Hi All, Been looking forward to this for months, thanks Nokia for a chance to get my hands on one of these babies, looking forward to contributing. Anyway, here goes, first impressions. Wow it's small! Either the models in the pictures have tiny hands or mine are huge, who knows? I was also surprise by how light weight it was. It might just be slightly too large for regular jeans pockets but if you a baggy pants kind of guy then you could carry it easily. Very nice intelligent feeling design, the sleeve is aluminium and was beautifully cool to the touch having been chilled in the back of the UPS van. Slide the back off, clip the battery in, recover and power on. NOKIA The Nokia logo appears in crystal clear fashion. After about 10-15 seconds a dialog appears asking for my choice of region then another appears asking for a choice of phone. I think I was also asked to name the device at this point. No bluetooth phone to hand so I skipped the phone setup. My workplace has 802.11g so I attempted to setup the wifi connection, network found no problems, reports high strength and unencrypted. All good there. Right we're in. The af-desktop looks beautiful. Somehow better than seeing in in an nested X window, plus all of the menus and notification areas are populated. Also nice to see is the handwriting recognition. Everything feels snappy, with just a few delays on opening some applications, open opened switching between them is very fast. Image viewer, nice simple application but for some reason the supplied demo images aren't of a high enough resolution to really test out the zoom and scroll, at actual size they match the screen size. Video player, whoops this one is a bit embarrassing, the device had an 8mb video of the Ice Age 2 trailer in it memory. However on my first two attempts at playing this file it reported that the file format was not recognised. After selecting the file from the browse dialog for the third time it decided to play. Play back was reasonable but not amazing, with just a 8mb video spanning 2 mins it's hard to judge fairly as the quality of the video is probably not too great. Right now on to the web, lets do what the device was really intended for. Clicking the browser icon I select news.bbc.co.uk from the preinstalled bookmarks and wait. The status bar makes all the right noises but nothing appears... hmm something up here so I launch the connection manager, low signal is reports and only about 80kb have been received, none are reported as sent. Hmm lets close the connection and try reconnecting. The connection manager provides a list of available connections, there are two networks in the area and the 'guest' network which I had tried previously now reports full strength. I give it another try. Again it says it is connected but then in the connection manager window it reports low strength and no bytes are sent. After about 10 mins of playing with settings and attempting to refreshing non-loaded web pages I eventually see that just 2kb have been sent. Something big seems to be up here but to be fair I don't have another WIFI device to hand to test the connection so I'll wait until I get home to give it a try. Games.. chess, mahjong and marbles. Chess, played on hard, lost, played on medium, lost, played on easy, lost. Yip the chess game seems as good as all others at humiliating me but to those who know how to play it will probably provide a good game. Chess and the other games all run in full screen mode and the exit button now functions as a pause button which brings you out to the title screen where you can choose to continue, restart or simply close the application. Mahjong is extremely similar (i wonder why?) to the GNOME mahjong game. The pieces are nice and the stylus is easy to play with. The final game marbles feels familiar but I'm not sure where from. The board looks a little like a platform level and has on it several marbles and at target pattern of marbles that you have to create. Using the stylus you can select and then send a marbles in any direction (up,down,left,right) but once in motion it will continue until they reach a wall or another marble. You finish the level by creating the target pattern. The challenging, addictive and good fun, I personally whiled away a good 30 mins and will be back for more. One thing that majhong and marbles could both make good use of but don't are the zoom buttons, both games are quite detailed and i frequently felt I'd like to be able to zoom and scroll the boards. Audio, without the network I could only play the include MP3 file, though the speaker it sounded OK but I think that a set of headphones would be a must for music listening. Handwriting, this isn't as intuitive as I'd expected but seems as good as any I've used. Using the notes I repeatedly tried to enter "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" as this test every English character. I only tested lowercase but it took me four attempts until I could write the sentence perfectly first time. The thing causing the most trouble was that when the characters are recognised can are converted to text and left aligned in the text box, if you then enter another character next to where you entered the first character the distance between the textual character and the entered character will be interpreted as a space and an new word will be started. However if you notice the conversion happening and move to right the next character at the end of the string then it works pretty well. I had a few issues going the other way as well where I wanted to insert space but the characters were just appended to the current string. The auto completion is very useful and speeds things up no end, though it doesn't always prioritise words quite as I'd expect. Well that's as much as I've had a chance to investigate so far. Generally I've very impressed and so are many of my workmates, plenty asking me about the device and marvelling at the screen. I look forward to testing out the browser, hopefully it's just an issue with our network, once I've tested it on our home WLAN I'll report back. I'm also keen to try installing some third party apps and seeing just how easy it is to port gnome apps. I'm off to play more and start some hacking. Thanks again to all the guys and gals that created the device and of course all the open source contributors. Tom.
