I didn’t think I would want to stretch the 770 in so many ways.
To tell the truth, I started out reluctant to even flash a new firmware image. It wasn’t till the third image came out that I even did that. And when I first got my 770, I thought I should restrict myself to just the built-in apps so as to better understand what the typical user would experience. That was both a strategy and a tentative response to a new Linux computer.
Well, that decision lasted about three days. A vanilla 770 isn’t enough.
Actually, the first thing I did with my 770 was to change Home’s appearance — I looked at the four color schemes, wishing I could build my own (must be a way to do that), removed the News reader, web shortcut, and internet radio, and changed the background image to one of Jayne and Sam perched in the red maple in front of our house. Small things, completely superficial, and btw springing from the distinct need to feel I was the master of my Linux destiny.
So, three days in, I began to install and then later to uninstall apps. FBReader and Plucker Viewer came first (naturally, given my bent towards books — I’ve worked in publishing for my whole career). Then games, a lot of them. I’m not really a gamer [1]; but I play a couple and I sometimes need to engage one of my children so some games are for them. Installing was easy, and finally I had added more apps to the device than it had come with. The 770 was beginning to feel like my computer. Of course, I wanted more.
So then came Joe, the text editor, and vim. What, a text-to-speech engine? Flite went on. And Granule for flash cards. The GPE-PIM trio. Happiest day? When Tomas Frydrych casually let slip how to install fonts. I put in a dozen I can’t live without (Maiandra, Trebuchet MS, Gardiner’s hieroglyphs). Comfort food for the eyes: Look, I control how text looks on-screen! I tried things out, I removed what i wasn’t using.
It didn’t take much encouragment to venture under the hood. I installed XTerm (had to for the fonts) and did the command-line thing. Sure, it’s not so daunting, but I really really would like to give up the command line. I installed the cpu/mem/screenshot applet in a slight euphoria, because it meant I could take screen captures without becoming root and going through elaborate contortions that I didn’t understand (does that old method involve a web server? I still can’t figure it out). With a steely eye, I put in Midnight Commander to do simple file management things like move files to a directory hidden from File Manager.
So for the first few months, modifying my 770 meant finding apps that did neat things I wanted to do. I was pretty content and put some energy into e-book-building apps on the desktop. I thought I had everything under control.
Part 2: I learn the reality.
[1] Confession time: All the blog items about games during the long period before release weren’t about the games — they were about the screen grabs! We needed pictures! What did things look like? We needed to see! And lots of games were being ported. Nice thing about it is that I started reading Marcelo Eduardo’s blog, A Handful of Nothing, which I really enjoy, and from there a number of other Brazilian blogs written by INdT developers, including etrunko’s (void *) and Renato Araujo’s Tux em Recife.
I posted the following speculations in the itT thread called “Mike Cane’s Live 770 Blog”. I’m blogging it here, which will start a new thread where people can identify their 770’s country of origin, code (hopefully this will equate to batch number), date of receipt and level of reliability.
In his forum blog, Mike Cane has detailed the problems he’s had with his Nokia 770. And I’ve been thinking about them for some time.
If I had consistently wacky behavior from an application on my PC that someone else with the identical hardware and software was not having, I’d suspect a bad install or a bad sector on the hard drive.
I’d uninstall and re-install, and I’d test the drive. Really unpredictable behavior would lead me to test the RAM too.
Mike wrote that he has re-flashed the most recent image. So a re-install didn’t fix things.
Of course, the 770’s “drive” is its mmc card and half the device’s flash memory. Is there an application that will test the 770’s memory? Both the internal and the mmc? Bad memory is usually an infrequent problem on PC’s, still it does happen.
But if it’s not the install, not the memory, and not the case that Mike is stressing the software beyond other people’s use, could it be the manufacturing that’s at fault?
Maybe Mike has a defective 770, or maybe there’s a batch of 770’s manufactured together in which more defects show up. Does that sound plausible to anyone? It is a new device, after all. And Mike’s not the only one who has frequent problems.
So let’s collect some data that would let us know if there’s a pattern to these problems that is manufacturing-based.
Here’s my info:
My 770 was made in Estonia. It has a code of 0631265. (Turn off the 770. Look under the battery. This isn’t the number you use to get firmware updates.) I got it in mid-November 2005.
And my device has the some flaky crashes, but nothing consistent and nothing on the frequency that some others report. (And since I’ve used a swapfile, the crashes are less frequent.)
Please post your info too. Let’s get to the bottom of this if we can.
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.
Lots of people have reported successful use of the Nokia Su-8W Bluetooth keyboard with their Nokia 770, and likewise with the Think Outside Stowaway Bluetooth keyboard. When I couldn’t find a good price for the former, I happened on a deal for the latter, $68 plus shipping from Amazon, and I was sold. It arrived today.
Connecting the keyboard and 770 isn’t complicated, as several people have reported, but I couldn’t find all the little pieces of information in one place. Because of that, even though I know others have done this, somewhere, I’m putting all the steps down here. In this case, information redundancy on the web can’t hurt. And just skip this if you’ve heard it before.
