Nokia 770

It came to market later than planned, but the pocket-sized Nokia 770 feels like a worthwhile experiment in portable computing.

The 8.1-ounce unit is a bit larger and heavier than a high-end PDA. Unlike a PDA, this device wasn't designed to keep your contacts and calendar up to date, but to be used as a secondary Wi-Fi-enabled Web surfer.

Initial boot time is sluggish, so you'll want to keep the 770 in Sleep mode thereafter. Once booted, however, the screen is bright, with deep color saturation and good responsiveness to the flat stylus. A four-way directional pad to the left navigates pages, and shortcut keys are assigned to the Back, Menu, and Home functions.

The basic interface and input scheme uses a custom Linux OS that vaguely resembles a Tablet PC. Icons for Web, e-mail, and a sub-menu of applications occupy the left corner, as do icons for switching among all open tasks. A persistent press on the screen brings up a context menu that offers handy shortcuts to necessary operations like zooming, closing, bookmarking Web pages, and saving images to files.

The 770's handwriting recognition works better with printed letters than with script. Clicking into any text field brings up the virtual keyboard or handwriting screen. The system generally works well, but you need to memorize the meaning of all of Nokia's unique icons, since this screen and stylus have no hovering capability or pop-up tips.

The Web experience is surprisingly satisfying for rudimentary browsing. The 802.11g performance was not as swift as most laptops, but pages loaded quickly enough. The custom Linux OS and its connection wizard sniffs out and connects to a Wi-Fi router or hotspot about as easily as Windows XP. You can also use a Bluetooth link to your phone and tap into the Web over a cellular phone line. Our 770 and Motorola RAZR did handshake properly, but for some reason never established a connection to the Internet.

Nokia meets the challenge of squeezing full Web pages onto a 4.1-inch screen in a number of smart ways. Multiple zoom levels are available in the context menu and it supports a Full Screen mode and manual scrolling by pressing and dragging the stylus on a screen. We would like to see Nokia try to scale text more effectively, because even in Zoom mode the type can be challenging to all but the eagle-eyed.

The 770 runs into trouble as soon as you throttle up beyond basic browsing. We never succeeded in getting a Windows Media video to stream, and Flash animation either didn't work at all or slowed the system down to a crawl, producing low memory errors and serious lag. Nokia has a lot more work to do to make the 770 a better multimedia Web browsing device.

Nokia includes a wide range of cool and useful features. The e-mail client is quite good, finding and delivering our POP account's messages easily (it also works with IMAP4). Web radio streams music from almost any Web address that you can copy and paste into the player. The RSS reader can poll your feeds, but again you need to copy and paste links. A more automated content discovery and subscribe feature would be better.

Photo, audio, and video players work with most of the common types of media files stored on the removable MMC card. Basic PDA tools are here (clock, contacts, etc.), a few games, and a good file manager that keeps everything within easy reach.

Unfortunately, most of these features are buggy. More than a few open windows bring the 770 to its knees. The Web radio applet returns cryptic messages, telling us songs weren't playing when they were. The plug-in compatibility issues will be the most frustrating for users, since the real multimedia depth of Web surfing fails to come through.

Altogether, we like the design and the broad functionality Nokia has built into this bold experiment in pocket computing. Using the 770 is more satisfying than Web surfing on most PDAs and certainly on any cell phone, and yet it chokes on its own ambitions. Nokia will have a true winner on its hands once it makes the Web more readable and irons out some of the performance bugs and compatibility issues with a firmware upgrade or two.