Nokia 770 internet tablet sees Nokia veer into non-phone territory
Props to Nokia for totally rescuing a slow news day by dropping this in our laps: the Nokia 770 looks sort of like a tricked out 7710, but the crazy thing is, it's not a phone. It's an internet appliance aimed squarely at your living room, designed to replace that "extra" PC you might be tempted to pick up for basic web surfing/news reading/emailing. At an expected price of $350, it may just succeed, at that. It's connecting to your home network via Bluetooth and WiFi and sports a nice, large screen at 4.13-inches and 800x480 pixels. It'll ship in Q3 2005 (yeah!) with the Opera browser and apps for RSS reading, internet radio, media players, PDF reader, and Flash plug-in, with software updates planned in Q1 2006 for VoIP calling and IM (not sure what the deal is on delaying the IM client, but whatevs). The whole thing is based on Debian Linux v2.6 and the Gnome UI (is that the sound of thousands of *NIX geeks rejoicing we hear?) — they're calling the platform "maemo" and are making it completely open, and will provide an SDK for developers. Smart, Nokia, very very smart. Horsepower will be provided by an ARM based processor, the TI 1710 OMAP, and will come with 64MB DDR RAM and 128MB internal flash memory, expandable via RS-MMC card (a 64MB card will be included stock). So color us thoroughly hot and bothered, though we would maybe have gone with SD instead of MMC and the 3 hour battery/7 hour standby life is perhaps sub-optimal. But hey, we can work with it, we can work with it.
[Thanks, zep and Simon]
