Nokia N770 tablet review

webmaster — Wed, 22 Mar 2006 23:44:22 GMT

Nokia N770 tablet - Hardware review

Introduction

It's a Nokia, but it's not a phone. "What on earth are they playing at?" cry the purists brandishing their mobiles.

"It's an Internet Tablet PC."

"Wot, you mean it's a laptop?"

"No, it's about the size of your average PDA and is primarily to browse the internet and do emails."

"Old news guv'nor - I can do that on my Nokia smartphone or Windows PDA. I've got WAP and XHTML on my phone. What do I need this for?"

"This devices browses web pages full screen using fast Wifi speeds, as if you were sitting at your laptop. It also handles RSS feeds, plays videos, MP3s, reads PDF without conversions and as it's a PC underneath - theres no limit to what it can be used for..."

"Ah, sounds interesting... Tell me more..."

Yes it's Nokia, but it's not a GSM device. This is a departure for nokia (who are keeping news about the 770 a low-key affair) and at first you might think why, but then when you consider the way the market is moving, it's appears that Nokia have done their reasearch and are willing to take a gamble by developing a new platform. It is also one of the few consumer mobile devices to run on Linux. To those who aren't familiar with Linux, it's a versatile powerful operating system that can be used on desktop PCs, servers, PDAs and other small devices (some people have even put Linux onto their ipods). Linux is gaining popularity because it's free, can be highly, and it has good performance.

There are other devices running on mobile platforms such as Symbian - often seen in high End Nokia phones, Windows Pocket PC - popular in many handhelds, and Palm - which has been around for longest time and is still popular. Although Palm have recently 'surrendered' to Microsoft and agreed to make devices using Microsoft's Pocket PC OS.

Key features

· High-resolution (800x480) touch screen with up to 65,536 colours

· Memory: Flash 128MB (>64MB for user)

· Memory card: 64MB RS-MMC (Reduced Size - MultiMediaCard)

· Web browser, Internet Radio, Music Player, News Reader, PDF Viewer, Image Viewer

· Audio formats: MP3, Real Audio, MPEG4, AAC, WAV, AMR, MP2

· Video: MPEG1, MPEG4, Real Video, H.263, AVI, 3GP

· WiFi 802.11 b/g

· Bluetooth

· USB, 3.5mm headphone jack

In the box

· Nokia 770 Internet Tablet

· 2 stylus pens

· Pouch

· Battery (BP-5L)

· Travel charger (AC-4)

· 64 MB RS-MMC memory card

· Connectivity cable DKE-2 (USB)

· Desk stand DT-7

· User guide

· 2 quick start guides

The travel charger has a plug like the standard Nokia chargers has a 2mm jack, which is smaller than usual. A few words have to be given to the silver case bundled with 770. It's more of a screen protector really as it mostly covers the display plus the some of edges. Either way, it is a very smart design as the 770 slides in and out easily. The 770 can also sit in the case when it is in use, so there's less chance of you losing it somewhere. Unlike some cases you get with PDAs which don't seem like they're up to the job, Nokia have provided us with a hard metal case that can surely take a few knocks. I suspect it may be able to withstand the accidental footstep or two but I'll leave that test till another time...

The USB cable is the Nokia branded DKE-2 and has a mini USB jack on one side. The 64MB memory card means that you'll obviously be buying a bigger card if you wish to add music and videos to your 770. The desk stand is just that - not a cradle - and comprises of two moulded plastic sections. They do the job nicely and are small enough to easily slip into your pocket if travelling to work.

There are two quick guides to get you accustomed to the device and connected to the internet quickly and a 50 page (approx) manual which is slightly thinner than I would expect. Given that this is the first device of it's kind for Nokia and a brand new software platform, one would have expected a bit more. But there are some elements in that give the impression this is not the quite the package that Nokia will deliver come full mainstream launch, but more on that later.

In the box:

Appearance

The 770 comes in the familiar Nokia package and the Nokia branding is so synonymous with mobiles I was half expecting to find a small GSM device inside. But instead, there lies a compact (141 x 79 x 19 mm to be exact) sturdy looking matt black tablet. The device feels very solid and has a good (quality) weight to it. The styling is of the no-frills business type which which I feel adds to the impression of durability.

