Nokia 770 Internet Tablet review

Rick Broida CNET

Published: 19 Jan 2006

You can pull down Web pages on most handhelds, smartphones and BlackBerrys, but let's be honest: the Web wasn't meant to be shoehorned into a 3in. screen. Enter the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, a handheld-like communicator with a wide, Web-friendly screen and loads of multimedia features. Priced at £245 (inc. VAT), it's an affordable solution for anyone who prizes Web accessibility but doesn't want the weight, the bulk or the expense of a full-blown notebook. Unfortunately, it won't be long before you're pining for a notebook's speed and versatility -- the Nokia 770 runs like molasses and currently lacks key features such as VoIP and instant messaging. Although Nokia plans to add them in 2006, you'll still be left with a painfully slow device that requires either a Wi-Fi hot spot or a Bluetooth-enabled phone to get online. Ultimately, the 770's only real advantage over a handheld is its dazzling high-resolution screen, but on those merits alone, it's hard to recommend.

Design

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet bears more than a passing resemblance to a handheld, except that it's designed with a landscape orientation and has the wide screen to match. The unit measures 14.1cm wide by 7.9cm deep by 1.9cm high and weighs 230g with its sliding-metal screen cover in place. It's a bit too long to fit comfortably into a trouser pocket and a bit too heavy for the inside breast pocket of a jacket, which otherwise seems like a natural fit, given the 770's slim, chequebook-like design. Ultimately, you may find the 770 difficult to carry anywhere.

The aforementioned cover might seem like an annoyance at first, especially when you realise that it adds extra bulk to the Nokia 770. It's reversible, however, so you can slide it over the back of the device without worrying about misplacing it. What's more, when you slide it over the screen while the 770 is still on, it automatically puts the unit in standby mode. Slide it off again, and the 770 wakes up instantly -- nice. Unfortunately, when you reverse the cover, it blocks access to the stylus silo -- a silly and annoying design flaw. Equally irksome, the flat plastic stylus fits only one way into the silo.

The Nokia 770 is almost all screen -- touch screen, that is. Its TFT LCD measures 4.1in. diagonally; by contrast, the display on the Dell Axim X51v PDA measures 3.7in. -- that extra 11 percent may not seem like much, but it's enough to make Web pages easier on the eyes. The real news, however, is resolution: At 800 by 480 pixels, the 770 can display most Web pages with little or no horizontal scrolling required. The screen renders bright, colourful and incredibly crisp images, making browsing a much more pleasant experience than you'd expect.

To the left of the Nokia 770's screen, a four-way navigation pad enables one-handed operation -- you can use it to hop between links, scroll through lists and make selections. Below the navigator, Back, Menu and Home buttons also assist in stylus-free operation. Along the top of the 770, you'll find a full-screen toggle button that removes all but the navigation bar from Web pages, an incredibly handy zoom rocker and the power button. The 770's USB port, 3.5mm headphone jack, AC connector and media slot can all be found on the bottom edge.

The Nokia 770's expansion slot is disappointing. Although the 770 seems like it could easily accommodate popular SD media, it instead forces you to use a Reduced Size MMC card. These are not only harder to come by and pricier than SD media, but also top out at 1GB. On the plus side, Nokia does supply a 64MB card and an adapter, so you can access it via a standard MMC reader on your PC.

To enter data on the Nokia 770, you can tap-type using an on-screen keyboard or try the handwriting-recognition software. We found the latter fairly awkward, especially compared with the more accommodating systems on most handhelds. Although we could enter standard alphanumeric characters, the engine frequently recognised letters as spaces and gave us uppercase letters when we wanted lowercase.

Nokia's printed manual is terse but comprehensive, covering all topics in very brief detail. Fortunately, we found we could figure out most of the Nokia 770's operations via guesswork. The interface is clean, attractive and fairly intuitive, although it can be difficult to remember when to press the actual Menu button and when to click its on-screen counterpart -- the two buttons launch different sets of menus.

Features

The Nokia 770 may look like a handheld, but it has a decidedly Web-oriented feature set. The device connects to the Web via Wi-Fi hot spots or your Bluetooth- and data-enabled mobile phone. This being a Nokia product, the 770 should incorporate some kind of wide-area (GPRS or 3G) connectivity -- but alas, that's not the case. Thankfully, we had an easy time seeking out hot spots in our area; the 770's internal antenna has excellent range, and the on-screen-connection selector shows signal strength for each discovered network and whether or not it's locked.

