Cloudy Thinking

An early adopter of the Nokia 770 gave a killer demo at the local Linux user group meeting tonight. He showed it working with a Stowaway portable Bluetooth keyboard. I have three words to describe the universal reaction of a (small) roomful of adults: pant. pant, PANT.

Nokia hit this one out of the park. The 800 x 480 resulting screen has great resolution and is very bright. The WiFi just works. The Nokia 770 “pairs” automagically with the Bluetooth keyboard. The software still needs performance tuning, but it’s very useable as is.

As nice as the system design is, Nokia’s truly brilliant and revolutionary decision was to make the whole thing open source. The OS is based on the popular Debian version of Linux. All the source code is available, so Nokia will automatically have dozens if not hundred of bright people working on the product for free.

This device defines a new category. Time will tell how broad the appeal will be. My bet is this will be a sizeable niche, and with good marketing could break through to true mass appeal.

I know I will buy a Nokia 770, but I’ll wait for it to shake out. I’ll probably defer my purchase until the inevitable second hardware refresh.

But make no mistake: I will have a Nokia 770.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 26th, 2006 at 8:08 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.