Some hope for 770 owners...
 

I just noticed this new Ari Jaaksi blog at planet Maemo:
http://planet.maemo.org/

It looks like Ari (at least) has changed his opinion on supporting the 770 users... :)

Edit: Here is direct link to Ari's blog:
http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2007/01/w...-weve-got.html

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

It's disappointing to know that Opera - easily the flakiest thing I use on the 770 - is never going to be upgraded on the 770 due to licencing issues.

Here's hoping the MiniMo gets stable...

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Yep, considering that it is an internet tablet, and I cannot be shagged installing other stuff on it right now considering the mess around factor.

Last os update screwed my scroll bars on Opera, my wife uses it and is asking questions so Im better off running the battery flat!

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Dissapointing? Its a ****ing disgrace... Its a freaking Internet Tablet with a buggier browser than IE.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

What I don't understand is that the Nokia 770 runs Linux, and has as one of its chief audiences the Linux hacker community. I've personally been running the same laptop on Linux for 5 years, and the same desktop machines and servers on Linux for more than that. I just recently bought a Nokia 770 and do think it somewhat disgraceful that Nokia could just say, "Sorry, we won't support it due to hardware/licensing difficulties." It just suggests to me that the Nokia engineering team took a hacker, rather than software engineering, approach to developing OS 2007. I would have made backwards compatibility with the 770 a primary goal, if I were on that team.

Clearly, they just like to use entire communities as "test beds" for their new platforms.

What's sadder to me is that I essentially bought the 770 to replace my Palm Vx, a device I bought 10 (yes, _10_) years ago and have used enjoyably since then. With 8MB of Flash memory, I've managed to ease my commutes with offline articles (AvantGo), ebooks (TiBR) and what's more, Palm OS supported Vindigo, which lets you get full city guides on your device. In 8MB.

Those functions I just mentioned were "faster" on the Palm, though it is true I didn't have luxuries like anti-aliased fonts. I'm the kind of person who likes to hold on to his devices until I really come up with a new use case for a new device. Unfortunately, apparently the Nokia technical lead on this project thinks a "1.5 year old device is old." Well, screw you. I don't like to throw away my money. For me, a 1.5 year old is device is "about the right age to buy it", since clearly you guys had lots of friggin bugs in the last year and a half. If I had bought it a year and a half ago, I would be yet more disappointed.

*sigh*

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Out of interest, how many OS updates did you get from Palm over those 10 years?

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

If Nokia didn't think to negotiate a decent price for opera/flash license updates when they arranged for that software to be hildonized in the first place then that is Nokia's problem not mine. It's not an unreasonable expectation to receive browser updates when they are made available for other devices running slightly newer versions of the same O/S.

There is /no/ reason why the new Opera from the 800 should not work on the 770, merely Nokia's lack of foresight.

If we don't see any more updates for Opera then the 770 will be the last Nokia product I purchase!

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

I keep hearing that, but I haven't encountered it, so I have to assume these comments are mostly hyperbole or involve other factors. IE crashes on me regularly, even the New! Improved! IE7. I get an occasional hiccup with the 770 and N800 browsers, but no outright crashes.

Sorry, I got a good chuckle from the irony in that one. ;)

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

I'm sure the poster will reply later, but in the meantime.. AFAIK for a Palm Vx there were a number of OS updates, three or four at least. It may even have gone on all the way up to the point when PalmOS 5 was introduced (which was for a completely different architecture - m68k->ARM, although OS5 runs OS4 apps through a just-in-time compiler, so in fact most Palm apps. are to this day still m68k apps! Runs on anything..)

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Maybe after all we should just be thankful that Nokia is forging on with its original idea and has put forth a successor to the 770, even if not exactly in the way we expected it to : just today the Zaurus forums were ablaze with (apparently confirmed) news that Sharp has decided to kill the Zaurus line. Why they would choose this moment to pull out of a market they've pioneered years before anyone else, just when it's taking fire with the UMPCs and OQOs and N800 and whatnot is beyond me, but there's no indication either that they're planning to replace the Z with something else...