The 770 has been designed to be held in the left handed use as all the buttons and the D-pad are on the left. Which is ok for most of the population, but if you're left handed you may be in a bit of a pickle... That said, for a right handed users, the buttons are well placed. The D-pad is firm and easy to control and unlike the current trend in mobiles, can accommodate man-sized fingers. None of that small ultra-chic compact nonsense... Apart from the D-pad (which has a central button) there are five other buttons and a rocker switch. The three buttons on the front access the 'home view', menu bar, and escape key. These also have a firm feeling when pressed.

It would have been good if there was a textured finish or some grooves just above the display to improve grip while holding the device. Nokia appear to have considered this by adding grooves on the back but not the front.

Ah yes, that screen. Nokia has provided a gorgeous 800x480 (91 x 55mm) wide touchscreen display which is one of the biggest I've seen on a handhled device. Once turned on, the screen is bright and very sharp.

tablet and its case:

Inside the 770

The stand

the stylus

the case, reverse-side

Using the 770

First impressions

The 770 takes 49 secs to boot up, and opens up on the 'home view'. Text, as expected with a resolution of this size, is very crisp. Applications can be launched from the menu bar along the left of the screen while the main page shows four shortcut panes; news reader, internet radio, a single web shortcut, and the world clock. It would be expected that the home view would be fully configurable but it's not really - you can only choose which of the four panes to display but you can't create your own.

The navigating through menus is reasonably snappy and it takes a few seconds to open an application depending on it's size. The browser takes about three seconds to load.

As this is an Internet tablet, the first thing task is to get connected to the Internet. Simply start the connection manager accessed from the globe icon at the top of the screen, and click connect. The 770 will scan for available networks and list them. The network available used the stronger WPA encryption (which is the more secure version WEP) so I was interested to see how it would get on. After selecting the correct network the 770 then prompted me for a password and then asked if I wanted to save the settings. After few moments after that the 770 was online! The procedure is not quite perfect though; the same thing a little while later and it failed to connect. It should also be noted that wireles 'b' and 'g' protocols are supported so connection speeds of up to 52 MBit/s are theoretically possible.

Audio player

The audio player supports AAC, AMR, MP2, MP3, WAV and RA (real audio) formats. It also handles internet radio stream in the [x] format. The player supports playlists and features random choice and reapeat modes. Headphones can be attached via the standard 3.5mm jack on the base of the unit. Sound quality through a standard pair of headphones is good, and will do justice to your favourite mp3 playlists. Sound was also test through a pair of high quality THX certified external Logitech speakers and audio was equally as impressive (Note that headphone jack is still accessible even when the case is on). Audio purists may be able to find fault somewhere but when you're playing tunes coming home on the bus, it really doesn't matter. What does matter however, what tunes sound like at maximum volume; thankfully the 770 has a decent max volume which doesn't distort noticeably. It's not enough to annoy fellow passengers on the ride home, but good enough for most environments.

A single speaker is situated on the left of the device, protected behind a fine metal mesh. Considering the size of the speaker, the output is suprisingly clear and loud. In fact, it sounded less tinny than those on my £1000 laptop. It's quite handy in the morning when you need to listen to your favourite online radio station but don't have time to wait for the PC to boot, login and start the media player.

Audio player window:

Browsing

The key selling points about the 770 is the ability to surf the web so that was the first feature to test. The web browser suplied is based on Opera. And it's good. Pages are displayed very quickly without error. There has been much debate about whether web-developers should still design pages for 800x600 resolution considering that the majority of web users have monitors that use far higher resolutions. If there was ever an argument to keep to the 800 pixel wide format, the Nokia 770 would be it. Browsing to rich websites like www.cnn.com [illustrate] is a joy and shows of the high resolution display to it's fullest. With the ability to display up to 65,000 colours; pictures are vibrant and accurate. Although due to the physical dimension of the screen the fonts can be very small but provided an effective zoom facility to handle this. On the top of the device is a dedicated zoom rocker, easily accessible with the index finger. Pages can be magnified by up to 200% which should be large enough for any user.

The browser also features javascript support which has worked well on the sites visited. Although when using Yahoo mail, the autocomplete feature when filling in email addresses doesn't pop up. It's unclear whether this is a problem with the javascipt handler or a result of how the 770 enters characters into text fields.

