Nokia 770 review cont'd

I’ve been getting a lot of e-mail about my 770, so here are a few more points:

I primarily use the 770 for web browsing.  To some extent I use the IMAP/POP client, but not extensively.  The item I am most excited about, but have not yet installed is the VNC viewer so that I can remotely access my machines at work and at home.

I have not experienced an sort of annoying boot lags when launching the web browser.  That said, I have experienced low memory errors when I inadvertently left to many instances of the web browser open.

The web browser works great, but I have so far been unsuccessful in installing Flash and some other plug-ins; this is strictly due to a lack of trying on my part as I am sure that it is possible.

I actually have 2 770s — 1 stays at home in the living room and is used extensively by my wife and 1 is carried around by me primarily for work stuff and as an alternative to lugging my laptop around.  Here are my observations of how my wife uses the 770:

She learned how to use the device fairly quickly once I showed her how to use some of the basic functions; she even took it with her to show to her brother at a coffee shop and easily connected to unsecured wireless networks around the coffee shop so that she could show him the online functionality.  Although she did not initially have any experience with pen-based computing, she is getting better and faster at entry with the pen; I think that she mostly uses the keyboard input panel as opposed to handwriting (i.e., ink) recognition.

Mostly she uses the device for web access and to play Mahjong (ok, she’s addicted to Mahjong), which is a game that comes pre-loaded on the 770.  I have offered to set up her e-mail accounts so that she can access them through the mail application, but that doesn’t seem to be a huge priority for her as she has web access to all of her accounts.

The portability of the device, the instant-on, and the battery endurance all seem to be useful things to her.  Additionally the battery on our Sony laptop that we leave in the living room is completely dead, so it is much easier to walk around the house with the 770 than to shutdown the laptop, unplug it, plug it back in, and reboot.

I have not tried to load pictures or videos on the 770.  All of that stuff is generally handled by my iPod or on our Apple computers at home.  All of my cameras (video and still and Treo) use SD cards, so it’s not as if I can take pictures or videos and easily load them on to the RS MMC card that the 770 uses.

Here are a few wishes that I have for the 770:

• Ability to use SD cards (probably not a likely conversion of the units that I already own).
• Ability to use the USB port to pull data on to the device.  It would be very cool if I could plug my still camera, video camera, or Treo into the 770 and use the screen as a portable viewing system.  Further, it would be cool if I could dump data (i.e., pictures and videos) onto the RS MMC card when traveling to open up some space on my SD cards.
• Vonage VOIP software.  If this existed, I would probably up my plan to the $24.99 per month and most extensively use it through the 770; I might even pay a small extra fee per month for the privilege.
• Skype software.  I might consider dumping Vonage if this was available.

There is a firmware update for the 770 that is supposed to fix some of the things that others are griping about that I have yet to install on either of my 770s (probably do that this weekend if I think about it), so all of my reviews above are based on the original firmware.