In his blog-style forum thread, Mike Cane’s Live 770 blog, Mike sent me careering down computer memory lane back to a couple notepads I owned back in 1983 and ‘84, which no one has ever heard of — a Convergent Technologies Workslate (pictured above) and a Sord IS-11. Convergent was a high-flying startup that managed to burn through all its VC money and go broke in a period of two years; Sord was a Japanese computer company that didn’t make it in the U.S. with its first efforts and then gave up.
Both computers had small LCD screens, full-sze keyboards and microcassette storage. The Sord was pretty much a word-processing device. The Workslate was sort of a dedicated spreadsheet computer — all its apps used an underlying row-column cell structure. That made sense for its core spreadsheet app and the financial calculator and even the phone book. It made for odd text files though. It was intended for travel all the way and included a built-in modem; you could even use the tape drive for recording voice memos.
The Workslate had serious design flaws — not only could you not extend the RAM, you couldn’t extend the apps either: it couldn’t load any apps at all except those few sorta-spreadsheet adaptations. But it was sleekly designed, rich black with striking round-topped keys that lacked the natural utility of normal concave key tops. Convergent must have designed it for businesspeople who didn’t want to learn how to use a computer, as though that were a growing instead of shrinking market back then. The Workslate reminds me actually of this year’s Sony Reader, another one-trick pony hoping that a single-use computer can win people over by its good looks alone.
I haven’t thought of the Workslate in years. Must be a reason for that, I guess. I read today that only 5,000 or so were sold.
Now the Nokia 770 has a 180-degree different attitude towards things than the Workslate. Instead of “our software or none” (actually almost the same thing), Nokia has labored hard to make the device friendly for others to bring software to it. Instead of a sky-high price, the 770 has jettisoned irrelevant features to keep the device affordable.
And instead of trying to replace full-computing with a limited-capability handheld, the 770 is designed to complement your other computers and do what they have problems doing — fit in your pocket to carry anywhere, instant-on so that a one-minute computer session is possible (I’ve done it, to answer a question at dinner), and grab email and browse the web effortlessly (well, that’s what PDA’s have trouble doing; also, I’m thinking how easy it is to get to the web by pairing with a Bluetooth phone).
Back in November, I wrote about visiting a page that didn’t display a graphic — OK it was the Washington Post comics page — and wondered what was up. One of the cleverer users of the Nokia 770 responded that Opera wasn’t using the “HTTP_REFERER header in HTTP requests.” (Here’s a screen capture showing the comics page in Opera on the 770 without the Mutts comic.)
I stopped visiting the Washington Post comics page with the 770.
Until a couple days ago. Then I discovered this problem had been silently fixed (the evidence is below).
Wonderful as it is, the Nokia 770 does have limitations, storage being one of those that pinch you earliest. One thing you can do is add a larger RS-MMC card. That enables you to keep big files on your device, but you can’t put the really big ones into the MyDocs directory, and you can easily fill that up.
At the Maemo Wiki is a new page called “How to upgrade the internal memory by extending the root filesystem to a memory card” at maemo.org/maemowiki/ExtendedRootFilesystem.
I’m not pointing out anything new to those who saw reference to this at Planet Maemo in the blog recently added there, Wolfram Ravenwolf blog which is written by Stefan Daniel Schwarz.
He also pointed to the wiki page in a thread here at itT forums, with the same title.
In the wiki page, he describes how to repartition and reformat a (larger) RS-MMC card and then move files to a second partition. He suggests moving “the root and user home directories onto the memory card (/root and /home/user) as well as user data like bookmarks (/usr/share/osso-bookmarks), settings (/etc/bluetooth/name, /var/lib/gconf, and /etc/osso-af-init/locale), even installed programs (/var/lib/install),” depending on the size of your new partition.
Explaining that this has the memory card’s new partition mounted at /Root, he adds, “We can move anything in there, and it is swapped out of the internal memory and onto the memory card. We then create a symbolic link in the internal memory which points to the file located on the memory card. To the device, it looks like nothing has changed, but now you can store everything you want on the memory card….
“Specifically, this frees up internal memory, which you will see in the control panel.”
And all those files can be in MyDocs and its child folders, Documents, Images, Audio Clips and Video Clips.
In my own case, I ordered a 1 GB Kingston DV RS-MMC card last week (UPS says they’ll deliver tomorrow), and that will give me enough space to implement this. No more deciding which files I put on MMC and which ones in Documents for me. Now that I think about it, this should allow me to install more applications, including some of the ones I’ll use infrequently.
At the same time, I will likely create a swap file in this partition too, which people have reported makes their system run more stably and faster. The itT FAQ page on swap cites Andy Diller writing at The Synching Apple as the originator of this notion (the initial post there points to a comment in the Maemo Users list about enabling swap). A thread here at itT forums, “Swap space on RSMMC card?“, contains more material on this.
Addendum on buying a bigger MMC card — and a BT keyboard I’ve gotten along fine for three months without a larger MMC card and without a Bluetooth keyboard. Why buy them now? Well, I wanted to stick some songs on the 770 for offline traveling and to try out some video, and that seemed to justify the big card. The keyboard I got hasn’t come into play much so far, confirming my first analysis that I could live without it. Having it for the one or two occasions a month when I’m entering a lot of material is probably not necessary, but my wife wants it for daily email entry — and her emails tend to be long — so we bought it.
So I was willing to pay another $150 (in my case) for these extras. Should they be built in and the price raised that much? That’s a question for another day.
