My own Nokia 770

On opening the parcel I found what looked like an official retail package, and in fact the device came complete with all content listed below "Sales Package Content" at the Nokia site. It was slightly disappointing that there was neither a developer CD nor accompanying information enclosed, especially as the downloads necessary for the environment add up to slightly less than 450 MB. Of course all information is to be found at maemo.org, but it would at least have saved some time to have them enclosed on CD to get you started. I'm at a 2 Mbit/s ADSL downstream connection, so this was not a real problem, but developers with slower connections will likely have to wait for the downloads to complete.

Then I put in the battery an tried to power on. Nothing. "Ok, the battery has to be charged first", I thought, plugged in the travel charger and let the battery charge for about a quarter of an hour. Then I switched the 770 on and let it fully charge first. In hindsight I think I have simply pressed the power button not long enough for the first time to switch the device on. Things were a bit hectically at the office. It worked the second time, so I don't know if this is exactly true. Speaking of battery time, I've used the 770 in offline mode (Bluetooth and WLAN disabled) mostly for MP3 playback and gaming since Friday, and the battery display dropped to 25% only this morning. The Chess game is a challenge even in easy mode, by the way.

The software that comes with the developer device still has some flaws, but that was to be expected. Localization is perfect, but the video player crashed the OS the first time I tried to access the IceAge2 trailer video clip, and the unit rebooted. - Ah! As I'm writing this, I'm just geting an optical and acoustical warning that the battery is nearly empty. This is really nice and gives you enough time to close any open applications. - The second time I tried to watch the trailer I got an "unknown file type" error, but it worked afterwards. On testing I'm still getting ocassionally "unknown file type" errors. The audio player lacks a convenient method to add whole directories for playing, or I was not able to find it, which would mean it might be not intuitive enough. I put some MP3 files on the RS-MMC card and built a playlist by hand. The player seems to forget this list occassionally, however. At least I had to rebuild it three or four times until it kept stable. The other applications still have to be explored.

I will comment on the hardware tomorrow, as I'd like to do this in detail. Yesterday I set up the Scratchbox development environment for the time being, as you can read on the maemo developers list.