Gadgets and Gizmos

The Nokia 770 is billed as an “Internet Tablet” - and in fact, it isn’t a phone at all. However, it can be seen as a logical evolution to widescreen devices such as the Nokia 7710 Smartphone.

This is an interesting device in a number of different ways. Firstly, the hardware: the Nokia 770 features a 800x480 pixel touchscreen in 65,000 colours, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity and expandable memory using RS-MMC cards. There’s no GSM, GPRS or 3G connectivity here - it can be seen either as a portable device for the home or office or a rather impressive accessory for an existing Bluetooth phone.

The second interesting thing about the Nokia 770 is software. Breaking with traditions, this is not a Symbian device , although you might have expected the same version of Symbian as on the Nokia 7710, but it isn’t. Instead, the Nokia 770 is a Linux device, running a development platform called Maemo. And although Nokia hold several patents for this platform, they intent to open up access to their intellectual property to aid development.

The Nokia 770 is compatible with handsets that support the Bluetooth 1.2 specification and come with File Transfer (FT) and Dial-up networking (DUN) support. It is fully compatible for FT and DUN connectivity to the latest range of Bluetooth phones, but for older handsets such as the 6310i, 6600 and 8910i and surprisingly the N-Gage and N-Gage QD you can only use the handsets for dial-up networking, rather than file transfer.

WiFi support is for 802.11b and 802.11g wireless ethernet. We don’t know exactly what encryption levels are available though. This makes the Nokia 770 an ideal second computer for a home environment, or a very flexible tool for a variety of business applications.