Hands on with Nokia's 770 Internet Tablet

Janne Jormalainen w/ 770I just got back from a quick trip to New York where I saw Nokia's 770/maemo launch event. In case you haven't heard, the 770 is a new Internet appliance that Nokia hopes people will opt for instead of a second or third PC at home. The 770 sports a huge, bright 800x480 pixel touch-screen display and runs on the Linux operating system.

The maemo UI is built upon the well-known Gnome UI, but differs from Nokia's Series 60/80/90 UIs that run on top of Symbian OS in that applications developed for the 770 and future maemo devices will not locked into using the maemo UI widgets. Nokia is hoping that developers will make maemo specific versions of their applications, for consistency's sake, but does not want to prevent anybody from doing a quick recompile/port of an application, either.

As was brought up at the press conference, Linux applications are traditionally designed for functionality and flexibility, not usually with the user experience in mind. Nokia is hoping that developers will pay more attention to UI issues since the 770 is a true consumer device, not a Linux based handheld computer meant for Linux enthusiasts. They expressed that they "trust developers to focus on ease of use" when it comes to consumer devices such as the 770.

Nokia 770

Nokia 770

Nokia 770

Nokia also discussed their position on Open Source at the press conference. Janne Jormalainen stated that Nokia wants to play a much more active role in the open source community than it has in the past. To that end, Nokia is saying that it will not exercise any of its patents against the Linux kernel. Jormalainen said that Nokia chose Linux over Symbian OS because the new 770 is much closer to a PC than it is to a phone, and that Linux was the only viable Open Source OS in that realm.

Physically, the 770 is much smaller than I had expected. The length and width of the device make it a little bit larger than a Nokia 7710, as I expected, but the thickness that Nokia quoted us for the 770 appears to have been measured when the cover was attached to the device. If you remove that cover, as has been done in the photos below, you can see plainly that the 770 is much thinner than my 7710.

Nokia 770

Nokia 770

Nokia 770

 

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