Nokia's 770 Internet Tablet is a new kind of product from the Finnish company. It's a mobile Internet device, providing access to your email, the Web, Internet radio, RSS and more, over your own broadband wireless Wi-Fi network at home, or a public one in a café. It adds in a few extras like music playing, image and video viewing, and some gaming.
The whole idea is very compelling, and it does work, but there are a few reasons we don't think the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is ideally suited to its job, the most important being a lack of internal memory and its relatively small overall size. The screen quality is great, but it needs to be about a third bigger.
It is also expensive. The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet costs £245 direct from Nokia's Web site.
Design
The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is a compromise between size and usability. It's always the way with small devices -- portable media centres, handhelds and smartphones have the same issue, for example. The hardware needs to be small enough that users will be bothered to carry it around, but large enough to be usable in the situation for which it is intended.
In this case, the screen is all-important, and Nokia has certainly gone to town in terms of its quality. It delivers 800 pixels of width and 480 of height, in a physical area 90mm wide and 55mm tall. It's crisp and more than bright enough.
The screen is touch-sensitive, and a stylus sits in a slot on the back of the casing. If you have stubby fingers you might need to use this regularly, as the icons and menus can often be quite small. On the left side of the screen are a couple of buttons and a navigation pad. These get you around the device without needing to tap at the screen, for example calling up menus and taking you to the Home screen.
On the upper-left edge, alongside the power button, are two really useful buttons. One lets you see the current window in full screen (great for Web use and looking at photos and video), and the other is a zoom rocker.
On the bottom edge of the casing is a 3.5mm headphone connector, USB port and mains power jack. These are not protected in any way. To their right is a slot for an RS-MMC card -- and this is protected by a cover that is attached to the hardware.
Nokia provides no less than two protection systems for the 770. There's a solid slide-on cover that can be used to protect the entire front face of the device, and a drawstring bag. You also get a USB cable to connect the device to a PC, and a printed manual.
Two rather tacky-looking bits of plastic turn out to fit together to form a desk stand -- you rest the 770 on this and it sits at an angle of about 45 degrees. With no rubberised stoppers on the feet of the stand there is a tendency for it to slide about when you prod the 770's screen.
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