Pros:
Most of these have already been covered here so I won't go into much detail. Screen is amazing, GNU/Linux, good battery life, etc...

Cons:
Lack of support from the OSS community/Nokia. What's up with OS2007 being N800 only? UGH. Lame, guys. The RSMMC thing is also totally bogus. I can't believe that they couldn't fit a CF card in there (4GB microdrives are cheap now). No USB host mode by default/unpowered USB port. Seriously, what gives? I understand that spinning up a 2.5" HD on the 770's power would drain your battery pretty quick, but that choice should be left to the user. I'm still also confused as to why, once I enable USB host mode and build a custom, powered USB cable, my USB flash drives won't automount. It's a PITA to have to open xterm and run a shell script every time I want to swap drives. There's probably a solution I haven't come up with yet (I've toyed with the idea of writing a status bar plugin to mount/unmount flash drives, but the whole cross platform development thing still scares me a little, and from what I've read, Python status bar plugins are OS2007 only)

(Feel free to tell me I'm nuts and offer corrections, despite its flaws, I love my 770.)

Mine was just delivered yesterday. I wish I could experience the smell and excitement of opening up new electronics everyday!

The Good:
-Screen is great
-WiFi worked instantly
-Bluetooth connected to my Nokia e62 right away
-Got setup with Maeomo repos right off the bat w/ no hiccups
-More to come (haven't played with it enough)

The Indifferent:
-Video player/Conversion was a bit wonky (not what I bought this for anyway)

The Bad:
-Had to do a couple of shutdown/restarts (is there a force quit application anywhere?)
-The Mic placement

Got my 770 a couple days ago. I have no wireless or blueteeth devices, yet.
Wireless router on order. Should arrive in a week.
So, despite this, it is really quite functional.
Discovered that a neighbor has open wireless - thanks, whoever you are.
I was able to download stuff from an open house window. As i've only been home after midnight, my neighbor probably didn't notice.

Good:
770 is discounted - probably due to new model. I might get a spare. This strategy worked well when i bought my Palm.

Awesome display (i've got excellent vision for close fine stuff, despite my age - YMMV). Readable outside in daylight - though not as good. My Palm happens to totally rock outside - passive B/W LCD. My Palm happens to also be awesome at the telescope. It's totally punny backlight does not destroy night vision. Will need red cover for 700. Tech i have.

Performance - like my old Pii/360 in CPU, memory, slightly less disk (flash). Both do full screen video. But 770 fits in my shirt pocket. My Palm is currently there, but for how long?

Quiet. I'll actually use it to read PDFs. I never used to like PDFs. You'd either print them or sit next to a noisy box in an uncomfortable chair.

Multitasking - i'm replacing my Palm, this is a real plus. The Palm really does not compute unless you wait for it. Runs Linux, like my desktop. I've been using Unix since 1982 - so the learning curve is mostly behind me. Even for the new stuff.

Battery life - seems good, charges fast. My Palm is better - two weeks on twin AAA's, and i can carry spares... and replacement AAA rechargables are cheap, but the two are otherwise hard to compare. My palm doesn't play audio or video, and IR compares unfavorably with WiFi. Both do USB.

Stand alone - can operate without the network.

xterm, perl come standard, other languages available. Is there emacs? (i can cope with vi).
perl just works. Is there a maemo GUI library for perl?

Stable - no crashes (yet).

Works with my images (jpg).

Works with my audio (mp3).

Browser should allow usable HTML book reading (offline). Haven't tried it.

Sound (especially with headphones) is high quality. Many x86 laptops come with brain dead sound - for example, you can hear electrical noice when CD changes tracks, or hard disk head moves. But also, laptops have fans, and hard drives that make noise - which effectively reduces quality. The supplied ear buds actually fit in my ears. One of my ears makes this difficult at best. This is the ONLY pair that seems to work.

Bad:
If you shut down, PDF reader, mp3 player, etc., forget where they were. Two days to figure out how to put it to sleep. The case does NOT have any remotely obvious mechanism to make this happen. Difficult to see that the screen has actually turned off when the cover is on. How does it work? Magnetism? RFID? Dark magic?

Two days to figure out where the escape key is. Killed xterm, but vi was orphaned several times. Rebooted to get rid of them. Why isn't there a keyboard screen with control chars and escape? I'd have found that...

None of my downloaded videos play. What do i need to do? Hard to imagine that there's enough local space for video files. Barely enough for audio. Maybe streaming audio or video will be something i'll use one day.