Your Web-browsing experience is robust, thanks to the fact that the Nokia 770 employs the excellent Opera 8 Mobile browser, which supports such amenities as JavaScript, plug-ins and even Flash content. Go to the AccuWeather Web site, for instance, and you'll see animated satellite maps. We particularly liked the various view options; you can zoom in and out, and you can choose Optimized View to have pages rescaled to fit the screen width, with little to no loss of formatting. We just wish the 770 were more adept at saving pages for offline viewing. As it stands, you're limited to saving only the current page; you can't store an entire site.

The Nokia 770's email client offers basic messaging functionality, including support for attachments, custom folders and both POP3 and IMAP4 accounts. You also can set up scheduling so that the 770 automatically sends and receives mail at designated intervals. Of course, this works only if the unit is either on or in standby mode, and it lacks an LED indicator to alert you of newly arrived messages.

Fans of RSS newsfeeds will appreciate the fact that the Nokia 770 devotes nearly half of its home screen to new posts. You can configure the device to fetch updates at regular intervals or just tap the Refresh button at the bottom of the News box. Alas, adding new feeds is something of a hassle, as you have to copy links from the browser, then paste them into an Add Feed field in the News Reader applet. Admittedly, you can also enter the feed URL manually if you know it; however, we wish the 770 had a more streamlined method for adding feeds.

As much as we liked finding an Internet radio selector on the Nokia 770's home screen, we were disappointed that Nokia provided a link to only one station. It's up to you to find and add other stations, which can be a slow and often frustrating process. Assuming you can find a link to one that's compatible -- and there's no way to know for sure if it is without trying it out -- you then have to perform the same kind of copy/paste hoop jumping that's required for adding RSS feeds.

As for the audio player itself, it's a fairly basic applet with intuitive onscreen controls and support for playlists, both imported and on the fly. Yet because it doesn't play WMA files -- protected or otherwise -- you can't listen to tunes purchased or downloaded from most online stores. That's not too surprising, given the open-source nature of the OS, but it does limit the 770's appeal as a mobile jukebox.

On the video front, the Nokia 770 can play AVI, MPEG-1, MPEG-4 and RealVideo movies, but don't count on any software to help you convert your videos to a compatible format. If the device can't play a file natively, you're out of luck; actually, you may be out of luck anyway -- see the Performance section for details. As for audio, the 770 plays MP3, non-protected AAC and WAV files, along with a handful of other, mostly obscure formats. Curiously, Ogg Vorbis isn't among them, despite the 770's Linux-based OS. But the tougher codec pill to swallow is the lack of support for Windows formats, namely WMA and WMV. That will undoubtedly limit the 770's appeal to some users. At any rate, if you want to listen or view any of these multimedia files, you'll definitely want to load up on those RS-MMC cards, as the Nokia 770 comes with only 128MB of flash memory, 64MB of which is user-accessible.

Inexplicably, Nokia chose not to include any calendar or contact-management features, which might have sealed the 770's place as a suitable handheld replacement. Although it does include basic tools such as a calculator, a world clock and a sketch pad, productivity just isn't part of the mix. We're also disappointed by the 770's lack of VoIP and instant-messaging features, which Nokia attributes to limitations of the Internet Tablet 2005 operating system. The 2006 version will add these and other services; Nokia plans to offer an upgrade in the coming year, but the exact time frame is unknown.

Performance

Operating the Nokia 770 tends to be a painfully slow experience. Most applications, including the Web browser, took several seconds to load. Even something as simple as closing an application can cause the 770 to pause for a few beats. Things really came to a grinding halt when we loaded a 1MB PDF on the device and selected the Show Images option. The 770 appeared to lock up, but in reality it was just taking a long time (several minutes) to render the images. If you plan to use the 770 as a PDF viewer, do it with text only.

Similarly, talhough the browser supports it, don't expect to enjoy much Flash content. The sample animations we looked at ran like slide shows, and the Flash games we tried were simply unplayable, running at about one frame per second. As for videos, the Ice Age 2 trailer that came preloaded on the 770 played smoothly, but other clips we tried, including low-resolution MPEG-1 files, were noticeably jerky. It's unfortunate that Nokia doesn't specify the optimal settings for video playback, as we could use third-party software to convert clips to the preferred size and format. As it stands, watching video on the 770 is very much a hit-or-miss proposition -- mostly miss in our experience.

On a positive note, once a Web page has loaded, you can scroll up and down with almost no delay; the screen refreshes very quickly. Why can't the Nokia 770 be that snappy in other areas? Software could be part of the problem. After receiving our demo unit, we downloaded and installed a firmware update that made the 770 a bit faster overall, although it still wasn't nearly fast enough. With any luck, a future update will boost performance to the point where you don't constantly feel as if you're waiting for the device to respond. Nokia promises 3 hours of browsing time and seven days of standby time from the 770's removable battery.

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