About BLEEPing time

[mdlbear]

Nokia has finally announced a US shipping date for their 770 Internet Tablet -- it ships the day after tomorrow, and I've ordered one. Of course, with my luck it will probably arrive while I'm away at Loscon. And I could probably have pre-ordered one a week ago if I'd realized that the link to the "buy it" page was buried under the stupid flash animation on the main page. You can reveal it (in Firefox) by zooming the font size up, but I have helpfully provided the direct link below. You also won't see Linux mentioned anywhere on their main site, but it's there.

Links: [features] [developer site] [live CD] [order page]

Comments

[johno.livejournal.com]

Want, want, drool, drool.

But they are not on amazon, so I can't add it to my wish list...

I've been reading and it looks like folks are getting many of the pim functions to work on it, so it's not as limited as some reviewers think it is.

[mneme]

V. cool.

Mind, I'm happy with my Zaurus, but it has three things the Z doesn't have:

a frigging 800x480 screen.
Bluetooth.
WiFi.

of course, what it doesn't have is a 4 gig drive, a CF slot, a -full- sd slot, and a keyboard, but you can't have everything.

[mdlbear]

I have an early Z at work, but rarely use it. It will be interesting to see whether the 770's larger screen works for me. And it will be interesting to see how well it does with a bluetooth keyboard.

[mneme]

I don't know whether the Z's screen has changed over its lifetime, but the C3000 works for me. (much better than the 6000SL did, despite the lack of wifi, since the clamshell form factor is much more comfortable. Though a bit of the plastic has flaked off. :( )

The screen is clearly lower res than the nokia device, though. Is the Nokia thingy qtopia?

[mdlbear]

Don't remember what the UI toolkit is, though QTopia seems to be the most popular on handhelds and works well on a small screen. I'm likely to spend a lot of my time in VNC.

[a few minutes later] a quick check of the developer wiki suggests that the UI toolkit is gtk+ -- this is good news to me, because it means that you can develop in C instead of/as well as C++. From my experience C++ is not suitable for use on small, slow devices. My first priority, given my work development environment, will probably be getting java running.

[mneme]

Hmm. I'd brain farted -- the 3000, at least, has 640*480, so the screen on the Nokia device is only 1.25 bigger.

Still.