The use of the 4 way D-pad for browsing is simple and effective. Tapping on any direction will highlight a hyperlink on the page. This action works relative to the section of the page you're viewing so if you've got the zoom enabled on the centre of the page, tapping the D-pad will highlight a hyperlink currently visible and not the first one from the top of the page, which is a good user friendly method. The button in the centre of the D-pad will 'click' the hyperlink. Holding down the D-pad will scroll the page veritcally or horizontally.

A menu similar to that found when you right click link in Firefox or IE, can be found by placing the stylus on a link a keeping in there for a second. The escape key acts as a refresh button while browsing. Holding it down for a second will close the current window.

A Flash player is included with the browser that work reasonably well with the sites browsed but some of those annoying Flash adverts that fly around the screen didn't display properly, which is not necessarily a bad thing... Except when there's the close button is missing on a Flash window and you can't get rid of it, which happened to me once.

Zooming with 770

100%,

150%:

200%:

general sites

News reader

RSS feeds are a great way of getting the news headlines or a list of new articles from your favourite website. To handle these feeds, the 770 has a news reader. Adding new feeds is easy; you simply copy and paste the RSS link from the web browser, click the 'add new feed' icon in the news reader and paste the link. Once finished, the feeds are refreshed periodically whenever the connection to the internet is available. This can be set to manually refresh if required.

A list of feeds (which can be organised into folders) is shown on the the left while the headlines and article summaries are shown conveniently on the right. Headlines of particular interest can be saved for later. Next to the save option there is also an handy 'Send' link to email the RSS summary.

pics

Caption: News reader

PDF Reader

The PDF reader is one of the main applications bundled with the 770. These days, PDF documents are used everywhere and readers are bundled with Palm PDA, Pocket PCs and even phones. However on m of these devices, the PDF have to be converted to a 'mobile' format, which means much of the presentation is lost. The 770 reads native documents and as it has an 800x480 resolution - you can view the full width of the page without horizontal scrolling.

This is a vast improvement over viewing documents on other mobile devices. Just as the 770 brings quality web browsing into the palm of your hand, it also displays PDFs as they were meant to be seen; complete with images and formatting. The text can be small (but still readable), so the rocker switch functions as a zoom again to make things easier. There is an option to hide images which can make flicking through pages a bit quicker.

However, the PDF reader was found to be quite resource intensive. While a couple of web browser windows could be started with the audio player running in the background, the PDF reader is not as friendly. After loading a 2.2 MB document and browsing a couple of pages, it could take up to 7 or 8 seconds to switch to another application. Sometimes with two other browser windows open, 'Low memory' warning would appear and other applications failed to start up. Even when the other application were closed, and the PDF reader was the only app running, there were still memory warnings. I had to power off the device and reboot to restore normal operation. This may be an issue with the application as opposed to a limitation of the hardware.

PDF reader

Zoomed pages

100%

150%:

200%:

Memory and storage

The 770 has 64MB of DDR RAM and 128MB of flash memory, 64MB of which is available to the user. It also supports Reduced SIze MMC (RS-MMC),as well as the newer MMCmobile (13-pin dual voltage reduced size multimedicard v4.1 MMCA spec) memory cards which can be swapped without powering off the device. The memory cards are stored behind a discreet panel on the bottom of the device. The hatch felt a little bit fiddly at first but it does the job well and is not likely to get opened accidentally. When connected to a PC with the USB cable, the memory card will appear as a Removable device in Windows Explorer. Copying a 40MB file from PC to 770 took 62 secs which works out a transfer rate of 666KB/s. For small files this transfer rate is ok but if you're going to be regularly moving albums of MP3s, a USB 2.0 MMC memory card reader would be much faster of course. The same file transferred to the memory card with a reader took just 28 secs and MMCmobile memory would be a lot faster still.

A discreet memory card slot:

Nokia N770 tablet - Hardware review Part II:

In the next half of the review, we'll be looking at one of the core 770 applications which is the email client and checking out how the N770 fairs as a media device with it's video playing capabilities. The widescreen dimensions of the 770 have given Nokia the chance to be inventive with handwriting recognition, but does it really make things any easier?