Now THAT's orphaning !...

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

The fact is Ari indicates a slight retreat from the original stance. That in and of itself is positive for the user and developer bases. Just like I said earlier: people were jumping too hard and too fast. Provide critical feedback, and wait for a response before going nuclear.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

I consider shutting down regularly without any apparent reason an outright crash, but that's probably just me. Opera on the 770 is not nearly as stable as it is on the desktop. I'm still hoping Minimo will eventually become usable enough that I can ditch Opera.

I don't know what IE7 is.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

What I'm saying, Karl (and I thought was very clear, sorry that it was not) is that I have never experienced that browser shutting down problem-- regularly or otherwise. Ever.

And IE7 is the commonly-used shorthand for Internet Explorer 7.

EDIT: I need to qualify the above statement: some websites with technology unsupported by the 770 have caused browser crash, as have network connectivity, other buggy programs and other factors. I just tend to eliminate those instances since they are not the fault of the browser in and of itself.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

I expect Opera to be as stable as Firefox.

Opera on the 770 disappears on me frequently - more than daily. Some people might not call that a crash, but I do.

The only way to keep Opera stable is to only have one window open at any one time.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Texrat: it's worrying when a person in your position isn't aware of the instability of one of the key applications.

See, for example: https://maemo.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=743 - or also the behaviour where Opera suddenly decides that following links is much too much like hard work, and gives up doing anything but highlighting the link when you tap on it.

Hopefully the newer version and more memory on the N800 will have resolved some of these issues, but everytime I use Opera in a rush, I'm always worried it'll crash or just stop working at the most inconvenient moment.

Hence NetSurf.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Yep it quits on me quite often. Sometimes (fairly frequently) I close one browser window with the close X button and all open browsers dissapear. At other times just clicking a link can cause all running Operas to dissapear. I also commonly experience browsers just freezing up - where you cannot click on any link (or rather you can but nothing happens - if you click 'hard' and choose 'open in new window' then the link works but the 'current' window is stuck/buggered.

Ajax simply doesn't work. In the current web environment, that is a glaring hole which renders the 'internet tablet' 1/2 useless.

As its an 'internet tablet' we're supposed to use stuff like Google Calendar rather than local PIM apps, however most of the on-line 'apps' like this simply don't bloody well work in the current version of Opera.

Maybe I exaggerated when I said it was buggier than IE - to be honest I don't use IE any more, FF all the way! It is buggier than I /remember/ IE to be! :)

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

My statements are being misconstrued.

For one, I haven't revealed (and can't) the nature of my involvement but it's a role I guarantee most people here won't accurately guess. The nature of my role has me focused on highly specific areas to the point that I can't spend much time on the things that are near and dear to the developers (but trust me, I wish I could!). So I'm out of the loop in some ways due to time constraints.

Second, as I said, I'm personally not experiencing that Opera flakiness. So the question becomes: why not? I'm running the same OS. I'm running many of the same apps. In fact, I tend to install some apps you guys won't see, one in particular that is very alpha and prone to wreaking havoc on the device. So there have to be contributing factors that just aren't present in my configuration. What they are I have no idea at this moment.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

I'm with you on this one. I found my 770 pretty stable and had very few issues with Opera. (I only upgraded to 2006 a few weeks ago and was very annoyed to find horizontal scroll bars though! and found it would often close all windows instead of one after the upgrade).

I'm guessing one reason I found it stable was whilst I used it for web access daily I almost always used it for the same subset of pages. It was never really used for general surfing.

So lots of forums, the BBC site and the internet movie database about summed it up. I guess I mainly use sites that don't do naugthy things to browsers!

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

That's an important statement.

