The device is really nice to hold in the hand, it feels steady, well-manufactured. It looks sexy too with this modern metal that it’s made of. However, there are two things I dislike in the design. First, the retractable/rotate-able video-call camera: It is so far away from the screen, that only 2/3s of myself appears in the picture when I hold the N800 directly in front of me. This is a problem if you are in a video chat session with someone because you have to constantly adjust yourself in an uncomfortable position so you are in the visible viewing field in your friend’s screen. Instead, the camera should have been placed directly above the joypad, and be rotate-able the same way some cellphones have it (e.g. the LG U8500 and the Samsung D820). Additionally, the camera can only be used with other N800 GTalk users for video-conferencing and no other application can use it so far.

I have been testing the 770, and I found that it performs its main function, Web browsing, better than any other pocket device I’ve tried. But it falls down badly on many other tasks, partly because of kludgy software and partly because it is agonizingly slow at almost everything other than surfing the Web.

Figure this one out. Taking a normal, 512×512 JPEG and making it your background on the desktop takes an unusually long time.. But bringing it up in the image viewer doesn’t take long at all. It was slow on previous versions, but seems even worse now. What gives?

But while this $360 gadget might fit in great on “Star Trek,” in the real world it competes with a galaxy of other handheld devices - most of which do more than the Nokia 770, and do it far more reliably and gracefully. The Nokia 770’s aptitude at providing a pocket-size window on the Web can’t overcome its ineptitude at almost everything else.

Grainy touchscreen! While the LCD underneath is indeed beautiful, the touchscreen layer above it, is extremely grainy. Very visible mostly when the background is white. It irks me.
No ability to install applications on the MMC card. Just by installing a few third party apps the other night, I was over 50% of the 64 MB of allowance and it resulted in a very limiting experience. No, adding more flash memory to the Nokia internally won’t do it for me because it will always be a finite number of bytes to deal with. I would need the ability the install apps on the flash card, as I can with the Zaurus and PocketPCs.

Geeks who have seen this device often fall in love with it, so much so that it’s been heavily back-ordered since its release. Unfortunately, however, the Nokia 770 is a disaster as a consumer product. Although designing it to do very few things was a shrewd move, sadly it doesn’t do any of them well. Opening a single browser window taxes the device’s limited resources; open the bookmarks window too and you’re likely to get an “out of memory” error. Complex pages can crash it altogether.

The comment on Nokia770.com mentioned trouble with Google Maps, so I checked that out too. It seemed to work ok, but I wasn’t able to drag the map around with the stylus. After tapping on the map, it did react to the rocker button, but this was terribly slow.

Pros: Superb screen. Nice overall UI. Good portable web and email device.

Cons: Experiences slow-down with several applications open. No PDA functions (yet).

Overall: The most important functions of an Internet Tablet work well. The rest should improve with future firmware updates. Some parts of the software still feel a bit like beta releases, but the hardware seems solid and ergonomic. 7/10.

I was a day 1 zaurus owner and this is exactly what the Zaurus should have been but was not. Out of the box, you pop in the included 64meg memory card, turn it on, and boom right in front of my face is my web browser, my RSS reader and e-mail. Best of all since its Linux they support all the secure e-mail connections (tls, ssl, imaps everything) so I don’t have to compromise my security while using it. It has a huge library for something that has only been out for a short while. It’s package management is 100x better than the zauruses! I jump on WIFI or Bluetooth to my phone to the internet, browse to the maemo.org site, click a package and it asks to open it in the package manager! It uses Opera 8 with Flash support. Plays full screen videos just fine, and let me tell you the screen is incredibly bright and detailed!

Its a 800×480 display, just beautiful! Not to mention the browser is a full one! No PDA versions of web pages, no side scrolling. You can zoom in, browse history and book marks it works!

I installed very easily mind you, GAIM for IM, Doom a bunch of other little games, an xterm, they have SSH for it, and the library is growing!

Drawbacks:
Occasionally, when using it not as intended, say using the not-ready or polished GAIM, or lets say loading up 20 web browsers, with your rss feeder in the background its going to run out of memory. This is an internet tablet, it has RSS feeder, web and e-mail and its all fully featured and ready to go out of the box. If you use it as intended it works and thats that!

Contrary to any reviews I have NEVER encountered any wifi flakyness or bluetooth crazyness. I have used it every day for about a week now, and it is just SOLID. Its design is slick as snot! check out the screen shots below, and check out nokias own site for the 770, its silver metal case and its included pouch is just awsome.

and of course, it runs linux! all my Ipaq and palm friends are very jealous!

The screen on this thing is excellent. Quite bright and crisp. The UI is simple, if a little bleak. The icons and design is reminiscent of Nokia’s earlier super-smart phones. As this is apparently running Linux, I’d very much like to figure out if I can install a terminal client, but that’s for you h/\x0rs to discover.