Nokia 770

The digitizer on my 2002 vintage Handspring Visor Palm Pilot is crapping out on me. It's functional, but every few seconds, i have to recalibrate the digitizer. Sometimes, it messes up during the recalibration, and it can take five minutes to get through it. It often helps to try twisting the whole device this way and that to get it to work. So, i want to replace it.

Some history. Before getting the Visor, i had a 3.5 pound subnotebook. It could do everything my desktop could do, but with less memory and disk. Further, it could communicate with my desktop fast enough for backups and data sharing. But, it was more expensive than my desktop. When it died, i did without for a number of years. Eventually, i picked up the Visor, and though i lost much of what i'd used the subnotebook for, i started using the Visor for new things that i now depend upon.

One way to replace the Visor is to pick up a cheap Palm. The cheapest $100 Palms have three or four times as much memory, are faster, and have color. What's not to like? Just backup the Visor, restore to a new device, and get on with life. But i'm the type of guy who shops carefully for bananas. This is much more important and expensive than bananas.

The deep dive investigation should take into account the Three P's. Portability, Performance, and Price. If it isn't portable, you won't use it. If it can't do what you want, you won't use it. If you can't afford it, don't buy it. But otherwise, price can be optimized. You might get performance at the sacrifice of portability. That would be the desktop.

I did a wider search for bliss, and discovered that the Nokia 770 (in process of being replaced by the newer, bigger Nokia 800) has been heavily discounted, and appears in my price range. It has some new capability. It combines the functionality of my old subnotebook, but with the portability and applications of an organizer. It runs Linux, like my desktop, though that isn't evident from the casual look. Linux is under the hood, and i can get at it. It has the power and resources to do things even a new Palm won't do. Here's a comparison:

Feature	Compaq Aero	Visor	Nokia 770
Date	1995-1999	2002-2007	2007+
Display	640x480 grey	160x160 b/w	800x480 color
Data entry	keyboard, mouse	stylus	stylus *
Carry in	brief case	pocket	pocket
Performance	10 MIPS	5 MIPS	100 MIPS
Communications	Cable 22 KB/sec	USB 100 KB/sec	USB or Wireless 1 MB/sec
Programmable	Yes	Not really	Yes
Apps used	note pad, planetarium, book reader, calculator, Web GUI-DB backed app development, web browsing	note pad, planetarium, book reader, calculator, calendar, sketch, contacts, music apps.	Video clips, photo album,note pad, planetarium, book reader, PDF reader, calculator, calendar, sketch, contacts, music apps, Web GUI-DB backed app development, web browsing
User file store	70 MB	4 MB	192+ MB
Cost	$600	$110	$150 (sale)

While the 770 has a stylus, it also has remote login, as did the subnotebook. But that means that one can use the desktop's keyboard. Further, a wireless bluetooth (or WiFi?) keyboard can be purchased. A USB keyboard might be usable, but the 770 does not have a powered USB port, so a powered hub would be needed. To make it portable, you'd need a battery powered powered USB hub. A bluetooth keyboard would be cheaper and easier. I'll try remote login from the desk first.

In the last months of my Visor, i experimented with various languages for it. Chipmunk Basic is free, but is a crippled version of BASIC, and is slow. Lispme is free, implements a variant of scheme, nearly produces executables that you can hand out (you need to give them the whole environment), the environment is fragile, and the speed isn't very good. There is a free C cross platform compiler that runs under Linux, but what i'm looking for is something i can goof around with on the device. Really, the Visor is too slow to be acceptable for an interpreter. Further, the Visor's one-app-at-a-time execution environment means that the user has to wait for any computation to take place. My best guess is that Quartus Forth is the best language. It's not free, but it produces small standalone executables. Too late.

By contrast, the Nokia 770 has a Perl environment installed when you buy it. That means i can hand out a perl script, and that's it. It will just work. And tiny perl scripts can do alot. There's also a shell, so shell scripts are also possible out of the box. While there is a native C compiler - word on the street says it runs out of resources for non-trivial applications. There is a cross platform C compiler. Python and Ruby can be installed. Further, the processor performance is high enough that a language that does not compile to the native iron, like Perl, Ruby and Python, is acceptable for a large number of applications. Further, since it really multitasks, the user can start a computation, and do something else while waiting.

It's been about a week. So, for example, i haven't tracked down and installed a calendar application. So far, the search has only turned up an app that can't turn on the machine and beep. On the other hand, i haven't even gotten a wireless router set up. How have i gotten anything? Well, one of my neighbors, has an open wireless setup, and cable. Thanks, whoever you are. I've been real happy with it so far. But the real test is how i'll like it over the next few weeks.

The latest news is that it appears that there is a Palm OS emulation application. It may be possible to download my favorite Palm OS apps, and run them on the Nokia.