As it happens, I finished working on my computer Tuesday night just after midnight. But if I had stayed at it a little while longer, the timestamp at two minutes and three seconds past one a.m. would have been 01:02:03 04/05/06.
Archive for the 'general' Category
OK, this post isn’t about software that runs on a Nokia 770. And I don’t even have one of the phone that it does run on, it being Geominder, a location-based reminder program.
Works like this: The software installs on your Series 60 smartphone and you teach it your locations, so that when you get to the office or the supermarket, it recognizes the location and then plays an alarm and displays the reminder — a text or voice note — you made.
The website notes: “Geominder uses mobile network’s cell id information and doesn’t require an extra GPS device. Mobile Network cell id information is usually suited for most common day-to-day uses (for example: home - office - shopping). No mobile operator fees are involved in using Geominder.”
When I get my Bluetooth phone and data-plan to go with my Nokia 770, then I’ll be getting this program I know.
OK, we’re waiting for VoIP. In a discussion about what we might expect from the next iteration of the Nokia 770, I said maybe VoIP will be the killer app for a device like the 770.
As I thought about it, I was reminded of two things Ari Jaaksi wrote about on his blog. First (well, in importance; chronologically it was second), he reminded us that “the killer app for the internet tablet is the INTERNET.” The way the 770 interacts with the internet, from displaying web pages to doing email, is just something that phones are not good at by themselves.
And “by themselves” I am referring obliquely to the fact that a Bluetooth phone combined with a 770 provides a different web experience altogether than a phone alone.
We say, “The internet tablet is about accessing the internet.” And it’s good to get away from the desk and use the 770 in a meeting room or in the elevator on the way to the meeting, or at home on the couch or in bed (or as others have described, as a control device accessing devices on the network).
But I keep thinking about the day I paired with a BT phone and surfed all the way into the city on a train and all the way to work as I walked from the train station to the office. That was different.
That was accessing the internet in a full and complete way, while I was away from the physical network. Ari wrote about that experience, saying, “I surf in trains, in cafeterias, at airports, even while driving. I can go online anytime and anywhere I want.” Just as cellphones meant voice communication was no longer stationary, he said, the 770’s release meant that the internet is no longer stationary either.
The big barrier to fully utilizing the 770 this way isn’t something Nokia can do anything about. It’s the price of cellphone internet access. If that were truly affordable, then the true promise of the internet tablet would be realizable, and we would appreciate, as Ari says, that the killer app is the internet, anywhere.
Reggie posted the news that in the 2005 Engadget Awards, the Nokia 770 won both the Reader’s Choice as the 2005 Handheld of the Year, and the Editor’s Pick.
Wow! Congratulations to everyone at Nokia! I can mention Janne Jormalainen, Ari Virtanen and Ari Jaaksi by name because they’re upper-enough management for their names to be known, but we know a lot of people made this happen. They all deserve our appreciation and thanks, and this award provides us an opportunity to give them that. Thanks, you guys!
Lots of things go into this. First of all, with as much as they bit off, the people at Nokia were able to get the 770 delivered in 2005. Look at Microsoft, which is hoping to get an “ultra-mobile” with comparable abilities delivered in 2007 for about three times the price of the 770. Or Sony, hoping to deliver a 2-bit 1-color e-reader without WiFi or additional apps, removing the pricetag from their website this week because they can’t meet their same-as-the-770 price. Or the PepperPad, bigger, heavier, fewer apps, twice the price.
Second, Nokia looked at the Bermuda Triangle of web pads and didn’t flinch when setting off to build its own internet tablet. Requirements: Must be super small so people will carry it — pocket size, in fact. Must fully access the web, which means at least 800 pixels wide (oops, that makes requirement 1 really hard) and WiFi. Must be affordable (oops, that directly conflicts requirements 1 and 2).
Third, for all the breadth of its capabilities, the 770 doesn’t try to do everything. It doesn’t include a phone. No camera. No keyboard or disk drive either. You don’t need those things for what it does. Nokia stayed focused on what it was trying to do and didn’t yield to the more-is-better delusion, like for instance, the OQO.
Fourth, Nokia didn’t try to partition off the 770 but instead placed it squarely in among the Linux/open-source community. Was this a separate goal or the lucky consequence of the requirements above? I don’t know. But either way, belonging to the community instead of profiting from the community made things signficantly different in helping the 770 succeed where others had wrecked.
Yes, we’re enthusiasts here at itT, and we’re happy the object of our fascination has won. It means that others can see this remarkable confluence of capabilities and recognize what it is too: a handheld worth celebrating.
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).
Boy, times have changed.
Picture used from old-computers.com, which has a brief article about the Convergent Technologies Workslate at www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=891.
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.
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 in this 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.)
Download here: www.aracnet.com/~alevinsn/vncviewer_0.1_arm.deb
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.)
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!
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!
