Linux web pad buggy but seductive, reviewer says

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Nov. 30, 2005

The Nokia 770 is buggy, but offers more web-surfing and mail-reading convenience than any other device, writes PC Magazine's Sascha Sagan, in a review of the once-more-delayed Linux web pad. Sagan clearly enjoys using the device, despite frequent reboots and foiled attempts to use some features.

Like every other early reviewer, Sagan raves about the 770's 4.1-inch, 800x460 LCD touchscreen. The broad format eliminates horizontal scrolling, and while the fonts can be small, the display can reproduce subtle colors and details better than any other PDA-sized screen, he says.

Sagan also praises the 770's battery life -- about five hours of steady use surfing and playing MP3 files, he says. Nokia claims cell-phone-like standby times for the device of about a week. The 770 is based on an ARM-powered Texas Instruments OMAP processor clocked at 200MHz.

On the downside, the 770 is "crawling with tiny bugs," Sagan says -- a condition he hopes will be quickly remedied by Nokia and the Maemo community of open source developers that it sponsors. Bugs include dropped WiFi connections, Bluetooth incompatibility with some phones, problems copying and pasting between some applications, and glitches returning to the browser after using the PDF reader plugin.

Sagan's complete review (including a nifty slideshow) is available here.

LinuxDevices.com's technical preview of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is available here.

In related news, Nokia USA appears to have grossly underestimated demand for the 770 -- the Estonia-made device is currently back-ordered into January, as many LinuxDevices.com readers are likely already aware.

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