At this year's LinuxTag the well-known company HP had a really big booth at the exhibitor's section, where they—among other things—arranged a Coding Contest. They had 16 desktop PCs with Fedora Core and a good set of developer tools and libraries preinstalled on these machines.
At the second day, I took part in the contest. The task was to write a "C Code Pretty Printer", whereas the best solution would be the one that used least number of bytes. And after 3.5 hours of coding I really won the first prize, by submitting a program being only 354 bytes short, written in Ruby: A voucher for the brand new Nokia 770, a Debian GNU/Linux-based Internet Tablet. At that point, they only had beta-versions available, so the nokia people told me they'd ship the device as soon as the device would be available.
And now, almost three months later, the device arrived. And I tell you, it's great. I'll just state some of the features:
It neither has a camera nor a phone built in, though it might be possible in the future to use a bluetooth headset and phone people using VoIP.
Here's a picture of it and a link to the official 770 page.
I also made an screenshot of the nokia browsing my home page (click to see in full size):
I was among the first 50 or so people Nokia shipped the device to (most of them were developers).
The first days the people who already got the device tried to crack the root password, though that did not turn out to be the solution to get r00t (otherwise it'd have only taken me some forty-two—ehh, forty-six seconds ;-).
On the device runs a custom Linux distribution called Maemo, which at the moment uses a mostly vanilla 2.6.12.3 kernel. With the OS come quite a few programs including an email client, a web browser (Opera!!) and a chess game. Many of these programs are ported from the original GTK versions since the user interface is based on GNOME desktop.
People can expect almost every program available in common Linux distributions to also be available for the Nokia 770. At the moment there's a Port of the game "Doom I" going on.
The Nokia 770 ist the first device to use the Maemo platform. It is expected that Nokia will release some maybe more expensive devices with a faster processor and more memory which will also run the Maemo OS.
Having a Wireless LAN access point at home is really nice, especially if you have a Nokia 770. You can just carry it around at home and when you want to look something up quickly at WikiPedia—then just do it!
The connection is a bit droppy however. Not while surfing, but when you just put the device aside for a few minutes.
It's a pity that it's not possible to have root rights on normal devices, because some wireless LAN networks don't use a DHCP server and thus you cannot connect to them.
Bluetooth works quite fine with the device. Since I don't own a cellphone I first tested it out with a friend's Siemens [MODELNUMBER]. He had a bunch of photos from China on his cellphone, and it was quite a fun to download and view them during my english lessons.
Next, I tested the connection to a Nokia 6230 and tested the download speed. It took somewhat over a minute approx. to download a 3MB MP3 file. However, I couldn't open the photos he made with the integrated camera ("Not supported format") and neither view the videos.
I also tested the connection with a Nokia N-Gage, but that didn't turn out to work so well. I couldn't access any of his files.
To neither one of these phones I was able to upload data, but perhaps that's just an access restriction. It is a pity that no-one can access the 770's files as well.
For security reasons, they say, the 770 does not broadcast his presence to other Bluetooth-enabled devices. I hope one can change that behaviour in the future.
I haven't tried to connect to the internet via GPRS yet.
Anyway... does anyone know how you can send those little text messages via bluetooth? If so, write me an email! I'd really appreciate that.
In my opinion, the 770 isn't quite stable yet. I noticed a few bugs (for example, start up the audio player, skip near to the end of a song and globally mute [in the panel at the top] the device by clicking on the speaker. Then wait until the music player skips to the next song and wonder why the musc starts to play even louder though the device is muted). Also, after some days of standby the device wouldn't resume from the suspend any more. Opera crashed a few times, and many applications are missing an "Abort!!!" button.
The system is a little bit slow, though Nokia says they still improve the performance.
Playing Doom on the Nokia 770 is just fun. The performance is great, it doesn't lag at all, and you'll get used to moving the character with the stylus. I can only recommend to try out this great game!
Some useful links if you want to find out more about the 770:
$Id: nokia-770.php 70 2006-02-26 22:03:16Z feh $