Cheap Alternative, sorta

[atad6]

Has anyone else used a Nokia internet tablet? I just picked one up new for 130 dollars, the nokia 770. For the price it's really great. Of course it has a few quirks and isn't as graceful as the iphone but it does have a solid feature set as a portable internet device.

It runs linux so there is a huge dev scene, with hundreds of different apps. It runs opera and there's a scaled down version of firefox that works with the device. Both render pages the way they should be as it has a 800x480 screen. It also supports flash.

Gaim is supported on the device, as well as gps using a bluetooth device. The interface can be completely customized with themes such as this:

http://maemo.org/midcom-serveattachmentguid-a0003ece286a11dc95a20f6e8169b1c0b1c0/view

There is a maps application as well that works with gps units:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/maemo-mapper

Of course there are some downsides. Being an open platform it's quirky at times and has pretty low battery life, only three hours. It does have removable storage and battery so that's not an issue. I picked an extra battery up for less than ten dollars.

So yeah, I was just wondering if anyone else has used this poor man's device and what there thoughts are on it compared to the iphone. I wasn't sure what forum to post this in so if this is the wrong one please move it.

 

[jwtseng]

I have the N800, which is the newer model. It's a nicely designed piece of hardware and software. I bought it to use as a portable/pocketable web browser, but honestly it has been sitting on my desk as a paperweight pretty much since I bought it.

The wifi option works well as does the Opera browser (Flash YES!). But my main objective was to use it to surf using my cellphone (LG VX8300) as a bluetooth modem, and I have yet to figure out how to do it. The cellphone works great as a bluetooth modem for my MacBookPro, but it just won't work with the Nokia device. So it's not my cell....it's the Nokia's problem.

If I could get the cellphone link to work, then I would have skipped the iPhone 1.0.

The Nokia devices had some appeal to me because of the open source development effort over at Maemo and internettablettalk.com. But I think overall it requires too much futzing around and terminal stuff to get it all to work. Great for the geeks, but for everyday Joe like me it's a little bit much.