As I mentioned a couple of days ago I have been playing with a Nokia 770 lately to see if it is a viable addition to my gear bag. What I didn’t mention before was the difficulty I have been having tethering my HTC TyTn to it through Bluetooth. It may seem silly to use a full featured PDA phone to tether anything smaller than a laptop, but since the TyTn has 3G and the 770 has a decent web browser, it seems like they might make a good pair for those times when Pocket Internet Explorer isn’t enough. It’s worth a try, at least.
The first problem I encountered is that I have Windows Mobile 6 on my TyTn, and that version of the OS no longer has dialup networking support. According to Microsoft’s infinite wisdom, we should all be using personal area networking for Bluetooth tethering. It works really well with the Mac’s built-in Bluetooth stack (and with Vista, I would think), but smaller devices like the Nokia tablets and TomTom GPSes haven’t quite caught up yet. One of the clever hackers at xda-developers put together a package to restore the missing DUN support, so I installed that.
That wasn’t enough, though, as the 770 insists that the TyTn has no usable services on it. It is supposed to support DUN, file transfer, and SIM access, and all of those are enabled on the TyTn, but the 770 still refuses to pair with it using the last official OS release (Internet OS 2006). The 2007 hacker edition of the OS (the N800’s OS backported to the 770) worked better. The phone pairing applet still didn’t work, but you could pair the TyTn using the generic Bluetooth control panel. I don’t want to run the hacker edition OS on my 770, though, as it tends to be slower and more crash-prone on the 770 hardware, and seems to be missing some core features like streaming audio playback. So I went back to the 2006 edition, and today I finally fixed the problem.
My solution isn’t exactly for the faint of heart, though, as it involves directly editing configuration files. Full details after the jump, if only so I can remember what the heck I did in case I ever have to re-flash my 770…
(Read more…)
Earlier, I wrote about my search for the perfect mobile device, and why it seems like there might not be one. But what about a two-device solution? Palm seems to be taking a stab at that idea with their upcoming Foleo, and I’m looking forward to trying that. In the meantime, I’ve been playing with the Nokia 770, another interpretation of the “second device” concept.
The Nokia 770 is the first of two Nokia “Internet Tablets”. Its successor, the N800, is essentially the same device, but with improved hardware. The 770 has recently been appearing at various online vendors for under $150, while the N800 retails for $399, so I thought it would be an ideal way to try out Nokia’s concept without spending too much cash.
The Nokia 770 (and the N800, which shares the same basic design) is a horizontal form factor device with a large touch screen and connectivity through WiFi and Bluetooth. It runs a heavily customized version of Linux and a web browser based on Opera. In addition to the browser the software includes an e-mail client, Jabber and Google Talk instant messaging, and a streaming media player. Notably, the 770 and N800 do not come with PIM software — Nokia is positioning these products purely as Internet tools, not as PDAs. Of course, since the 770s OS is based on Linux, there is a lot of add-on software already available for it, and a convenient package management interface for downloading and installing it automatically.
But how does the 770 work as a “second device”? Better than I expected, although it still isn’t very close to perfect. The browser is far better than most phone browsers I’ve tried, at least in how well it renders the web as it is meant to be seen. It even supports Flash, although the 770 isn’t really fast enough for that, so I ended up turning it off. The e-mail and instant messaging support is seamless and automatic, although the e-mail client leaves a lot to be desired. (It’s no worse than the stock messaging app in Windows Mobile, I suppose.)
For my needs, one of the biggest things holding the 770 back from perfection is its lack of a truly usable input method. The only methods built in are a typical on-screen tappable keyboard (with word completion) and a decidedly sub-par handwriting recognizer that requires you to write in a fixed size box at the bottom of the screen. I haven’t been able to get the handwriting recognition to work well yet, and I doubt I ever will. So for a device with easy to set up email and IM, I find it hard to believe I could actually use it for either. The TyTns thumb keyboard is much more efficient, and the TyTn also has the Block Recognizer (a.k.a. Graffiti with the serial number filed off) which works well for me as a long-time Palm user. The Nokia tablets will work with a Bluetooth keyboard, but that’s yet another thing to carry around, not to mention being useless unless I’m seated.
So, in the end, the Nokia Internet Tablet is closer to what I need, but not quite close enough. I’m carrying it in my gear bag anyway, because it is occasionally useful for its browser. I’m guessing that the crispness of the display will make it a good e-book reader too, although I already have one of those which has been a permanent part of my kit for a while. The search continues… perhaps with a Foleo, next.
With the release of the iPhone, I’ve been considering my options for mobile devices to try to figure out if any of them is ideal for me. The iPhone isn’t — I’ll talk more about that in a later post — and unfortunately it seems like nothing else either. This post, and probably others to follow, is as much for my own benefit as it is a way to publicly record my thoughts in the vain hope that someday, someone might make a device that works well for people like me.
Thanks to my work with Julie at The Gadgeteer and my own fetish for handhelds and PDAs, I have been able to try a number of different things. My current phone/PDA is a HTC TyTn which is arguably one of the best Windows Mobile phones available right now. I’ve used the Treo 650 and also have a Palm TX. I have a couple of Nokia N-Series phones, but unfortunately they’re tri-band so I’d have to switch away from AT&T if I wanted one of those for everyday use.
The options boil down to five smart device platforms:
- Windows Mobile Pocket PC
- Palm OS
- Symbian
- iPhone
- Blackberry
There is a sixth option, which is to use a separate device such as a PDA or ultra-portable PC which is tethered to a phone by Bluetooth when necessary. I’d prefer not to do that, since I already carry too much crap around with me.
Let’s start with the iPhone, because it’s on everyone’s mind right now. First of all I have to say that Apple did an amazing job on the iPhone design and user interface; nothing else I’ve tried comes close. But for me, it falls short in a few key areas.
One of the iPhone’s biggest drawbacks, from my perspective, is the lack of 3G support. Of course, opinions on this will vary based on network coverage. But here in Birmingham, AT&T’s 3G network is pretty solid throughout the city and more populated suburbs, while the EDGE network can get very congested and slow. Theoretically, EDGE can do over 200 kbps; in practice, around here, it’s more like 20 kbps most of the time. For a device where one of the major features is browsing the real web, this really hurts.
The lack of add-on applications is also a big disadvantage of the iPhone, as far as I am concerned. I understand that there are reasons why Apple made that decision for the launch, and I hope that it will change in the coming months, perhaps with the release of Leopard and its development tools. The problem right now is that while the iPhone is very good at what it does do, it doesn’t do enough on its own yet. Web applications are not an acceptable substitute, because inasmuch as EDGE is slow, so are they.
And yes, I do want to do more with the iPhone than it does out of the box. I’d like SSH for server maintenance — one less thing I would need a laptop and a WiFi connection for. VNC would be nice too, or better yet, proper Windows and Apple remote desktop support. I need a text editor or word processor, so that I can whip out a folding Bluetooth keyboard and write. I’d love an e-book reader, so that I don’t need to carry a separate one if I’m going to be waiting around somewhere. Instant messaging is a must, preferably with multiple networks but I’d be happy enough with a mobile version of iChat. Streaming audio and video would be cool too, since the iPhone is also an iPod.
On the “pro” side of the ledger, the iPhone has excellent support for Mac syncing and a great web browser, both of which can be troublesome on other platforms. These may be what make me choose an iPhone in the end, although I doubt that will happen until after Leopard is released (which seems the obvious time to announce an iPhone SDK).
Next time, I’ll talk about my current platform, Windows Mobile. And by “talk”, I probably mean “complain”…
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