3) Install the plug-in. If you went to Tomas’ site with your 770, you can choose open when you click the link and that will bring up the application installer and you can install it directly from the website. Otherwise you can save to your mmc card, or to your PC and transfer, then install from your downloaded copy.
4) Restart your 770. Btw, that means turn it off, then turn it on, I suppose. Is there a one-step restart I don’t know about?
4a) (left this out when keying up this post, but encountered it right off the bat): If you’re Offline, go back to Normal mode. Offline turns off the Bluetooth radio. (Brand-new users: Press the on-off key to call up the Device Mode menu, which includes a toggle for changing between Offline and Normal modes. You have to be in Normal mode to use WiFi or Bluetooth.)
5) Click the new BT icon that shows up, and a one-line menu lets you connect your Bluetooth keyboard.
6) Somewhere in here you need to press three keys simultaneously on the Stowaway keyboard — <Ctl>–left <Fn>–right <Fn> — the Control key and both the green and blue function keys. I guess I do this shortly after step 5 while the plug-in is looking.
Presumably this works similarly on other Bluetooth keyboards, except for the keys you press.
After that, smooth sailing.
Except for the 770 not recognizing keyboarding as activity and dimming the screen after thirty seconds. Time to look for that hack that sends a signal every thirty seconds to defeat this. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Edited to add: Oh, and be sure to click in the Notes window to get a cursor. No cursor, no place to insert text.
Thanks to the different posters who have discussed their BT keyboard experiences, and thanks especially to Tomas Junnonen!
Edited later to put the new URI for the updated ver 0.3.0.0 plugin. There are changes in how it behaves — more automated. I’ll revise the text to reflect these changes soon.
Andrew Flegg (aka aflegg), writing at bleb.org, describes his experiences installing and first impressions using the Think Outside Stowaway keyboard. Having used a Stowaway in the past, I like the way it feels, looks and works, so this is my preferred choice for an external Bluetooth keyboard. He provides some useful ancillary information (Ctrl+Fn+Fn to get the keyboard into pairing mode) and some useful observations.
With all the things the keyboard brings, there are three provisos to such a purchase, which Andrew notes —
the “special” keys don’t work, though Andrew suggest .xmodmap in the /home/user/ directory might fix that
non-Hildonized applications on the 770 (the Linux Citrix client is one such recently discussed in our forums) don’t pick up the Bluetooth or the 770’s virtual keyboard (discussion on maemo developers list on this), and
the 770 doesn’t register BT keyboarding as activity and dims the screen after 30 seconds of typing the same as if you had not clicked anywhere on screen.
Some specs on the Nokia 770 are underwhelming, especially when compared to devices that cost tons more money or that allocated much less of the overall cost to their markedly inferior screens.
Like any geek, I’d like the CPU to be twice (no, four times!) as powerful with twice (no, eight times!) as much memory. I understand from Marcelo Oliveira that Quake is too big and runs too slowly on the 770 to port. Bigger, faster hardware would solve that.
And several people have noted that when they opened too many browser windows and other apps, things really, really slowed down. Or crashed.
This would seem to be cause for worry. I’m a guy who, on my desktop, usually has forty sites open at the end of the day, in a slew of multiply-tabbed browser windows, and five to ten apps open at a time. And, you know, I want to run GIMP, and maybe GIMP will overwhelm the 770. Beforehand, I had some concern about this.
But you know what? I don’t find the Nokia 770 underpowered. It’s plenty fast for everything I actually do on it.
I’m not running huge spreadsheets or converting video. I’m not compiling programs or doing any of a dozen tasks that require big horsepower. (I’m not running Windows, for one thing, nor using Microsoft Outlook or Internet Explorer, all of which often make me yearn for a more powerful laptop.)
I use the Nokia 770 for reading — websites, e-books, mail. I play games. I adjust things — memos, blog items — created elsewhere, and don’t try to make the 770 my tool for keyboarding. (I went on a trip and I took both my laptop and my 770.) All of these things are just fast. There’s no slow there.
Surfing the web on the 770, I don’t open ten links from a page, but only one additional window and then close it when I’m done. This isn’t how I operate on the desktop but I don’t feel at all limited. I close apps pretty much when I’m done with them, even if I have to open them again ten minutes later — hey, everything launches so fast I don’t really notice it. Apart from the browser, I rarely have more than three or four apps open at once. When I go online, I close all my other apps.
Maybe the physically small size of the screen leads me to focus on one thing at a time. Maybe the fact that I use the 770 for less than an hour at a time — and not eight hours at a time, like my laptop — is why I don’t need to switch apps so much. Maybe the fact that I like to use the full-screen mode, which doesn’t facilitate switching, comes into play.
Whatever it is, the limits don’t really seem to matter. I’ll be glad when future Internet Tablets have more power, but that’s going to make a lot less difference than I used to think.
When I was looking at Joe as a text editor, I saw all the keyboard shortcuts use the <ctrl> key. Hey, there’s no <ctrl> key on my Nokia 770’s virtual keyboard!
So I wondered if there is any way to effect changes to the virtual keyboard because there are many missing keys — not just the <ctrl> key but also the <alt> key and the function keys (I’ve been wanting to try F11 with Opera on certain pages).
