Ok, so following on from my last post.. I've now tried the device with my home network and it seems to work much better. However I have found it has crashed a few times when configuring / trying to configure WLAN access (others have reported issues too). I deleted all connections and started over and then things went smoothly. The browser is superb, truly. This is the first handheld portable device I've seen that is a truly viable browser, a combination of the excellent fonts, opera and the superb screen. The 800 pixel width is the clincher, site such as news.bbc.co.uk which are optimised for a 800 pixel width look incredible. I've already successfully checked and written emails using my gmail account, checked out my favorite news sites and order 4 large pizzas.. things that were just too tedious with other handhelds, even the hx4700. The other big app on the 770 is the mail client, unfortunately I no longer use any POP3 or IMAP mail accounts so I'd be keen to hear from others how they've found it. Besides the frequent crashes/resets when messing with the WLAN settings I've noticed a couple or other small bugs i.e. the signal strength being reported as low and never changing. The first sound (click or tap) after power up seems to ignore the current volume setting and plays with full volume, subsequent taps are at the correct level. Another issue is the layout of text on web pages when zooming, sometimes text can start to overlap when scaled up, it starts with spaces seeming to disappear and as you zoom more the text can overlap. That said the zooming and scrolling of pages is very intuitive and responsive provided the page doesn't have too much Flash (I'd love to know how to turn embedded Flash objects off or set them as click to run). Despite the issues i've mentioned the software feels reasonably mature. If I had to compare it to some other project I'd say it was similar to the 0.8/0.9 releases of Firefox compared with the 1.0 release. Feature full and awaiting the final polish that will endear it to everyday users. Certainly it is no more problematic than any of the WinCE products I have tried and is far more pleasurable to use. The always present notification area and window list allow users to always know what is running and what the current state of the device is. The only third party application I've installed so far is an X Terminal. The install was simple, just plug the device into the PC, the 770 unmounts the flash card and the PC mounts it, transfer the files and remove from the PC, finally browse to the .deb package on the memory card using the application installer and follow the simple steps. Using the terminal and by running "uname -a" I verified that the kernel on the machine is version 2.6.12.3-omap built on 5th October. To summarise this is a refreshingly different device and what it does do it does extremely well. If you fancy a portable device for browsing the web then this is it. Hopefully, anytime soon, the now quite quiet maemo.org should spring into life with a variety of community developed applications and the 770 can lead the way to a new generation of portable appliance. Tom.
