The Hamptons, where New York City goes to summer, will provide free wireless, according to a
report today in the NY Times. A new Suffolk County WiFi cloud would cover an area 900 square miles in size. Now the walkabout web will encompass sandals and cargo shorts.
The system would allow anyone to use computers and P.D.A. devices with wireless capabilities anywhere in the county, and would also be available to visitors, businesses, government agencies, institutions and groups. …
The potential uses are virtually endless, proponents say. People could flip open a laptop and surf the Web while at the beach, pull over and park to check their route on MapQuest, get a head start on office e-mail while commuting to work on the train or pause on the golf course to track stock prices by glancing at a P.D.A. device.
Think back to some of those smart-alecky remarks about Gee, why wouldn’t I just want to use my laptop? and A PDA has it all! when the Nokia 770 first appeared. They show their naivete now. After all, you can’t surf and cruise on Dune Road without a 770!
I don’t know how long ago this happened, but you no longer have to go pawing through the phone listings to locate the Internet Tablet at Nokia’s website. I guess this must be recognition that enough people are interested in it.
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How much longer till there’s an “s” at the end of that entry, too? I guess I can admit to wanting more than one kind of tablet, in more than one size.
In my version, the new device stays true to the vision of the original. No disk drive. No keyboard. No camera. Only VoIP. Very light weight. Low cost.
However, one of the main principles was it “fits in your pocket,” and I’m willing to change that to “fits in all the places you can carry a trade-paperback book”: book bag, hip bag, purse, backpack, briefcase. Coat pocket.
As I noted in today’s earlier post, I’d like to see a screen about 5.5 inches in size and 1024 pixels wide. Heck, maybe it rotates too. And there would be a Bluetooth thumb-board/keyboard that clips onto it, for times when I really want to carry and use a keyboard. As an accessory, not a required purchase.
License what is needed from Nokia, or partner with them. Run Linux or run Solaris, who cares? And make them in more than one size.
Then push the idea proselytized by Remote User (aka Gene Mosher) of the device as a window on a more powerful computer, where you really run your software.
I guess this is the idea of the diskless computer that was temporarily popular a few years back, but that seems mostly to have been an anti-Microsoft effort. This one will work, because you’re untethering the computer.
The 770 is meant to access the web. (OK, it does many other wonderful things.)
But think about it from the remote control perspective. I want a bigger screen for accessing my desktop. I want maybe 5.5 inches width and 1024 pixels. I’m thinking of this Sun tablet as more a business device than the 770, so I don’t worry about it being larger. Still has to weigh little. Still needs fast, no-cost, open-source OS. No disk drive needed (for obvious reasons). Is more RAM useful in this context?
And low, low cost. Not $1,200 like the first Windows-based UMPC. More like the cost of an iPod.
The point is to sell so many of them so fast that the demand for Sun’s current lines goes up. Oh, sure, that was the idea of the iPod too, that it would feed sales of the Mac and that hasn’t happened. But if you’re going to control a computer remotely, you want it to be optimized for that. And if you’re going to have a lot of people doing this at the same time . . .
Hey, maybe it makes more sense to give these tablets away to sell the bigger devices and service.
Probably, as a consequence of being business-y, I’d package a keyboard with this device, or what some people call a thumb-board. I haven’t used one of these, but as an add-on it makes real sense — only buy one if you’re willing to deal with the added bulk and weight. And need it badly.
I’d also push WiFi clouds heavily in urban areas. You need that to make the walkaround web work for business. I mean, how much of your business occurs away from your desk and even away from an outlet? Must be a lot. How about exploiting that, Jonathan?
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I guess I should add that these tablets benefit greatly from the notion of running apps from a website. But I don’t suggest that that is what makes the device appealing to a company like Sun — much more important would be controlling your own apps from your own server or desktop.
Can Sun do this better than Nokia? I don’t know. But I think they could put a lot more people on the project and use this as a way of building their core business, and promoting their open-source OS, in a more direct fashion than Nokia. And if ever there was a way of realizing the vision that “the network is the computer,” wow this is it.
You know what I’d like to do? Be upstairs monitoring the buggy old HP desktop I’m trying to clean from an unidentifiable infection, and play Battleship with my son as he half-watches a TV show with his sister that he’s seen before. Both of us using 770’s of course (we’re inching ever closer towards that second unit).
Sure, there are lots more interactive two-player games, but we’re partial to Battleship. And playing over a networkagainst each other instead of the computer would be a lot more fun.
I’ve played chess this way, as an add-on in an IM program. That was a little too interactive, too intense, to mix in with work and I dropped it. But Battleship ought to be about perfect. I wonder: Will Gaim take add-ons like this?
A review of the Nokia 770 at The Guardian shows that somebody in the technology press gets it:
If the holy grail of mobile communication is to have all the functions you need on a single device, then the long-awaited Nokia 770, based on the open-source Linux operating system, is a deep puzzle. It lacks a word processor. It doesn’t have a spreadsheet. There is no camera. There is no calendar. It isn’t a personal digital assistant (PDA). And there is even a health warning attached to its calculator, stating that it has “limited accuracy”. Oh, it doesn’t make phone calls, either. Its selling point is that it is an “internet tablet”, one of the first of what may be a new generation of handhelds with instant access to the internet either through a wireless link — at home or in local hotspots such as Starbucks — or with a Bluetooth short-distance wireless link (which most smart phones have).
