Are You Sitting Comfortably?
Use a PDA. Well, I would say that wouldn’t I, as PDAs sit around my house like infrared remote controls sit around most people’s. I’m even thinking of putting one in the loo for guests to play with while they, er, occupy the throne. But that’s a geek householder for you.
The PDA solution is good as far as it goes. Providing you have WiFi integrated it is fast to get onto the Web, the hardware is easy to hold, and if you use one with a high resolution screen, you get reasonable quality Web surfing. But it isn’t really the solution I am looking for in this instance. I want something that’s dedicated to surfing and streaming in ways that a PDA isn’t.
Without a perfect comfort computing solution yet available to me, I’ve been taking a preview of a candidate for the role – Nokia’s 770.
Nokia has only just released this curious little gadget, but I managed to get my hands on a pre-production sample for a while, with which I was able to have a bit of a play.
The 770 isn’t a phone. You can’t get a SIM into it. It is designed primarily for use as a Web tablet, connecting to the Internet over 802.11 b or g. Bluetooth is built in too, and there is a USB connector so you can make a physical link to a PC. It has a passive touch sensitive screen (for finger prodding). It has an RS-MMC card slot for boosting the internal 64MB of memory.
The 770 I tried offered such services as Web browsing, an email client, Internet radio, a news reader, audio and video playback, image viewing and PDF reading as well as an on-device sketch pad, a note taker that uses handwriting recognition, and a couple of games – including Mahjong and Chess.
It runs on Linux, and the software should be upgradeable over time. Although my test 770 didn’t support Voice over IP, for example, some time next year Nokia reckons, it will be able to, thanks to a software upgrade. Instant Messaging should come on stream then too.
The 770 is small – just 141 x 79 x 19mm, and it weighs 230g. Not a feather by any means, but a lot easier to hold in the hand than a Tablet PC. Its screen is, of course, weeny – just a shade over four diagonal inches. And it only offers 65k colours. But at 800 x 480 pixels it can show more of any Web site you visit than any PDA you can currently get hold of.
In principal the 770 seems like a rather clever idea if comfort computing is to take off as I think it might. But there are some important comfort computing criteria it needs to meet:
It needs to be competitively priced if it is to stand any kind of chance at all - does £249 fall into this category? It will need to be fast to render Web sites and other streamed content. It will need to stream from my home network so I can get to all my music, videos, PDF files and any other content I want to access through it. It needs great quality sound output for my music.
It’ll also need to meet the important ergonomic criteria of being small and light enough to hold while slouching or lounging, but not so small that it doesn’t show me enough information at once. I’d go for an A5 sized device rather than the very small format Nokia has chosen. But, assuming this isn’t just a one-off for the company, maybe there is other stuff in the pipeline – a whole family of devices at different sizes perhaps?
Whatever happens to the 770, it looks like being a positive step on the road to comfort computing.
