Connecting geeks

I got my gadget!

November 16th, 2005

Yes, I am a lucky owner of a Nokia 770. I have been playing with it since four days, so I think I can write my first impressions with this impressive gadget.

The processor in the device is a 220-MHz, ARM9-based Texas Instruments (TI) OMAP 1710 (more specifications).

The operating system is a Debian-based GNU/Linux, with a 2.6.12.3 modified kernel. Here are the output of uname -a:

Nokia770-43:~# uname -a
Linux Nokia770-43 2.6.12.3-omap1 #1 Thu Oct 27 09:24:21 EEST 2005 armv5tejl unknown

and this is a look at the partitions

Nokia770-43:~# df -h
Filesystem                Size      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mtdblock4            2.0M      1.9M     84.0k  96% /mnt/initfs
none                    512.0k     56.0k    456.0k  11% /mnt/initfs/tmp
/dev/mtdblock4          123.5M     65.2M     58.3M  53% /
none                    512.0k     56.0k    456.0k  11% /tmp
none                      1.0M     52.0k    972.0k   5% /dev
/dev/mmcblk0p1           60.9M     41.8M     19.1M  69% /media/mmc1

The default installation contains a web browser (Opera-based), a Mail client (allowing POP3 and IMAP4 inboxes), an Audio Player (allowing streaming audio), a Video Player (based on Real Player, allowing also streaming), a RSS reader, a clock, an image viewer, a PDF reader, a file manager, a calculator, a notes pad, a very basic drawing program and three games (Chess, Mahjong and Marbles).

The best applications are the browser and the RSS news reader. They work pretty well, and are not too heavy. The worst applications are the PDF reader and the Mail client. They have lot of bugs; the PDF reader seems to have memory leaks and if you close the applications, some processes are still running. The Mail application can not treat correctly with IMAP accounts (it can only read the main folder, but not more), and it can not open messages with PGP/GnuPG signatures. If you take a look at the Bugzilla, the developers say these bugs to have been corrected.

There are more applications available. For instance, I installed contacts, todo list, calendar, x-terminal, gaim, bluetooth keyboards plugin, load plugin, bluetooth send&receive, gtk-based mini browser (awful, it can only render very basic HTML-only web pages), SSH client and server, and two more games (Crimson Fields and Bomberman).

The system seems to be a bit slow. Actually, I tested the Maemo Development Platform (a full open source system, without the Nokia and non-open source applications), and it is faster. Although it is only available in english, and apparently without TTF fonts.

The general impression is good. The screen is very good, large, good bright (even at minimum levels for saving battery), the battery time seems to be about four hours (and a lot of days while sleeping the device).

It is not too heavy, and small enough to keep it in your pocket.

In next posts, I will write some tricks, for instance how to install the developer system, how to recover the original system, how to encode videos to watch them in the gadget, how to become root, how to setup a SSH server, how to set up USB network (they are all features of the developer system, I will tell you how to do it without installing the developer system), how to connect a bluetooth keyboard, etc.