The main sites my 770 (and the N800) experience problems on are online gaming sites that my kids like to frequent. They wreak all kinds of havoc due to the tech, popups, spyware probably designed for Windows, etc. I don't need those sites and so I avoid them. Sites like this one, CNN, hotmail, ebay et al give me zero problems. I'm sure that's a factor in my Opera experience.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

I don't quite understand why upgrading (or not upgrading) Opera on the 770 should be of importance. It's only an application. If certain programs will not be available for the 770, there will be reasons for this, technical or legal. More important: As we're using a relatively open platform, you can still use another browser if the currently installed version opera isn't what you need. Same goes for Flash, Skype and everything else. (People who want a vendor to take care of each and every aspect of their computing experience should seriously consider Apple. I don't want this kind of paternalism.)

From my point of view, Nokia isn't responsible for application development on the 770/N800. It's nice that they do something in this area, but I don't expect them to. I see Nokia as the company that made the hardware. Period.

What they should do, though: As long as the actual operating system isn't fully open and free, it's up to them to support and enhance it. After all, by using closed source elements in it, they made us depend on their work. So, yes, I do expect them to bring all those low-level changes to the 770.
Of course, I'd rather have them open source all of ITOS2007 (except for the apps mentioned above, but incuding all drivers/libraries/...), throw it at the community with an evil grin and say: "Now show us how you make this run on a 770". This is the way it should work.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

IMHO, There are a couple of important points to consider:

1- Nokia 770 (or N800) is designed and marketed primarily as an Internet Tablet. This means Nokia should pay close attention to browsing experience and web site compatibility; something that is poorly implemented on 770.

2- With introduction of N800, it seems that Nokia down plays the importance of browser stability and site compatibility (e.g. Google Calendar...) on 770.

It's like selling a phone that doesn't work half the time due to software issues and then after introducing a new and improved phone excusing oneself of fixing the issues of the first one. If Nokia backports OS2007 base to 770, but Opera browser issues remain unsolved or half the frequently used websites stay inaccessible, then, the 770 Internet Tablet hasn't improved meaningfully.

Please remember, I'm talking about Internet usability on a so called Internet Tablet, not other features like Multimedia. So, I ask this : when Ari (with all his good intentions that I respect) states possibly there won't be an improved Opera browser for 770, why is it acceptable?

Please also note, big corporations mistreat their consumers, because we let them to do so and brush off the, bitter, feeling by saying they all do that. I strongly disagree with rude or angry protests, but, if a user community demand getting a service worthy of the money that they pay, then, they will get it.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

It's a crash, trust me. If this was a Microsoft thing, they'd probably call it the "user-independent shut-down feature", but in Linuxland, we call things by their ugly names.

"Thy program shalt not close down without thy express permission", is carved in aeon-old granite in mile-high letters in Bitstream Vera Sans.

And even that is no guarantee...

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

then disable your wifi and USB connection, and lock you screen. That should guarantee its stability.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Ooohhh! I almost forgot about the link-amnesia! It's a real tick in the 'nads, that one, but I've gotten so used to it that I almost subconsciously switch to double-tap whenever Opera throws that fit on me.

Can't wait to see any alternative browser finished for the 770.

I really don't understand why people, who are supposedly in the know, keep heaping praise upon Opera in portable devices. Sure, it's a nice browser on the desktop, but it is a pile of shite on any handheld I've ever used it on (or rather: have been abused by it on).

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Karel, before you rip Opera a new one for its "aweful browser," can you name a single other company that has tried to consistently provide a mobile browsing experience with support for modern web standards across a huge range of devices? The only other browsers that are even in the same ballpark are Access Netfront and Minimo. Minimo has more or less been abandoned by Doug Turner at this point and Netfront comes in a rather distant third, given my experience with version 3.3

Opera isn't perfect, but the latest version on the N800 is a big improvement over that on the N770. I sincerely hope that Nokia continues development of the N770 and licenses the latest Opera for it as well. A lot of people bought 770's very recently and to have a company heavily advertise a product shortly before dropping meaningful support for it would be the highest form of disrespect for your customer's hard earned. I know that I tend to gravitate to and stick with companies that have good long term support records and avoid those that take the money and run. In the tech business, you certainly don't want to burn the power user base, either. Even though they are a small minority, they are a very vocal and influential one.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

So, um, back on the original topic (Ari's blog)...