Also under the microscope will be connectivity; wireless, bluetooth and GPRS connectivity, other bundled applications. Follow by an evaluation of the maemo platform, the target audience and the all important conclusion.

E-mail

Email is one of the headline applications on the 770. Not because it's a great piece of software (because it's not) but it's all part of the 'Internet Tablet PC' marketing where users can surf and pick up mail anywhere.

The email client supports multiple POP and IMAP accounts, sending encrypted messages and digitally signed messages. Folders can be created to manage mails but there's not nearly enough flexibility in its implementation. For a start, although several accounts can be configured, you can't control what folder the mail goes into, which will make it quite frustrating to try and use two or more accounts at the same time. Part of the setup was also troublesome - connecting to my standard IMAP account provided by my ISP always failed with the error message "Recipient not found on server". This is apparently a bug which w

The screen has a traditional vertical split with folders on one side and a list of emails on the other. This doesn't really work; you can't see very much of the sender column and even less of the subject column, which is always longer. It would have made more sense to go for a horizontal split. When a mail is double clicked, the contents get displayed in a new window. There is some support for HTML and rich text because fonts and colours are maintained but HTML docs with images were not displayed.

This email client should and can be a lot better. The lack of filters, and better folder management will drive off many users. Overall I had a feeling the I would like the client to feel a bit quicker.

Initial email screen, a bit cramped:

Mail:

Image viewer

The image viewer supports JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, PNG, Animated GIF format, SVG-tiny, ICO pictures. Ithas no special features other than viewing a slideshow of images and zooming. But it's one of the best applications. Why? Because every picture looks fantastic. When viewed at full screen, the sample images provided looks as if someone has just placed a carefully cut photograph over the screen. It's that sharp.

There are phone with 2 megapixel camera but it's hard to show people pictures when the phone screen is so small. With the 770, you can take you photos with you and proudly display them to your workmates. Horizontal viewing angles are good so two or three people should be able to see your lame holiday snaps at the same time.

File manager

· File manager

The file manager uses the standard tree view on one side with a list of file within the current folder on the other. By default a Documents, Audio clips, Images, and Video Clips folder has been created. The memory card appears as a separate folder. It is possible to show thumbnails of images (but not videos) in the file manager. It would have been useful to have cut,copy and paste icons on the toolbar. As these are the most common actions performed while dealing with files.

If you have previously paired a bluetooth phone to the 770, the phone will show up as a device which can be browse just like a folder. There is a slight delay when bringing up directory listing, but this is to be expected with bluetooth. Otherwise this feature works well.

The backup facility is located within the file manager application. It can save your emails, bookmarks, contacts, documents,'media files' and settings. However the manual makes no mention of this feature when describing the file manager (which it does in three lines) so it's not clear exactly what documents and media files includes. This kind of lack of attention to details does give the impression of the platform that is still in development. See the 'Early Adopter only?' for more on the state of the platform.

Video player

Is the 770 good enough to watch video on? Well it supports some common formats including 3gp (a format targetting mobile devices), avi, h.263, mpeg1, mpeg4 and rv (Real Video). The manual states that the 770 does not necessarily support all the variations of a file format but neglects to tell us which ones definitely work and definitely don't work. Such information would have been very useful as all the avi's I tried didn't work. The 770 seems to be quite fussy about which compression formats it accepts. Mpeg video fared much better and although an exhaustive test of what video formats work is beyond the scope of this review, only the odd few mpegs failed to play.

But for the video files that did work, the playback was not smooth at all and appeared to be running at about half the frame rate of the original 30 fps. Also, the audio was often out of sync with the video so all in all, the experience was not a plesureable one. Which is a shame as the large screen actually makes videos worth watching on a mobile device.

The video player also handles Real Audio streams which would have made more sense from a user point of view if they were actually handled in the Audio Player.

Other bundled apps

Smaller applications included with the 770 include a calculator, world clock, notepad and sketch tool. The notepad takes simple notes and the sketch tool can be used to scribble a few small diagrams or doodles depending on your artistic ability.

Handwriting recognition

As a Palm user, Nokia's take on handwriting recognition was one of the bigger differences from existing PDAs. Normally, a section is assigned to writing lowercase letters, uppercase letters and numbers. This system is used on Palm and Pocket PC devices and works well. Nokia have done away with these sections altogether and given you a wide pad to write in.

