The Mandelbear's Musings

My Nokia 770 Linux tablet computer arrived this afternoon -- naturally nothing got done. (Strictly speaking, it's mine only until I file the expense report.) Quick first impressions -- I'll do a review later. First the good points:

• The screen is gorgeous! 800x480, color, anti-aliased text...
• The "connection manager" handles multiple WiFi networks just the way you'd want it to. Has both 802-11 and Bluetooth.
• Plays a wide variety of audio and video formats.
• The software is X- and Gtk-based -- it should be trivial to display via the network, and you can develop in C.
• The development environment looks very well thought-out, and is basically Debian-based. Big win.

On the other hand, there are a couple of major lapses; people to whom these are important might want to hold off for the next version or the inevitable knock-offs.

• USB support is, in my opinion, marginal. It doesn't appear to charge over USB, and you have to install the developer's root filesystem in order to get a network connection over USB. When you do, it only works if you unplug the memory card. It has USB storage support, but you can only access the memory card in that mode. Weird.
• There doesn't appear to be any way to rotate the display, or at least the web browser and PDF viewer, into portrait mode. Landscape is usually OK, but you could get a whole page on it, readably, in portrait mode and as a filksinger I would really like that.
• It uses a "reduced size MMC" card, which is hard to find, overpriced, and significantly smaller in capacity than an MMC or SD card.
• It has audio out (a stereo headphone jack and a tiny speaker), but not in. Combined with the lack of BT headset support, that means no VoIP. May be fixable by installing the appropriate kernel modules. Maybe they were trying not to impact their phone market?
• The audio player doesn't support ogg. There's a third-party ogg player, but it's not integrated; the stock player doesn't appear to have plug-ins.
• There aren't any of the traditional PDA apps installed (but of course, being Linux, they won't be far away). Your web-based apps are only a click away, though.
• [update] Oh, yes. It's designed for a right-handed person. All the controls are on the left-hand side, and the stylus is on the right where a right-handed person would find it easy to pull out.

It's going to be fun to play with, and I think it will be very useful for work, but it's still very much a work in progress.