Hello, Nokia 770
Portagamers meet Nokia 770, Nokia 770 meet Portagamers.
The 770 is NOT A PHONE. It is just Nokia’s latest attempt to venture out of the cellphone market (not like the N-Gage, which is first a phone, second a video game system). The 770 IS an internet tablet. It’s mostly designed for jumping on the web, checking email, listening to MP3s, watching MPEG4s and streaming internet multimedia. But tucked away in its feature set is one important and probably overlooked feature: games! That’s right, this tablet isn’t just for the Armchair Stock Brokers out there. No, this is for guys like me that hate lugging a laptop around just so I can check Portagame’s comments and get a quick gaming fix from time to time.
Other companies have tried similar tablet things, but failed miserably. I see the Nokia having a very fair shot in this small, but expanding, market. First off, it’s open source! The 770 runs Maemo code, an open source toolkit based on Linux, Gnome and GTK+. This makes it fairly easy for developers to cook up applications. I foresee many ports of favorite games and emulators headed our way.
Second, its form factor is sexy small. 5.5″ wide by 3.1″ tall and only 3/4 of an inch thick! And it only weighs half a pound. You eat hamburgers bigger than this.
Third reason for success is the multimedia. It has a decently sized screen that is just over 4 inches wide. At an 800×480 resolution, that’s not bad at all. Oh yeah did we mention it was a touch? Also, it supports MP3, WAV, Real, MPEG1&4, AVI, PDFs (yeah, PDFs), and a plethora of other formats out of the box. We’re sure more codecs are to come too.
Fourth reason should be the price, but his hasn’t been formally announced yet. jkOnTheRun guestimates an approximate $350 USD retail sticker:
is expected to cost about $350 making it a very attractive option to some of the larger Internet appliances that other companies are getting ready for the market
We’re excited to see a handy device such as the Nokia 770 in our future. I wouldn’t place it as a competitor to the Palm or PocketPC markets, but more as an attractive alternative for a PMP (Personal Media Player). Whatever, we’re just excited for the games.
Emulators, get your compilers ready!
Comments
To quickly reply to visitor, I have a new pocket pc with Windows Mobile 5. Every application must be bought separately. Navigating with Pocket Explorer is frustrating. There is no pfd reader (acroread displays chars with no interleave and other pdf reader are slow, not compatible etc.). Every document must be converted. On the PC side you interface with the pocket pc only via ActiveSync which runs only on the latest upgraded version of Windows . . .
There are plein of useful sw in Linux. So, I think that I’ll sell my PDA and I’ll go to buy this great piece of technology. (ah, it is the first PDA with 802.11g !!!)
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Well, everything that you say it does can be done with a PocketPC without having to wait for software to be developed, and it costs about the same… but you don’t its competing with the PocketPC? What does this thing have to offer that PocketPCs don’t?