appeal to even more people. You know, like the 770. And did I mention the 770’s color screen?
The 770 can do more and has greater appeal. And that’s why I say Nokia should include FBReader in its next release and encourage other e-book readers — eReader, Mobipocket, Adobe Reader — to be ported to the 770, so when the e-book market rockets into the stratosphere, the 770 will go along for the ride.
Aaron Levinson has posted to the itT forums about the port of a VNC viewer to the Nokia 770. This, he notes, is different from earlier announcements because “these were strictly builds of the RealVNC vncviewer client and were not GTK/maemo software applications. As such, they lacked certain GTK/maemo amenities, the biggest being no text input methods.”
I can report that his viewer works, text input and all, and the impact is overwhelming. (Some of the text in this report was entered from my 770.)
Above is a screenshot of my Nokia 770 controlling my Windows XP laptop, complete with IM, password-saving program and RealVNC website in Firefox. You can see that Microsoft Outlook is running is well. The screenshot doesn’t do justice to what you see onscreen because of the reduction to fit our column width.
Below is the viewer in full-screen mode with virtual keyboard active. You call it up by pressing the Enter key, in the middle of the scroll keys. Obviously in full-screen mode, with the toolbar removed, considerably more real estate on my Windows machine is visible. (What’s onscreen isn’t the same in the two screenshots because I moved things around to keep my passwords and IM contacts private.)
Time magazine showers kudos on the Nokia 770 in its Persons of the Year issue: “A viable laptop alternative weighing in at 8 ounces, the Nokia 770 tablet packs a powerful punch,” reads its headline over a review by Wilson Rothman.
It’s an online-only review — the Business section’s “gadget of the week” — and not in the print version, the big end-of-the-year issue with Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono on the cover.
Positive even when discussing the 770’s negatives, the review doesn’t reveal any new aspects of the device. Typical sentence: “Web browsing and instant messaging are the two areas that highlight both the strengths and weaknesses of the 770. The browser — from a ‘third party’ — is powerful.”
Rothman falls in the “it replaces a laptop!” camp without complaining that it doesn’t have everything a laptop has — instead he adores its portability: “[The] 770 will do almost everything you’d want a laptop to do…. And at just over 8 ounces, it’s a lot easier to carry around.”
Thanks to Mike Cane for pointing us to this yesterday!
The top of this Internet Tablet Users blog says “This is a blog maintained by Internet Tablet enthusiasts, founded by Mike Cane.” That fudges the truth in several ways — hardly anyone else is contributing to the “users” blog except me, Mike never wrote anything called “internet tablet users blog,” which is a name Reggie Suplido and I came up with, and, most importantly, Mike prefers the forum-type chronology (earliest item first, latest item last) to the blog-type (newest on top) and wouldn’t ever write a blog in a form like this one.
But over at an unnamed Palm site, Mike began writing a blog-style forum thread back in May about the newly announced Nokia 770, one which drew in everyone whose interest had similarly flared. He moved that forum-thread-cum-blog here to itT later in the summer and would be writing it still except that — passionate as he is about the 770 (about everything, apparently) — he was fortunate to discover he wasn’t driven to write the way he always had, a combination of worldwide coverage, offhand remarks and reference to every related development in phones, portables and fantastic gadgets. Nor — this happens — did he have the time to do that anymore.
Two weeks ago, Mike chanced across one of the many 770’s Nokia is seeding among those who will help the device succeed, if it indeed it succeeds (okay, okay: he got one free at a Nokia party; so did everyone else who came) and things haven’t been the same since.
Mike started writing about his experiences, in the form he prefers most, a thread here in the forums at Internet Tablet Talk. It’s called Mike Cane’s Live 770 Blog, and it bears all the unmistakable Mike Cane imprints — great enthusiasm, disdain and information no one else has uncovered, with miminally annotated links. The detailed exploration revealed in his seminal review of the 770 shows up here too.
We may see a Mike Cane review of the 770 — events have precluded this till recently — in future. We’ll keep our fingers crossed. But this is for those 770 users who don’t yet know about this font of information — start at Day 1 and hold onto your hat!
Nokia and CompUSA released a press release today announcing that CompUSA will be selling the most advanced Nokia devices. Termed as "Nokia Experience @ CompUSA", CompUSA is now displaying and selling the Nokia N90 mobile flip phone with an integrated 2-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens, the Nokia 6682 with a 1.3-megapixel camera, and of course, our most loved Nokia 770. Two hundred CompUSA locations now carry these Nokia products. All other CompUSA locations will have them by Febuary, 2006.
For those who received a Nokia 770 for the holiday, have a happy one! And for those who are still waiting, you’ll be getting a special holiday very soon just for yourself!
And thanks to all those at Nokia who have give us such a wonderful present!
Here’s a present in the holiday spirit — etrunko has released Gnumeric for the Nokia 770. Info about the release and how to install (and a pointer to evince) are at his website, (void *).
A Nokia press release on mobility notes that “while employees may be in the office, they may spend more than a third of their time away from their desks.”
This, of course, echoes the noteworthy Bill Gates argument that workers really need an auxiliary, ultra-mobile device that is “complementary to their PC, and [in which they] have all their states, the same applications, [which they are] able to carry that around, … that’s very attractive.” What’s needed, he says, is a way for people to get at information easily, with such portable devices being extremely practical.
Of course, that’s what is already here with the Nokia 770, if you change it into a business device, rather than just a web one. Or use it as a remote controller, an “auxiliary display” Gates calls it, of your desktop.
Seems to me this is the opening salvo in the Nokia 770 business-use case, or for one of the 770’s successors as the Internet Tablet splits into home and business camps.
Nokia and CompUSA released a press release today announcing that CompUSA will be selling the most advanced Nokia devices. Termed as "Nokia Experience @ CompUSA", CompUSA is now displaying and selling the Nokia N90 mobile flip phone with an integrated 2-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens, the Nokia 6682 with a 1.3-megapixel camera, and of course, our most loved Nokia 770. Two hundred CompUSA locations now carry these Nokia products. All other CompUSA locations will have them by Febuary, 2006.