One of the open WiFi places i frequent redirects to an agree-to-our-terms page. The 770's browser can't get by it. Probably some javascript error. Feh. Another browser?

Though screen responds to fingers, my oily fingers mess up the screen. Now carry a lens cleaner rag in bag. High res screen is best clean.

Power cord barely works while device is on a stand. Have right angle headphone jack - is there a right angle power jack?

Manual says "don't overcharge". If powered up while charging, it tells you when it's topped off. But not if it's powered down. It'd be MUCH nicer if you could leave it on A/C and it would internally do the right thing by the battery. The device clearly knows. So all it has to do is do something about it.

Unknown:
My Palm has a totally awesome planetarium app. No idea if i'll be able to settle for 'stars'.

My Palm comes with an adequate calendar app. I can cope with a calendar that doesn't sync with other hosts. Depending on a net connection eg:google's calendar) is a non-starter.

I'll need a plain text book reader. Might just use 'less'. On palm, weasel reads compressed books. So, maybe zless. There's pkzip/unzip - is there gzip? bzip2?

Haven't tried the handwriting recognition. On Palm - grafitti and 'keypad' are same input speed - about 8 WPM. But grafitti doesn't consume screen area. Will want to get wireless keyboard - to make use of 70 WPM skills, from time to time. First, i'll log into the unit from desktop, to see if i like it.

If 770 can do USB TCP networking, can it act as a host to a USB thumb drive? USB 160 GB external hard disk? USB printer? USB iPod? Palm doesn't print. Does 770?

What's the biggest flash card available? Where? What cost?

There's a microphone on it (for internet phone)? Where is it? Are there sound recording apps? If not, why not?

Some of these are doc issues. I've only read the manual once. Maybe it's there, and i missed it. This forum has answered several of my questions.

OK, so i can answer a question or two of my own.
I've got Maemo Recorder now - and it works. That handles sound recording.
I've got Password Safe - for recording passwords, and other secret stuff.
I've got FBReader, and it seems to rock.

I've got mplayer, but am having problems with it.
I downloaded another browser - but there are problems with it.

I'm having problems with some repository - can't do updates. Will have to track it down. Until then, can't download abiword or Python, probably etc.

Rome wasn't built in a day or two.

A new questions have come up. I had more, but i'm having a senior moment.

Sometimes, (but not always?) when you install an app, it asks you if you want it somewhere else. For example, it's really a game, but defaults to "extras". But if you've got all this junk there, you have to scroll. I'd like to move the games to games, and the utilities to... you get the idea. Bugger if i know how.

control panel->task navigator->organize

Thanks!
I think i know why i missed it.

Well, I might be the last person posting on this thread. It's perhaps becoming useful for people getting N770s second hand because the places where they're sold new is drying up.

I got mine in an excellent deal along with the Navicore Personal 2007 navigation kit. Effectively the N770 cost peanuts if you deduct the cost of the GPS unit and navigation software.

So the question is: In October of 2007, is the N770 worth consideration?

God, yes. Definitely. If you can still buy one new, do so. They're so cheap as to be the biggest bargain this century.

I sit here in shock having played with the N770 for a day. I can't understand why the reviewers were so down on it, although I understand the firmware has been significantly improved since the early days in 2005. But, really, it's a terrific and usable device. Yes, it's experimental. But a lot of love has gone into making it work well. And it does. Mostly.

The Good:

The browser. It's a real browser, not a mobile browser. You see sites as the designers intended, or you can opt to let the browser rearrange the contents to make them fit better (which I find I do rarely).

Once you set the swap properly, and increased Opera's cache size, it's pretty stable. I've just used the full Gmail website -- the complete AJAX experience. Composing mail, reading... It works. Even Google Maps works... just about. It's insane. Yes, it's not lightning fast but, let's be honest, web browsing rarely is, even on high-powerd computers. The system is mostly responsive, in a similar way -- not lightning fast, but OK.

Also good is the software installation system which, like Ubuntu, is repository based so that dependencies are managed automatically. This is the only bit of Linux foreknowledge I've actually needed. Otherwise I have no clue that I'm running Linux, although I did download an Xterm, just to have the thrill of running shell scripts while sitting on the loo.

The battery may well have come through a time loop from the future because it lasts an unbelievably long time. I spent a few hours wifi browsing (screen at full brightness), and then spent an hour or so listening to Internet radio through the speaker, and then a while more browsing, and still the battery is alive. I'm locked into a battle of wills with it. When will it eventually die?