I decided to use it without looking at any instructions to see how easy it would be to pick up. I find that complete novices can pick up a Palm or Pocket PCs and start writing straight away and I wanted to see how the 770 compared. The first thing I thought was that Nokia's system is unusable. It regularly failed to recognise certain characters and due to the delay in recognition, incorrect or missing characters were only recognized three or four characters later.

In the handwriting settings, 'character recognition time' can be adjusted so I selected the fastest speed. This worked much better. I also took off Capitalisation and Handwriting case correction so I could be sure if it was failing to recognise characters properly or it was changing them itself. There is a teach option within the handwriting tools to add a custom shape to each character. It also shows provides animations to show how characters should be written. This was a nice touch as there are some distinctly different ways in which the same character can be written encompassing different styles.

After looking at the way a couple of letters were constructed, a funny thing happened, it all began to work. I can't really explain it because I was sure I was writing in the same way I had done previously buy accuracy was much improved, especially when using the ruled line near the bottom of the writing area. This faint line (which should probably be a bit stronger) is used for recognition purposes as opposed to a guide to write everything above the line. So a lowercase 'g' could only be written if the tail drops below the guide line. The same character written above the line would produce the number '9'.

The width of the writing pad also allows multiple (small) words to be written in one go, which is new for a PDA. It is also relatively easy to insert and overwrite missing or incorrect character. You simply write between or next to the character in question. It took a while to get used to but I decided this was a good feature.

Overall I have to say that I liked the handwriting system on the 770 but there are still some rough edges. Writing long words pushes you right to the edge of the pad where it is difficult to write within the small gap before the pad clears. Once the word reaches the last half inch of the pad, the pad should clear for fresh character entry. Also the guide line could be a bit higher up as it's too close to the bottom for people with bad handwriting (i.e most of us).

Connectivity

Wireless

Setting up a wireless connection is fairly painless. Managing more than one however, can be a bit tedious. Different wireless configurations can be stored using the Connection manager however only one wireless network be chosen as the 'preferred connection'. For this one network, anytime it's in range and the 770 needs a connection, it will connect automatically in the background. However once you move to another network, say work, you have to manually disable your preferred connection, start scanning for networks and then select one to connect to. Then once you get home you have to do this again or re-enable your preferred connection. This is unnecessarily tedious - the obvious option would be to have a list of favourite networks that be connected to in order of preference.

This would be so bad if the wireless connection was stable, but it's not. When I first started using it the connection would regularly drop after maybe 10 - 15 minutes. Later I happened to by a new wireless router which and connection times were extended to around 20 - 30 minutes. Whether it's a hardware or software issue, the 770 seems to have trouble holding the connection particularly when the signal strength was weakened (e.g by passing through indoor walls). This is a key issue that needs to be resolved for the 770 to enjoy any kind of commercial success.

Bluetooth

The bluetooth connection was easy to configure. Once your phone is set to discoverable, a wizard will take you through the pairing process. Files can be transferred from the phone using the File manager as described previously. However, there is no mention of how to set the 770 to be a discoverable device so sending files to the 770 from the phone was not possible. Whether this will be changed in the future is unclear.

Browsing via GPRS was relatively straightforward. A three step wizard should have had GPRS set up perfectly but the wrong dial-up numbered had been preconfigured. After a quick check on the Nokia website that was easily changed. With a humble Sony Ericsson T630, I could browse at 56kbs without incident. It's handy that the connection manager keeps count of how much data has been transferred since GPRS users pay by the packet.

GPRS connection

Performance

Performance is a bit of a mixed bag - when actually using an application performance is not bad, but nothing to write home about. After using a Palm Zire 71 for a while, I was expecting a similar kind of responsiveness but the 770 felt a quite sluggish in places. I was not expecting to become accustomed to seeing the hourglass equivalent appearing regularly but loading applications took up to 8 seconds sometimes.