Yeah, I think it's great that Ari is acknowledging the frustration of legacy 770 users. But I don't think that blog is as re-assuring (at least to me) as it should be.

"We will now investigate what it takes to run N800 software on 770 hardware." That statement is supposed to appease us, but it also, to me, implies that until we started complaining, Ari (and Nokia) had no intention whatsoever of providing OS 2007 (or a variant of it) for the 770. I guess there original plan was to just slip it right by us and hope we didn't stir up too much bad PR.

"Should we find it impossible to have N800 software even partially run on 770, you will see the details of our attempt." It sounds like they haven't even started this work, so even if it does work out, I wouldn't expect it to be coming any time soon.

Basically, I think this "re-assuring" blog has had the opposite effect on me. I still hold out hope, but it is greatly diminished by this blog.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Your field of personal interests? The same goes for me, so far, not one of the web sites I really need has ever crashed Opera on the 770.

But then, I barely ever visit sites outside the scope of my personal and professional interests, which are almost entirely scientific, non-profit, open-source or underground in one way or other, so that I almost never come across IE-centric sites containing orgies of animated GIFs and Flash menus, buggy stylesheets of several 100KB size, and piles of concurrently running Javascript usage tracking spyware.

Presumably, the overwehelming majority of popular entertainment web sites is built that way - and whenever I've stumbled into something like that, Opera was way less stable than on my usual tasks.

Sevo

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

No offense meant, gnuite, but I think you're just approaching that blog update with a negative bias. I doubt any sort of subversion was intended toward the community-- I think they just honestly misgaged the response, and you're now seeing the realization of that based on critical feedback.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Actually, this sounds like it could be a fun game: "Guess Texrat's Role". Now, according to the rules of this game, there are two ways to win:

1. Accurately guess Texrat's role. He has posted a lot of clues so far. But, given that he likely won't admit it if someone actually guesses correctly, it will be difficult to verify a winner this way.
2. Force Texrat to reveal his role. This could be as easy as simply suggesting lowly, ridiculous, monkey-capable jobs, like (insert insulting job title here). This is almost the opposite of #1 - if you can suggest roles so far out that he feels compelled to dispel such rumors, then you win!

#2 might be a little demeaning, though, and I'm a little ashamed even to suggest it, so I think that winning by #1 (even if nobody other than Texrat will know it) earns more respect, and "winning" by #2 is just bad form.

My guess is that his role is involved (as a contractor) in some sort of sub-system (not whole-system) QA verification, be it hardware or software. It could be specifically focused on part of the new functionality, like the camera. Actually, this post provides explicit evidence that it is camera-related:
Of course, I could be way off. :)

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

So you're saying that they had plans all along to release OS 2007 for the 770, but didn't want to tell us? Maybe they were waiting for everyone to assume that the 770 was going out of favor and thus buy an n800 before they started to calm the 770-loving masses... Yeah, I can see the financial motivations (and thus the corporate plausibility) of that approach. That still rubs me the wrong way.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Gnuite: Based on the christian-summer-camp-counselor-attitude replies, I'd say PR guy...

But in all seriousness I'd side with something along the lines of QA. I like texrat which should immediately rule out anything in sales. ;)

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

A few observations:

1. The fact that Opera on the N800 is better than Opera on the 770 means absolutely d*ck to me, a 770 user. Besides, we've but received an official communiqué that there will be no better Opera for the 770, so your pleading to Nokia's common sense comes a bit late.

2. It's okay for Opera to suck vacuum because nobody else produces anything worthwhile?

3. Netfront ain't half bad. At least 3.4 didn't crash on my SimPad. Then again, it'll be a cold day in hell when I'm paying for a bleeding webbrowser, so Netfront is completely out as far as I'm concerned. The fact that they don't even know what "Linux" means, doesn't help either.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Nooooo... I did not say anything close to that. :p

Just keep close to the actual wording (ie, avoid reading between the lines!) and you'll be more on target. ;)

As for my role, I'm shutting up now because you guys are sharper than I'd thought. :x (oh, and thanks Hedgie :))

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

The comment from Nokia seems fairly vague to me, and could be interpreted a number of ways.

