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.