After using the 770 for maybe hour or so, it seemed to have problems managing memory, as it would complain from time to time that memory was running low and some tasks may not be completed. Switching between applications also slowed to a crawl on occassions, and sometimes switching to an application was not possible at all. A quick(ish) reboot fixed those issues.

maemo platform

It's prudent to include a few words on the maemo platform as it's brand new OS from an unexpected manufacturer. As mentioned earlier, Nokia have chosen the Linux route for their new OS. They're not the first to use Linux in a PDA device but their implementation may draw a lot of attention given the prominence that Nokia has on the mobile phone marketplace.

As a Linux platform it's open source, so its developer friendly and other manufacturers can even use it free of charge (providing they adhere to the licensing agreement). It will be very interesting to see how maemo fares against more mature established platforms like Pocket PC, Palm and Symbian. There's a great deal of interest from the open souce community but do they have the right aptitude to produce polished consumer focused applications? The short answer to that question is 'yes', but it's too early to tell how the maemo market will develop. Currently, it feels very much like a product still development; it was launched just over five months ago in May 2005 and version 1.1 has just been released.

It's even more interesting to understand why Nokia chose to develop a new platform. They have years of experience with the Symbian platform as used in Nokia 9300 Communicator and many other phones and if they just wanted to focus on browsing and email, it would most likely be far easier to work on Symbian which has an established presence than to develop an entirely new one. I would speculate that the first step in a strategic push into the PDA space. Maemo cannot compete with Pocket PC or Palm at the moment but a maybe year or less from now and maemo will be in a better position to flex it's capabilities. Nokia have anounced that an updated version of maemo, dubbed 'Internet Tablet 2006' is slated for release next year that will include Voice over IP and instant messaging functionality.

A list of maemo applications is a available at http://www.maemo.org/maemowiki/ApplicationCatalog. They currently include the GAIM instant messenger (compatabile with MSN, Yahoo and AOL instant messaging services), Abiword Word processor and a number of games including Doom.

Conclusion - Great for Early adopters and developers

After using the device for a couple of weeks, I can say that the Nokia 770 is a very well designed piece of hardware. Build quality is execellent, the screen is fantastic and it's all delivered in a compact package. It's the first PDA type device I know of that can browse web pages (designed for 800x600 screens) full screen without horizontal scrolling. To be able to browse the web with this quality anywhere with a handheld device is quite liberating. If you have a 3G phone or one with EDGE capability, comfortable web browsing is only a few seconds away.

But this is not a device for consumers at the moment. It's not going to replace your PDA, or MP3 players. The decision to ship without calendaring, PIM or office software ensures that it would not compete with current PDA platform. As an 'Internet Tablet PC' it's not quite there until a a better email client comes out and the wireless connection is rock solid. To the best of my knowledge, it's not available from the high street only direct from Nokia (and it seems that even Nokia aren't sure if they've released it or not - in a list of product it still says the Nokia 770 is "coming soon"). This is probably not an oversight or bad scheduling either, Nokia are more experienced than that. This is an opportunity for to get feedback from early adopters and give developers a feel of what the future holds. And the future's bright...

Beyond the bugs and performance issues, the maemo platform shows a lot of potential. The web browser is the most accomplished application and it demonstrates what the 770 is capable of. The high resolution display opens the door for more advanced applications that are only possible with a bigger screen.

Nokia say their new device is targeted at mobile browsing. They have some nice flash animation on their website to illustrate typical usage in the home and in an airport. But let me ask you, who would buy a mobile device to use in the home? Any such person would already have at least one PC and unless they're addicted to the internet, that could probably wait until after their tv show to check their stock prices or a new recipe. In a similar vein, anybody who needs one for mobile purposes would need better contact management, better email and would most likely have a PDA that does that already. And they're certainly not going to carry two devices around plus a phone.

So I would speculate that the only way for the 770 to survive in the long term is to strike at the PDA market. With Palm to produce Pocket PC powered device it would seem that Microsoft are set to rule the PDA scene like they have the desktop. But with maemo developing fast (a new version was released as this review was being written) and an eager development community behind it, if Nokia play their cards right the 770 could be the first strike in a new battle for handheld computing.

andrew@moby

Phone memory card help - microSD, miniSD, SDHC, Memory stick micro M2, Pro Duo, MMCmobile cards / Other Devices (inc Cameras, PDAs, video cameras etc) / Nokia N770 Tablet memory

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Nokia N770 tablet review