The way I read it, Nokia won't be releasing upgraded functionality for Opera on 770 (ie. they won't be upgrading the current 770 v8.02 to the v8.5 provided on N800/OS2007) however they could/would/should provide bug fixes to the current 8.02 build in any future 770 firmware.

If you read it this way, Opera may still receive updates to make it crash less often or prevent it from forgetting what to do with hyperlinks, but it won't receive any major functional updates. Seems fair to me, to be honest.

And to be honest I don't see much difference between Opera 8.02 and Opera 8.5, although the latter does seem more stable but that could be due to other OS2007 improvements than any changes in Opera itself.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Here’s the thing - the Internet is a complicated and constantly changing/upgrading beast. I had no idea that the 770 would be left behind so quickly and completely, as in, uh, less than a year. It is similar to the Newton - a great device in its day, but it became obsolete in a few years. Problem is, the 770 was obsolete in less than a year! If I knew what I know now, I would never have kept it. There - I've said it. If I could return it now, I would. If I could sell it for any decent money on eBay, I would.

I said this before – if I could simply fall back to the 770 as a PDA, I would be okay with it, and I honestly thought that would eventually happen. I thought somebody would write a decent PDA app, or Nokia would just toss one in there. Nope. All of the PDA programs for the 770, in my opinion, are cr@p. Sorry if I hurt anybody’s feelings, but, in my opinion, it is true. All I wanted was a to-do list, a calendar with audible alerts, and integrated contacts, with fields like: wife’s name, kid’s names, multiple email addresses, multiple phones, multiple locations; you know, a usable contact management app. The built-in contacts app is cr@p; it is the sort of thing that students write in college classes. Admit it – even the hundreds of freeware contact manager programs all over the web are better than the built-in contacts app that came with the 770. True.

I have bought multiple Newtons, Palms, Psions, PalmPCs, PocketPCs, and every single one of them kicked the 770’s butt, big-time, in the simple arena of PDA functionality. Every single one of them has an OS that is capable of waking the CPU up to alert the user of a scheduled event. That one simple feature is impossible on the 770. I have a Newton Original MessagePad in my office drawer, and even it is infinitely better as a PDA.

Every handheld computer in the world has the ability of waking up at a particular time. At the very least, we could schedule in cron, a bunch of tasks to pop up a message. Even the IBM 8080 could do that. Even my Motorola Razr can do that. Even my wife’s old Nokia phone can do that. Even my old Nokia phone from 2000 could do that. Even my 6-year old iPod can do that. This computer cannot perform that one simple duty. You can do this much with a 40-cent notepad, or a stack of post-it notes. A paper day-timer is infinitely better at managing information than the 770.

If I had the avail of a larger hard drive, I could fall back to the 770 as an MP3 player. If it had [real] Bluetooth support, I could use my Motorola Bluetooth stereo headphones with it. Nope. 1-2GB is nothing compared to my vast array of music. A $50 iPod Shuttle is better at playing music than the 770.

If the 770 had an integrated camera, like my ‘old’ Palm Zire 71, I could fall back to using it to photo-catalog our antiques business (my wife is an antique dealer). That is something I do with the Palm Zire, which has an integrated camera.

I finally got Minimo to install; I got lucky and figured out the Application Installer thing, and now I can run Google Calendar. That is the saving grace, because I was about to stick it in the drawer, next to the Newton.

Installing apps is ludicrous on the 770. True. Everybody knows it. Seriously, who in the heck is going to go to all that trouble, just to install an application? I would bet that hundreds of 770’s were/will be returned for that reason alone. I am a career software developer, and I even have trouble with it.

I got the 770 for my wedding anniversary a year ago, and I was about to buy a Palm Treo at that time. I didn’t feel right, returning an anniversary gift, you know? But I should have. I thought I would have been able to replace my Palm Zire with the 770 PDA software that would be coming next week, next month, etc. But it never came, and I still use my Palm Zire, a year later – I cannot remember all my meetings without it. I work in a corporate environment, and a PDA is as important as a pen and a phone.