The Bad:

The stylus keyboard is annoying. I'd just prefer to type the complete word and ignore the autocompleted entries, but they eat into the spacebar area so I often end-up hitting one by accident. I can't find a way of turning this off and that's one other complaint: The OS is surprisingly un-customisable for a Linux distro.

And why aren't there any cursor keys in the text entry area? And why can I never actually get the finger keyboard to appear?

It looks like the Maemo community has forgotten the those using OS2006. All I can find is a website with a list of apps so long that it causes Opera to freeze. The new cute interface at Maemo.org throws up OS2007 software that I can't use, and I can't find a way of filtering the results, unless I'm searching for a specific software package.

But these are minor complaints.

What you have with the N770 is a very usable Internet computer. Mine is also a pretty good in-car GPS unit too. If you want stuff that "just works" then this 'ain't for you. If you don't mind putting in a little effort, and can withstand the odd unexpected event, then the N770 is for you. You'll love it.

Well I have given it a good month with my nokia 770. I think I have gotten over the honeymoon phase, and have some real impressions.

First a little background. I am a computer "guy" and have toyed around with Linux (enough to be dangerous) but I am a huge fan of good interaction / user interface design, and I have gone through an exhaustive comparison between the IT, the Archos, and the Iphone. I will still get an Iphone (after I buy Xmas presents for everyone else), but while I had a good deal available for the IT, I decided to take it.

I currently use a Sidekick as a phone, so I am, again, a big fan of KISS. I like "power" but I like the option of not always having to think to use my devices. I have used a number of different cell phones and operating systems, so I am used to relearning something new.

My unit was a used model (like new condition) with IT 2007HE installed as well as the microB browser, and a few other programs. I was really impressed with the "fingerability" of the device. I don't like styli, so i was happy the OS was accomodating. I could IMMEDIATELY see why this was not a huge splash for consumers, the device was a bit sluggish, and the steps I had to go through to find/add software repositories would turn off most people immediately. The Internet Tablet School is/was a brillant idea and I have NO idea how noobs got around before it.

The device speed is comparable to a windows mobile phone, or a S60 phone. Some processes take 1-3 seconds to load/act making the user think they did not press they key right. I often ended up with having to reopen menus or had two items open at a time because of this. This is less of an issue if you turn unit sounds on (you can hear the click of a successful selection), but I hate system sounds, so it took me a while to get used to this.

The browser was slow as well. So slow in fact that I began a comparison to the proxied speed of my sidekick 2 on GPRS. The browser challenge stalled a couple of times as the microB browser had issues with:

* pages that auto refreshed (ESPN's scoreboard system for example)
* flash based clickable banner navigation (The expandable banners on top of Autoblog)
* Ebay in general. (No idea why, but links would just randomly stop working).

I knew there were other issues with the tablet as I could not browse the file system from any program other than file manager (for example, if I went to change the background to an image that I had on the memory card, the program would crash).

At this point of frustration, I opted to change the OS back to the "original" IT 2006. The nokia OS manager was an easy tool, and 15 minutes later, I had a new tablet.

Tablet Review: Round 2

SO MUCH BETTER!!!!

Seriously, the browser, operating system, all the loaded programs are much better than the IT2007 HE firmware. I know I know, the HE was never meant to be end user material, but I didn't think there was going to be this much difference between the two.

The OS change coincided with a restyling of Maemo.org that improved usability and software downloads exponentially. All in all, this combination would be nice to show off to end users. I am assuming IT2007 on the N800 is the same, as is IT2008 on the n810 (both are on the "to buy" list).

I have to make a side note. I hate using styli (mentioned before), but the 770's is really useable and I find myself not minding as much. The overall experience has been good on with IT2006, and I have found enough software to meet my immediate needs of pdf/e-book reader, web browser, and entertaiment unit. For the prices they are going for now, used, (~$100 USD) I consider it a real bargain.

It's a bit like windows mobile OS. Out of the box, it's ok, but to make it worthwhile, you have to play around with it. I think the line would do well to have something along the lines of what apple has done. Maybe fork the product line. An internet tablet that requires little to no thought to run it and do exactly what it's designed to do REALLY well, and then a HE edition line that allows a number of people to play with it will.

I am very happy with my purchase, I can't say I would have been had I taken the plunge earlier, my background really helped get over a lot of frustration.