My New Toy

Last week I picked up a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet.

CompUSA in my town was going out of business and had everything 40% off so I couldn't resist.  I wanted the 880 but it was sold out.  At first I was a bit disappointed, but over the week I've loaded it with tons of add on apps and games so I'm starting to love it.  It's great for cruising the Internet while watching TV.  I'm running the GAIM IM client which seems to work very well.

The streaming audio work fine and the Canola client makes it look like windows media center.  I haven't been too successful with Video.  There is an app I downloaded that lets you convert video to the correct format.  I was hoping it would handle standard iTunes mp4 but I have not gotten anything to run as yet.

What I'm most disappointed with is the old version of flash which prevents you from watching YouTube videos.  Someone came up with a web site that you can paste a YouTube video link into, and it will convert the video and let you download it in 770 format.

Also found a very nice book reader client.  It has a built in PDF reader.  I have it connected via USB  at work and just drop all the things I want or need to read onto the media card in PDF format.

I had some Best Buy gift cards so I ordered a 1GB rs-mmc card which will let me pull some audio files and do some more video testing.

I was also frustrated to find that it would not pair to my Blackberry 7130e via Bluetooth.  That's not the Nokia's fault.  The tablet can actually connect to the internet using a Bluetooth connection to a data enabled phone.  I was hoping to use that to connect the train ride home.  Not sure if it's the Blackberry itself, or Verizon  that does not allow the phone to be used as a bluetooth  data connection.  It actually pairs but says no usable service is available.

I was able to connect the built in email client to Gmail, but honestly I connect to the browser version and put it into plain HTML mode shutting off all the fancy ajax stuff, and it works just fine.

All in all it's a lot of fun, and I still have a lot more to explore.