More than that, since the keyboard is virtual, I was wondering if it is possible to customize it at all.
For instance, I use the hyphen a lot more than I do the exclamation mark and would gladly exchange their relative positions. And where is the em dash?
I’ve got to believe this is something that should be available in a configuration file.
New useful applet showed up in the Application Catalog. It’s is a status bar plugin showing CPU load and memory usage. It also has — all right! — a menu for taking screenshots. Future versions will list the most CPU intensive apps, for killing as needed. It notes that the applet, which loads on startup, is “Application Installer friendly” but you will need to reboot after installing.
We’ll continue to point to forum posts and blogs from developers and other users writing about their new Nokia 770s.
Dominique Bonte, whose first impressions were reported here earlier, has added pictures and descriptions of installed applications and desired applications at his blog, mobile analysis and development. He’s hooked up a Nokia Bluetooth keyboard too.
• • •
Have to love this photo in our gallery of the Nokia 770 with its antecedents in mobile communication, sent in by JPB.
• • •
zupidupisent us news of this difficulty with the email reader and two email accounts:
I wasn’t very pleased with the email reader. I have two different mailboxes to watch, one from my Internet provider (a POP-account, username zup1) and an IMAP-account at my office (username zup2). Naturally my outgoing mail goes through my Internet provider’s SMTP-server. The office account is my main account, and the POP-account is there just because it is there.
There was no problem in setting up the two different accounts. Unfortunately, the email client does not display the folders in my IMAP-account — it simply downloads the headers into the local Inbox folder. This means that both accounts share the same Inbox-folder. That’s not the way I like it — I want to remotely browse my IMAP-folder.
Also, when you create an account you cannot specify one username for the incoming mail and another for the outgoing. My default mailbox should be my IMAP-account, having the username zup1. But then I can’t send mail through my Internet provider’s SMTP-server, since I’m zup2 at that one. So I have to define my POP account as the default mailbox, and separately check for mail at my IMAP-account.
Reports are coming in from the first batch of Internet Tablet users (other than pre-release exceptions like Nokians, developers and reviewers). A smattering of first impressions (updated throughout the day; two updates so far today):
The Real player and mpeg support of is the ‘hidden gem’. Real video streams perfectly at about 220kbps and using it as a portable radio is something that I hadn’t thought I would do but I’ve done a lot already
It is still a little sluggish. Especially when you have more than about 2 apps in memory, the keyboard takes a little time to appear and switching reminds me of Windows CE v1.1 on a Philips Velo. I am sure that this will improve with updates… and it’s not too bad (don’t want to sound like it is a real problem).
Browsing on it is brilliant. It is the first ever handheld device that I have used for ’surfing’ rather than ‘looking at websites’…. to explain - it is not a restriction to follow interesting links or explore stories… something I have never done with a PocketPC / Clie or Palm
screen is fantastic, download some digital photos that I resized to 800 x 480, they look great
very simple to setup wireless internet connection, took longer to reconfigure my router to allow another device than it did to configure the 770
simple connection to PC, appears as a storage device and hence easy to copy to/from
the chess game plays at a good level, too good for me
• • •
dsmudger has sent back-to-back reports on the much-remarked-upon display of the 770. Here are some excerpts, not in the order he presented them:
As for viewing angles — you can still make out the image looking almost end-on (i.e. there is no issue with viewing angle — you could certainly have several people crowded rounsd looking at the same image). This is in the horizontal direction….
[F]rom looking at it head-on, you can tilt the top of the device away until it’s pretty much horizontal (screen facing up) and still see the screen ok. Tilting the top towards you from head-on it starts to go dark/unreadable fairly quickly.
Looks to me like it’s optimised in the vertical direction for all angles ranging from head-on to the device lying flat on the desk in front of you, and in the horizontal, it’s viewable at pretty much all angles.
Seems like whoever designed this screen had exactly this application in mind….
[O]ne thing IMO lets [the screen] down a little (I’d like to know if other people have noticed this…)
I think it’s the layer that does the touch-sensitivity, it looks as though it’s adding some sort of odd polarisation or moire pattern over the screen — in simple terms this means that as you tilt the screen, you get an apparent ‘grain’ of rainbow-colours — particularly in bright/white areas. It has the overall effect of making photos look like they’re a lower resolution that the fantastic 800×480 screen underneath…
One of the first things I have done when the n770 arrived was set it up to work with my Samsung D500 mobile. The pairing worked OK, but in contrast to every other bluetooth device I have paired with the phone, the phone will not let me authorise the tablet …. {This] means that every time the tablet tries to connect, I have to manually confirm on the phone that it is OK to do so. This is real pain, because in use this happens over and over again, and there is a limited time window in which the confirmation has to happen.
… [Samsung support’s email] is lot of non-sense; there is an authorise/unauthorise menu entry for every paired device except the tablet, ….
… (I know that the problem is likely with the tablet, but it is the Samsung people who can tell me what the problem is; the tablet has a different icon associated with it on the phone than all the other devices, with a little red exclamation mark, I just do not know what it means.)
