playing with the nokia 770

i bought a nokia 770 a few weeks ago for no real reason at all (probably because i've been reading planet gnome too long). it is only sold through nokia directly and compusa, the nearest store of which is about an hour away. since i didn't want to wait to get it from nokia, i drove to compusa and picked one up.

it's a bit smaller than i expected from pictures of it, which was nice. the screen is bright and crisp. the initial setup wizard easily configured the 802.11b wireless with wep and bonded with my moto slvr phone for connectivity over bluetooth.

the default theme is decent but the pushbuttons look kind of cheap. the default e-mail client worked fine with my imap+ssl server and the web browser was able to correctly render most webpages i went to. the large amount of pre-packaged applications for the 700 is a big plus. i installed xterm, gaim, openssh, and rhythmbox, the latter of which gave me wireless access to the shared music on my laptop through itunes.

however, only a day after i played around with it, it broke. when turning it on, the screen just showed a solid white screen with thin vertical lines along the sides. i thought i had broke it since i had just done a firmware update, but apparently it's a common hardware problem. since my day-old device was now useless, i had to drive an hour back to compusa and get a new one, then drive an hour back home.

i applied the new firmware to the new device which has an integrated contacts and presence system that works with jabber and its sip phone. its built-in jabber client worked nicely and the new firmware overall seemed quicker and more polished than the previous one. unfortunately most of the pre-packaged applications need to be recompiled to work with the new firmware, so i wasn't able to install any third party software.

however, after two weeks or so with the new one, it also turned into a brick. i left it suspended for a few days and when i turned it back on, it showed the nokia startup screen and then went to the white screen with vertical bars. "luckily" it broke within 21 days of getting the new one so i could return it to compusa (again). this time i decided not to get another one, but just return it. this hardware problem really needs to be fixed by nokia before i'll buy another one. i can't trust putting any data on it or relying on it when i don't have my laptop around.