I work in a building with 100 or so programmers; most of them are talking about the Apple iPhone. Most of them will buy one, because their iPods are getting old, and their phones/plans are ready for replacement. I believe the iPhone will be like the PS2, in June. What can Nokia do, to boost their N800 (and 770 sales), and also protect their cell phone business? Save the Internet Tablet from a bleak eBay future. How?

a. Re-think the PDA thing. All you need to do is standardize the format, in XML, for all the PDA apps, and create some sort of syncing app. Bluetooth sync would be nice, but heck, it could even be where you sync via the USB cable. Resolve the wake-up feature. I know it is in there; I did a paper in college on the Apple Newton’s OS, which also ran on the ARM CPU. By the way, Apple saved the ARM company from going out of business, with the Newton. The ARM will wake up, but the OS must tell it to.

b. Fix the browser. If Minimo can run Google Calendar, why can’t 770’s Opera? It doesn’t have to run Ajax, but it should be able to do what Minimo can do. Hey, if you are selling an Internet Tablet, shouldn’t it be, uh, really good at doing the Internet? Hello?

c. Don’t abandon the 770. If you do, who will buy the N800? If you don’t want the N800 to be the last tablet you sell, you need to consider the current customers. The internet will broadcast your foibles to the world, on the mouths of discontented customers.

Just so you know, I work for a large un-named global company. In the next year or so, my team is going to replace thousands of Windows CE devices that have reached end-of-life. Those devices originally cost $1500 a unit. The possibilities are Windows CE, Palm or some custom embedded OS device. If I thought the 770/N800 was something that we could develop for, I would recommend it, but honestly, I am not getting a warm fuzzy, here.

d. Give us Java. If Java can run on my old HP Jornada 548 PocketPC, why can’t it run on the 770? This is where your users want to be. Java is the new Visual Basic. Talk to Sun; they will help you; they want everybody to use Java, (I guess?). If I had Java, I would have built my own PDA software. I am not going to learn a new language – who has time? Hobbyist programming is the domain of college students, who have lots of time. I code J2EE, C++ and VB (and still a lot of COBOL, unfortunately), 50 hours a week. If I had a tool for any of those languages, except COBOL, I would use it. Java is already a Linux staple.

Now is your time to shine, Nokia!

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Mr Pedantic here! The 770 became available in November 2005 and became (potentially) obsolete (though I disagree with that - for now) in January 2006 so that means it had a 14 month life span (and may yet continue for many more months to come!) :)

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

770s all go for above £150 on ebay, they seem to be very much in demand there still. :)

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

Micheal - the 770 is called the Internet Tablet. It runs the Internet Tablet Operating System. And you know what? It's not a PDA! :)

According to Nokia - who stated this when they launched the 770 - it is not a PDA because it's primary design goal is to connect the user to the web. Any other function should be considered a bonus, but if you don't like them then develop something better - that's the point of the Maemo platform! :)

I actually thought installing apps on the 770 remarkably straight forward - certainly better than having to connect my device to a PC so that I can install the app on the PC in order for it to then install itself from the PC on to the mobile device (think: WinCE madness).

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

The trouble with Java is that it's utterly cr@p for building desktop apps, it's getting it's arse spanked by C# every day of the week - nobody is interested in developing Swing apps anymore. Mono would be a better bet on a mobile device, Java as far as I'm concerned (and I'm a Java tech lead in a major investment bank) is rapidly becoming useful for server platform development only, by and large. Practically every Java GUI app I've used (apart from Eclipse) has performed appallingly on the desktop, I just don't see it performing well on the Nokia devices.

Re: Some hope for 770 owners...
 

He does make a solid point about the Internet experience on the 770 (and, albeit to a lesser extent, on the N800 also) being way too limited to warrant the moniker "Internet Tablet".

And although application installation on the 770/N800 should basically be hassle-free, due to the Debian foundation, the Abominable Application Installer makes it a lot harsher than it should be.