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Jason Haslup
jason at haslup dot com
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Mon, 25 Jun 2007
One More Thing...
blog
One more thing about the N770 -- get a protective screen overlay and use it right from the start. I have one on all my Zaurus' but I didn't with my N770. It's the only one with scratches on the screen. Oh well.
Woot! N770
blog
Today's "woot" (http://woot.com) is a Nokia 770 for $130 (plus $5 shipping). I mentioned that in a twitter-tweet (or whatever they're called, I'm still new to twitter), and a couple friends of mine asked me about mine and one smartly suggested I do a blog post and... here I am! I'll try not to copy and paste from previous emails, but I make no guarantees :)
I think $130 is a really nice price for the N770. I use mine pretty much daily these days... here's a pile of random bullet points:
- I'm running the 'hacker edition' of the Nokia software on my N770. It's basically a backport of most of the functionality from the new N800's software, minus a few things like the FM radio player and (I think) an upadted Flash/Opera combination. There's a workaround you have to do to get mp3 files playing, but I've saved that somewhere so let me know if you can't find it.
- I'm a broken record with this but... I use bloglines to keep up with my feeds and the primary reason I still use it (over google reader) is for its mobile interface. It's a very lightweight feed reader that works very, very well with Opera on the N770. The hardware keys in Opera aren't optimal, so I still use the stylus, but other than that, it's great for feed reading.
- While reading my feeds, a lot of times I'm streaming the mp3 feed from SomaFM's groove salad. The N770 handles that just fine.
- I read PDF files purchased from O'Reilly and the Pragmatic Programmers using the n770's PDF reader. The 800 pixel width of the N770 is perfect for PDF books and 99% of the time I don't need a stylus.
- I have not purchased a large rs-mmc card although i've been very tempted to several times. I've read about how to install the Nokia OS onto the rs-mmc card which allows you to restore at anytime but also (supposedly) speeds up the OS a lot. If the daily woot is ever an rs-mmc card for cheap cheap cheap, I'll give it a shot :)
- I've mounted NFS shares with the N770 in order to get access to my music collection a few times. It seemed to work pretty well, so it's a nice alternative to a larger mmc card (provided you're at home and exporting NFS shares).
- Don't tell anyone, but I don't have encryption keys on my wireless network at home. So, I've never had any problems connecting my N770 to my wifi network at home. I have, however, had issues trying to connect to some hotel wifi networks, but honestly it's been so long since I've tried, it might be just fine. A whole slew of other folks on various N770 lists don't have a problem, so it's probably just me.
- I've never used the VOIP through google (I think) with the N770.
- I try and avoid lots of input with the N770. The soft keyboard is functional and not too bad for short inputs (usernames, passwords, urls, etc...), but I wouldn't want to type something like this blog posting using it. I have recently started using the handwriting recognition and have been pleasantly surprised with how well it works. With that said, though, I still avoid it and quite honestly, I avoid writing in general (even on paper) because for me it's a lost art. I can type much faster than I can write and my handwriting is (and always has been) horrible.
- I have streamed video to the N770 but I can't recommend it for that. It (at least for me) was more of a pain than its worth, so I avoid it. Your mileage may vary, but for me, it's an audio device.
- If you do get an N770, definitely check out 'Canola', which I've mentioned before on my blog.
- I avoid sites with a lot of javascript and Flash. In fact, I currently have flash and images disabled. In order to visit espn.com have those two things disabled is pretty much mandatory. That site is way too "interactive" on a normal desktop let alone a little box like the N770.
- The only game I play (and even it is rare) is mahjong. I may try a nethack variant, but if I want to play a game I'll fire up WoW or my Xbox360.
- I want to write an application for the N770 but it's fairly low on my "at home" priority list. It looks like a cool environment, though, and I had fun building my gtk-xpath application (a couple years ago) which translates nicely into maemo since it's based on gtk. Right now I'm thinking either a del.icio.us client or an app based on twitter's api.
Ok, that's about it for now. If you decide to get an N770 let me know how you like it! For email, my name is jason and this domain is mine, so... figure out the email address :) Good luck!
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