Remember what it was like last year? People talked about a portable internet device and you had to imagine what it would really be like.
Sure, this was before the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet came out. But people were putting the Sony PSP in this category, and the OQO and there was talk of Windows and Macintosh tablets and there was the PepperPad. And announcements for devices like the Sony Reader and iLiad iRex and such appeared, and people wondered about PDAs fitting in here.
So: think back a bit. Imagine that portable internet device to come.
Imagine you could play songs and videos off the internet, or that were stored on its internal memory.
And you could play games.
Of course, you’d want your portable device to be lightweight (say, a half-pound).
And fit in your pocket.
Since it’s portable and you’re carrying it around everywhere, you’d like this device to fill in the gap when you don’t want to surf.
You’d like to be able to IM your friends (without a per-message charge) and, heck, call them too. For free.
You’d like to use it to read, especially when you’re just sitting around. Like “on the throne.”
And you’d like access to all your information — email, documents, pictures, spreadsheets, whatever — so you’d like your internet device to run other computer programs, just like your regular computer.
Heck, for that matter, since it’s a small device and obviously limited, you’d like to be able to use it to control your main computer and serve as a window on apps running there.
You know what? I’m still thinking about the Nokia 770.
Somewhere along the line — surfing, size, general capabilities — all the other contenders fell away.
Can’t surf satisfactorily on a PDA. Can’t run apps on your e-Ink device. Can’t carry your UMPC in your pocket (does “UM” really stand for “ultra-mobile”? for who exactly, Shaqille O’Neal?).
Now what kind of genius enabled Nokia to build this 8 months before the earliest competitor and for hundreds of dollars less?
Smaller size and lighter weight than UMPCs. Bigger screen and more versatile than Palms and PocketPCs. Multi-functioned unlike e-Ink readers. Open sourced. Available. Affordable.
Gosh, don’t you love it when you get what you asked for?
It was one year ago today that Nokia announced the Internet Tablet at LinuxWorld Expo in New York.
From the beginning there has been a lot of excitement for what the Nokia 770 is and portends. And there’s been a lot of disappointment and dismissal of the Nokia 770 for what it’s not.
But think about it. No other company has been able to get out a device that is this portable and this powerful, that has an 800-pixel-wide display and that also sells for anywhere close to the 770’s price.
For everything that the 770 can do and for what it will be able to do, I’m really grateful that the Nokia developers made so many correct choices in designing this computer.
Thanks, everyone! Congratulations on your one-year anniversary!
Ari Jaaksi’s post in his blog got me to read his Linux World presentation, where I saw an interesting statement on slide 14 about how Armin Warda had added swap to Jakub Pavelek’s applet for controlling memory and taking screenshots. And that “What this is for Nokia [is] something we could productize. However we must ensure that it will not break hardware, and that it is easy to use, etc.”
And next to the screen capture shown here was also a capture of the X Terminal app.
Am I reading this right to say that Nokia is definitely including swap (and screen capture and X Terminal) in the OS 2006?
* * *
Well that made me want to go and read the roadmap at maemo.org that Ari mentioned.
I’m sure I’ve seen/heard of this before, but it looks very different than I seem to recall. I can’t say whether I saw an earlier version or have a bad memory.
(And the one at maemo.org is dated today. Is it really from today, or is that just an artifact of the way maemo.org presents things?)
Anway, the roadmap says the Farsight audio/video conferencing framework will be included, as well as support for python development within the Maemo SDK. We’ve heard that real package management will be included, but I hadn’t realized that every Application Installer app that works in the current version will break and in fact that every third-party app will have to be recompiled because of the “new EABI toolchain.” (OK, I don’t know what that is, but then I’m a user, not a developer.) I hope this means that OS 2006 will be available to the developers in advance of our user release.
So what have we got?
Video conferencing. OK, cool.
Python — faster development of brand new 770 specific apps, yes?
apt/dpkg — more and greater automation in bringing apps to the 770, yes?
gtkhmtl — support for html within apps? Especially those new ones I’m theorizing about?
There’s more.
The roadmap also includes such enticing items in the “To-do List for future unannounced releases” as x86 multimedia development support and support for full x86 device virtualization. That sounds so tremendously wonderful I have to stop myself and acknowledge I don’t really know what it portends. But it’s got to be good news! I think. As does the last item on the page: “Enable other languages beside C for writing UI applications (Python, Java, C++ binding for Hildon widget set).” I really think that one essential for the growth of the Internet Tablet platform is that it becomes a great place to develop new apps and that consequently other companies use Hildon or something derived from it for their own tablets.
Bill McCloy works at Adobe and writes in his blog about this headline and first paragraph of a Wall Street Journal article:
Gadget Makers Offer Features to Improve ‘Readability’;
‘The Da Vinci Code’ on a Treo
Chris Kwak, a 31-year-old financial analyst, spends hours a day glued to the tiny screen of his Palm Treo hand-held computer. He fires off emails, check stock prices — and recently plowed through the novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’.
So here we have reading an eBook matter-of-factly included, along with emailing and information retrieval, as a basic user behavior (!). While this surely doesn’t track to typical current usage, it’s yet another signal that eReading is, directionally, becoming a mainstream activity.
So this is more evidence accruing that e-reading is mainstream. Shouldn’t Nokia consider e-books as central an activity on the Nokia 770 as, say, Mahjong? The next release should include FBReader as part of the base system, I think.
The previous post in this blog, Let’s re-evaluate the 770’s chances in the market, was written and posted to the itT forums by cobalt and promoted later to the users blog to give it wider exposure. I wanted to make note of that, because Planet Maemo didn’t pick up the line about the different author.