Just to make sure you know he’s being ironic about its lacks, he spells out what we’ve got here: “As a fast link to the internet, it is the most impressive I have encountered on a mobile device.” The review praises the praiseworthy aspects and lets the weaker aspects be, instead of fixing on them as proof that the 770 is destined to failure. And then Vic Keegan writes about the “oh, I get it” insight we have all experienced:
The more I used this device the more I was impressed with how well it did its limited functions. Once you accept it is a complementary product and not one that is going to replace everything else, then it assumes a life of its own. If you want something that is lying around the house, or by your bedside, for instant use when needed, then this is for you. It could come of age during an era of omnipresent Wi-Fi, enabling anytime, anywhere access to the web for everything from word processing to blogging and video sites.
It seems strange that that acceptance is so hard for some people, especially the know-it-alls who have seen-them-all. The Nokia 770 is not unblemished, but the blemishes are very close to being surface-deep, all reparable and far less significant than the things that Nokia got right.
Were the Nokians prescient in their anticipation of “the cloudburst of web applications we are promised” or just lucky in their timing where predecessors were unlucky? Both, probably, but the biggest thing about being web-prescient is that Nokia is far closer than anyone else to achieving the super-sweet low cost that Keegan uses as a throwaway last line (”At a lower price it would be very tempting”). Six months from now, when the costly UMPC’s will be heavily promoted, the 770 will be well-positioned to benefit from the interest that is aroused. The walkaround web is going to be more and more a necessity in life, and the 770 may ride that wave into a “you’ll never catch me” price advantage.
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. To check what OS version you currenlty have or verify if the update is successful, you need to tap the icon on the task navigator, and select Control panel > Device > About product.
As with the previous updates, there is no included list of changes/fixes. If you notice any drastic improvemements or even minor changes that is worth mentioning, please reply to this thread. Let’s build an unofficial changes/fixes list.
A Google group has been established to discuss FBReader — the world-class e-book reader that runs on the Nokia 770, Linux desktop, Sharp Zaurus and other devices.
The FBReader forum at mobileread.com will continue, but the Google group permits posting in Russian (although the primary language is English).
And I will continue to post matters of interest here, with comments and discussion in our forums also encouraged.
Btw, I understand a new format and a new platform are in the works for FBReader, but I’ll wait till their announcement — or mention in one of these forums — before writing about them here.
In one of the first posts at Google groups, Geometer (aka Nikolay Pultsin, FBReader’s developer) writes:
About platforms: currently I am working [on a] port for GPE
(http://gpe.handhelds.org). In fact, the version for OpenZaurus/GPE is
almost ready, I hope to release it next week. Another device planned to
support in near future is Archos PMA430. (This device runs Qtopia and
is very like to Sharp Zaurus.)
About formats: I plan to add support for OEB and CHM files. And maybe
for OpenReader format.
This is great news — the tools to disassemble encrypted but non-DRMed[*] (or “personalized”) e-books in the Microsoft Reader .lit format are not hard to locate, their result being an OEB package file and the content files. Plunk ’em all into a zip file and add the OPF to FBReader’s library and you’ve got a direct pipeline for thousands of e-books in this very popular format.
And isn’t CHM the most popular format for documentation of Windows-based programs? The universe of content readable in FBReader is about to get very bigger.
[*] I can’t say what they do with DRMed content, because I’ve never owned any such in .lit format.
Nako is a version of the memory game Concentration that runs on the Nokia 770 which Jakub Pavelek coded. Jayne, our six-year-old daughter, loves playing Nako but some of the landscape photo pairs in the default tile set are too similar for her level of observation.
Jakub has worked up a version of Nako which permits you to supply your own images and to switch between different sets. The illustration here shows some of our five-year-old photos of Jayne as well as scenes from her native Cambodia (and the director of the AOA orphanage outside Phnom Penh).
Now the images mean something to her, and even similarly composed pictures of family and friends will be easier for her to distinguish (oh, I’ve got several more tile sets to create before her birthday on Sunday, at least one for each of the last five years — there’ll be lots of images of faces).
Construction of a tile set involves creating a single bitmap 2100 pixels wide by 70 pixels tall, picking and sizing 21 images each 100 pixels wide, and placing them side by side, as you can see below. The BMP image needs to be given a “.tileset” extension and placed in your Images folder for Nako to see it.
Clicking the arrows in Nako’s sidebar switches you between different tile sets. It’s hard to tell from this illustration, but the graphic shown there is the upper left quadrant of the dancer in yellow — the leftmost image in my .tileset file. I’ll probably change the photo in first position with one that has a clearly identiable feature in the upper left.
You can download the new 0.2.0 version of Nako 0.1.11 experimental version of Nako (this version closes if you try to switch to another application) from this page: koti.welho.com/jpavelek/tmp/770/
Helsinki, Finland and London, United Kingdom - Nokia, the world leader in mobile communications and Linksys®, a Division of Cisco Systems, Inc, the recognized leading provider of voice, wireless and networking hardware for the consumer and small business customer today announced a product bundle entitled, "Go wireless at home", which includes the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet bundled with either a Linksys high-speed wireless router or gateway. This convenient and secure wireless Internet bundle has been designed to provide freedom for home users who wish to access the Internet using the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet over Wi-Fi, together with the latest in wireless solutions from Linksys.
Been thinking about what I’d like in the Nokia 770 that fits how I use it.
I guess I’d like a PDA-like thing — instead of just a listening capability, I wish I could record too, to make quick memos to myself. When I’m in transit, especially walking to the train, entering something in Notes can be more trouble than it’s worth.
We know there’s a microphone. I wonder what it would take to make an easy “press this to make a voice memo” application work on the 770? Or port — anything like this already on the Linux desktop?
Update: Well, I guess actually I can use my cell phone to record voice memos, and I carry it around everywhere as well. Am I the only one having trouble wrapping my mind around the notion that Nokia expects PIM functions to be handled in your phone and not the 770? I mean it makes sense, but I’m still not thinking that way . . .
icon on the task navigator, and select Control panel > Device > About product.
From 
