Nokia 770, The AJax Appliance that Could

I have been fortunate enough to come across a Nokia 770 Web Tablet. This is a small device that resembles PDA, but oriented horizontally. It features a very high resolution display in a pocketable device. Bluetooth and 802.11b mean that if you are equipped with a cell phone, you can potentially always have access to your email, web content and more in a manner that is not nearly as compromised an experience as the typical PDA or Smart Phone.

This device has recieved notoroiously bad reviews, but it is not entirely the device's fault. Partially to blame has been a initial release of the OS that was at times sluggish, some rough edges in the user experience, and stability.

The beta of the new "2006" OS is on my 770. It is quite good. In fact, in using it for a while, the strengths of the device become much more obvious.

The 770 is not a PDA. It is not a laptop. These are obvious points, but they color our expectation of how devices that resemble them should behave.

The 770 is purely a creature of the connected experience. This is apparent in little things, such as the well done connection manager which makes configuration with a cell phone simple, but also in larger aspects, such as the default "desktop" of the 770.

The 770's initial UI resembles in some ways Apple's dashboard, and this is no accident. It is possibly a low threshold approach to allow developers to build "infowidgets" that can be accessed immediately, exactly in the way this device is envisioned to be used. It is for immediate access.

The inclusion of a chat client further supports this. It expands the utility of a cell phone by offering a useful way for users to communicate. Intriguingly, due to Nokia's partnership with Google, the 770 includes voice over IP support, and does have a microphone built in, but of course could be used with a bluetooth headset as well.

The browser included with the 770 is quite useable, and this is where it becomes interesting. Since the 770 is so network centric, technologies that make use of the browser as an application platform (AJAX etc) can leverage this.

I think this is where reviewers that gave the 770 a bad rating didn't get it. The 770 isn't necessarily about writing applications for it per se, but about utilizing web development and cross platform expertise to power a portable device. It is actually quite smart. Palm has to convince people to learn a unique development platform to write software for their PDA's. People can write for the 770 using skills they already have; and their efforts won't just work on a single series of devices, but a broad range of devices and environments.

Microsoft has ushered in a smaller tablet format, but it is quite expensive -- the cheapest one is at least 3 times the cost of the 770, and can't be slipped into a pants pocket. The only thing they got right is the idea of a network centric tablet device that people carry with them, but I don't any of the existing UMPC models qualify.

The 770 is an imperfect, but I think vital, glimpse of the near future.