Maemo 4 Nostalgy
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I am still an owner of the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It was (and still is) a
great device. When it was new (in 2005) it was pretty unusual: a pocket device
with huge and dense display (4,7" with 800x480 pixels) and with integrated
WiFi. With the (less or  more) full, desktop version of the Opera WWW browser
if was an excellent thing to surf the WWW at any place where the WiFi network
existed. Most pocket computers of that time provided only "mobile" WWW browsers
which were much less comfortable.

It had (and still has) also disadvantages: being a experimental (or a pilot)
device it was a bit under powered. Its ARM processor runs on about 200 MHz (the
Zauri and iPaqs from the same time had similar ARMs at 400 MHz) and its 64 MB
or RAM was not sufficient for a desktop WWW browser. So one has to be careful
about memory usage (in practice, opening more than 3 WWW pages at once was not
feasible). Also the used WiFI chipset was quite old and the device was not able
to connect to some encrypted networks (the EDUROAM was out of its
possibilities, for example).

Many of weak points of the 770 were fixed in its followers (N800 and N810
tablets). Unfortunately, the Nokia finnaly decided that the Maemo devices
cannot compete with iPohes and Android stuff and canceled the line. I had the
N800 and then N810 for some time. I sold them when I started to use the
OpenMoko phone ane the Ben NanoNote as the third device was not necessary (I
find that it is impractical to carry a relatively large touchscreen-based phone
and even larger as they provide similar functionality).

Before few weeks I have found a cheap used N810 on the eBay. A I decided to get
it.

As I expected, a lot of services and software repositories are gone. It is
still easy to install chrooted Debian but it's repositories are a problem. The
same can be told about native Maemo repositories. Fortunately, the Nokia
transferred lot of things to the Hildon Foundation but some 3rd party things
are often no longer available. For example I'm not able to find the software
for use of external VGA card (the sis/xsis stuff), there is no longer an
AbiWord and so.

Anyway, it is good to visit the http://maemo.org site. There is still lot of
useful stuff.

The default software has some limitations today: the WWW browser is not able to
open the http://technomorous.eu (well, I know that it will change, ;-) ), none
of pre-defined online radio links works (it says "unknown codec"), the MEdia
player has problems with UTF-8 characters...

But: it still can connect to the EDUROAM network and it works. The RSS reader
works for many sites. There is a working SSH client (I still have to check how
secure it is...). The MaemoMapper works (with the OSM maps). The geocaching
applications works (albeit not with OSM maps :-\ ). 

So it is still good for (at least):

- media (music) playback - and it the on-line radio has MP3 stream, to works,
	too

- geocaching and navigation (but there is no turn-by-turn navigation, only the
	map display and path recoding in the MaemoMapper)

- note taking, computing in the Gnumeric (if one needs is), dictionary access
	(there is a StarDict one)

- on-line access (SSH and so) on internal networks (I'm not sure about SSH
	security as the client is quite old)

- WWW browsing on many sites (the modern sites with tons of Javascripts are
	problematic)

By the way, the original battery life was about 3-4 hours on WiFi and about
7-10 days without it. My machine has an original battery and it seems to be
still around these numbers. The device came from a community library and it
obviously was often used. So the battery is probably very durable.

More about this thing later. I'm going to test it the stuff compiled on my old
770 works here as I don't have nor the desktop SDK not the on-device compiler.