Chainsaw76 (aka Jason) has hacked Google maps for the screen of the Nokia 770 — width, proportion and sized so they fit perfectly at 150-percent enlargement (so you can actually see what’s there).
Right now, you can enter city, state and/or street address. Or latitude and longitude. In the US version at least, you can zoom, drag-pan or click the direction areas to move the center of the map. And, as shown above and below, you can view the map, the satellite image or a hybrid that adds names to towns, major streets and such.
Jason posted this information at itT on Tuesday and has been updating steadily since (hack and info).
Slipped by us when it appeared a couple days ago, but CNET has reviewed the Nokia 770.
Like others before him, CNET’s reviewer expressed disappointment that the 770’s performance didn’t match that of a bigger, faster, considerably heavier and more-expensive notebook computer, saying, “The Nokia 770 suffers from extremely sluggish operation, with most movies and Flash animations too slow to be useful.”
The reviewer then wanted the 770 to replace PDA’s, deciding it was too big. Ultimately, his inability to see the revolutionary aspects of the device led to a “mediocre” rating.
After reading the review, I wrote my own “user opinion” (which is how they characterize comments at CNET). What’s disappointing is that there are so many negative comments there from people who never used the device, written before it was released. I hope readers of this blog and the itT forums will chime in with their own positive remarks there.
Kallisys’ Paul Guyot, who ported Einstein on the Zaurus, has also successfully created a version for the Maemo platform, which runs on the Nokia 770. Andy Diller was lucky enough to try it out on his 770 and posted some pictures.
Interestingly, Paul just released another version of Einstein, this time for the Pepper Pad. Some pics here, courtesy of Victor Rehorst.
We anticipate with some eagerness Nokia’s inclusion of VoIP capabilities in the 770. More than once, users have wanted to know about using Skype on the 770, Skype having by far the largest number of internet telephonists.
If someone knows whether using Skype will be possible come the Q2 upgrade, please let us know.
Until that time and in lieu of waiting, a port of the Skype software to the 770 was also proposed long ago. Of course, wiser, more experienced heads responded that this wasn’t something open-source endeavors could accomplish, since porting their proprietary software would depend on Skype (or its parent, eBay) doing this.
Recently I found myself on the Skype site and learned that Skype has in fact ported the internet telephony software to Ubuntu, Mepis and other Debian Linux distributions (as well as SuSE, Fedora and Mandriva). Debian, eh? I posted a forum request — Port Skype to the Nokia 770! — and learned in return one salient detail: Skype for Linux uses the QT 3.2 (and not the GTK+) toolkit.
Don’t know how much difficulty it would be for such a port, but it seems like a case of two steps forward and one step back. Only thing I can suggest is to visit the Skype forums and post your own requests if you want it too.
If it’s needed, that is. What exactly is being promised as far as VoIP with the upgrade?
I haven’t been following the Maemo developer list for several weeks now, but when I looked today I saw a message from Xavier Calbet with this note:
I have successfully installed PDL with only the plplot library (which is enough for most purposes). Which implicitly implies installing perl too.
I’d be interested to learn the specifics of what perl installation required (PDL being the Perl Data Language, btw). Added later: A few details on this actually appeared earlier in the month.
And I wonder what would be required to install ruby.
Last week, on his blog ThoughtFix posted a list of “ten simple changes Nokia can implement to improve the 770 tablet.”
I like this list, and the first improvements identified would top my own similar list.
(I won’t even mention adding the FBReader e-book reading application, btw. To me that transcends this kind of list. It makes complete Nokia’s vision of internet communication to my thinking, while these items make it easier to use and more practical.)
ThoughtFix’s list:
Enable sudo gainroot by default. Just don’t include xterm. It’ll help the power-users.
Enable USB host mode by default and toggle it with a control panel setting. It’ll help 3rd party hardware accessory developers.
Add a control panel applet for swap creation on RS-MMC cards. Even 16M swap makes a big difference.
Include the bluetooth keyboard driver by default which works properly with popular brands.
At this point ThoughtFix (aka Daniel G) and I begin to diverge as to what improvements should make the top ten list (all of his are worthwhile and I agree with them all). Where ThoughtFix mentions being able to modify the behavior of the directional keypad, I would ask for easy modification of the virtual keyboard. For instance, I’d like to be able to replace the equals sign with the hyphen. Maybe others would make the number keypad like a computer keyboard’s rather than a phone’s.
- I would like an easy way to add/install fonts to my system. Maybe it sounds odd, but sometimes I need Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nokia Sans is a wonderful font for reading, too, yet I have a couple other favorites I use in FBReader.
- And I would like to move some of my added applications into the Games and Utilities folders.
- While this might not be a simple change, I do wish there were an uninstall option for some of the built-in apps. If at one point I use an alternate browser, email app and pdf viewer, should I really have to carry around the extra baggage?
- And how about making the Documents, Images, Video Clips and Audio Clips folders accessible to the desktop computer when the 770 is connected by USB?
The last item on ThoughtFix’s list is:
Modify the firmware so software can wake the device from sleep to sound alarms, thereby making it possible for developers to build in PDA functions.
Given that “sleep” isn’t sleep at all, but merely “turn off the display and break WiFi and Bluetooth connections,” maybe the obstacles to this suggestion are small. It sure would be nice if the once-planned alarm clock/alert were to be resurrected.
I’ve followed the implicit restriction ThoughtFix placed on this list — not to suggest improvements in specific applications or hardware, but in the overall system operation. And note the title: “Ten simple changes.” Any better suggestions?
Kallisys’ Paul Guyot