Hopefully many other it Forum contributors will make posts that are also posted to the blog.
IMO, from the standpoint of the US market, I think the 770 looks like it could be reasonably successful. However, it’s hard to know what Nokia’s expectations of the 770s “re-release” are without knowing how much they have put into its development.
After looking into subnnotebook PCs, tablet PCs, UMPCs, Sony’s ultrasomething PC, and PDA communicators, IMO, the 770 still has no direct competitors. Unless I’m mistaken, any other way of surfing the web on an 800×480 or higher res screen always involves a full OS PC that costs around $1000 (UMPC) to $2000 (dualcor cPc). The Nokia 9300 phone is an exception, and costs $500 or so.
The new Sony micro PC comes closest to delivering similar functions as the 770 in a desirable form factor at a similar size. $1400 difference is a lot of money. However, the 770 is a more limited device, in a way that directly affects the desirability of the 770. So, for instance, many people are commited to other IM networks, and a lot of people don’t use gmail or other google services. As a networking device, if the 770 is going to take off in the consumer market, it will have to mean that whole networks of people will buy into the 770 and Google Talk.
The more I think about it, the more I think it could make sense for me to buy 770s for my friends and family - when I hit the lottery. But really, let’s say you want to stay in touch with someone, anywhere really, either in the same city or traveling around the technological (networked) world. The 770 is a pretty slick device that gets the job done with enough generic functions to make it a good individual tool as well.
I think the itT forum represents a mix of people, some of whom are learning how to customize the 770, and some who are using the built in functions and are more representative of the general consumer market. I’m in the latter camp. So I’d be curious what other people thought about this.
I like using Google’s gmail and I usually email files from my Nokia 770 to my main computer rather than connect the two devices directly. Don’t know why, just seems easier.
But emailing files the other direction is a real problem in Opera. If the attachment is a text or html file, Opera wants to open it rather than save it when I click on the “download” link.
I hope that the collaboration between Nokia and Google leads to Google slightly redesigning its pages for the 800×480 screen and to making “download” a button rather than a link.
We know now that the 2006 OS will come with at least one new application pre-installed — Google Talk, with its instant messaging and VoIP phone capabilities.
Since Nokia has been promising IM and VoIP by mid-2006 for 51 weeks (hey! one more week till the announcement anniversary!), we knew this was coming.
I wonder if there will be any other pre-installed applications? Maybe FBReader, the world-class e-reader, for instance. We know that the 770 is an ideal e-book reader and that e-books are becoming more significant.
Or maybe there will be some additional games — Nako, Battlegweled and IceBreaker seem obvious candidates. Maybe a sturdy text editor to supplement Notes. Or built-in XTerm and CPU/MEM load graph. I would add PIM apps to this list, if there were any such available. I’m not envisioning the Nokia developers creating new apps with so much already on their plate.
I’ve definitely made my opinion known that FBReader is a natural application for the Nokia 770. But maybe not everyone agrees. RemoteUser (aka Gene Mosher) believes in the 770 as a remote control device. A whole crowd is making it a mapping/GPS displaying device. Not to mention others developing its audio and video playing side.
If Nokia isn’t going to pre-install all of these apps, and is wary of picking only one or another of them, I hope Ari Jaaksi and his crew provide a good clean automatic way to install and update them that even a rank beginner will be able to follow, as they’ve hinted will happen. If there are “click to install” links to add some of these apps, that will be the next thing to “pre-installed.”
In the hoohaw about the Google/Nokia collaboration, I ran across a peripheral mention to a discussion area dedicated to the Nokia 770 at LinuxDevices.com. Poking further, I learned that this was created back in February, so this is old news, I guess.
While I find the Internet Tablet Talk forums so active I can’t follow everything, it’s good to know that other venues have sprung up to discuss our favorite walkaround-web device. It reminds me of different areas in New York where competitors are all located together — the Diamond District on 46th Street, the Flower District in Chelsea and so on — and the proximity brings more people to the area, benefitting all the companies located there. I used to live on 6th Street, where there were 11 Indian restaurants all in one block. They didn’t drive each other out — on the contrary. Last time I checked, there were 16 restaurants on the block (rounding the corner too), meaning everyone thrives. So the more the merrier, I say!
Nokia was kind enough to send a pic of the fullscreen finger keybaord (thumb board) that is one of the enhancements on the upcoming Internet Tablet 2006 OS coming out this quarter. There’s no word yet on how it can be invoked and if it would work with all the applications but from the looks of it, it may prove quite functional.
As promised, Nokia announces today the 2006 OS update adding Google Talk(TM), a full screen finger keyboard, improved memory performance, and new refreshed look. Additional applets have also been added for faster access to internet services.
The newly added Goolge Talk application will let Nokia 770 users chat and talk wirelessly with family, friends, and co-workers for free, via the Google Talk network as well as instant message other people on the Jabber/XMPP network.
Nokia 770 users can now set the stylus aside and type with their fingers with the new full screen keyboard. This will enable faster typing and a better chatting experience.
New themes have been added and a Google search applet has been included for easy searching.
The Internet Tablet 2006 update will be available free for download for existing Nokia 770 owners second quarter of this year. New Nokia 770 owners will get the new 2006 OS pre-installed.
The full press release and additional screen shots are available after the jump.
I like using Google’s gmail and I usually email files from my Nokia 770 to my main computer rather than connect the two devices directly. Don’t know why, just seems easier.
