Nokia 770 Internet Tablet review

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet Review

Reviewed by: Sandra Vogel

Reviewed on: 19 January 2006

Features
There's a bevy of software built in to the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, though not quite everything that might be useful is present. You get a Web browser, email software, Internet radio, an RSS-feed reader, software for video and images, a calculator, a clock with an alarm, a notes tool, a draw-to-screen tool and a couple of games. There is also a PDF document reader built in, and you should be able to add additional software.

Two obvious omissions are instant messaging and Voice over IP software, but Nokia says at its Web site that an operating system upgrade should become available in 2006 to add these.

Your key way of getting onto the Internet for the connected functions is through Wi-Fi, though as Bluetooth is built in you could also use a mobile phone for Internet access (or file sharing). The 770 supports both 802.11b and g. When we tried it on a 'b' network, we were able to visit Web sites and listen to Internet radio without any bandwidth issues.

Internet radio is one of the more fun things on offer. One station is already built in, but to add others you need to go through a rather tedious process of copying and pasting their URLs from the Web browser to the radio software.

The Web browser lets you have more than one window open at once, and switching between them is a simple matter. Entering Web addresses is one of the occasions when you need to use the tappable virtual keyboard or handwriting recognition. We quickly decided the former was best -- the handwriting recognition was woeful.

The quality of sound output from the built-in mono speaker is very poor, but attach a good headset and the stereo pumps though nicely. AAC and MP3 formats are among those supported. Video playback was pretty sharp, and when in full-screen mode, eminently watchable. Supported formats include Real Video and AVI, but not WMV. Images are similarly nicely rendered, and reading PDFs was fine, especially in 'fit to width' mode, where documents are sized to precisely fill the screen.

As you open more applications they are represented as icons in a strip on the left edge of the screen and switching between them is as easy as tapping each icon. Unlike with Windows Mobile, when you tap the cross in the top-right corner of each application, it actually closes, freeing up memory. This is crucial, because if you have too much going on at once the system will clam up.

When you connect the 770 to a PC using the provided USB cable, its flash storage card shows up as another drive, ready to have files copied to it. You can't access the internal 64MB of memory using this method, however.

Performance
The 770 dropped its network connection a few times during testing, and it ran slower as more and more applications were opened, but it seemed to deliver adequately if treated with respect.

Overall, the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is a great little device. It really does work, and if you are prepared to live with its foibles it can be both useful and fun. Nokia needs to do a few things with the next version to make it better, though. These include increasing the amount of internal memory -- and allowing access to it through a PC -- improving the quality of the sound output and making the device larger. We think the A5 paper size would be perfect.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide