Dropsafe

by Alec Muffett

Alan Cox’s Latest Toy

I went to the Castaway Theatre Company’s production of Treasure Island this weekend, visiting Jim and Catrin and ran into old friends Alan (notorious author of AberMUD and the ZX-Spectrum game “Blizzard Pass“) and his wife Telsa; Alan had a new toy, a Nokia 770 which I can only describe as a mini-terminal-tablet-web-browser-PDA-thingy which has WiFi, seriously good Bluetooth, and a pile of other functions all atop a really nice Toshiba Libretto-sized 800×480 touchsensitive display. It runs ARM-Linux, and Alan got an xterm running as-per my request to see if it was a real hackertoy but I didn’t really play with it.[1]

It seemed certainly convenient, easy to use, and compact but I am not convinced that I would use it; the spec pretty squarely limits it to being a consumer device, especially regarding memory.

If my pocket camera takes 1Gb of RAM in a removable chip, could I really cope with a PDA having a mere 128Mb, plus one/more 64Mb mini-MMC-cards?

Plus: how well would the on-screen keyboard cope with vi and emacs?

—
[1] I have a stock set of tests for Unix toys when I first encounter them: which perl; which ssh; which rsync; perl -v; ps auxww; ps -ef; top; cc; emacs -f psychoanalyze-pinhead; successful passing of this test tends to provide incitement to buy, as happened when I encountered Geoff Arnold’s G3 iBook back in – ooh – late 2000?

⊞

Comments

7 responses to “Alan Cox’s Latest Toy”

  1. 83.237.183.240
    re: Alan Cox’s Latest Toy

    Alec, you’re wrong on MMC sizes. This thingy accepts RS-MMC with 1Gb as well — from both SanDisk and Nokia, about 70 EUR per card.

    And don’t mix RAM and card space. In your camera you hardly have even 128Mb RAM as does Nokia 770. It is surely small space for today but given price tag of 350 USD/EUR for the device I think it is tolerable.

    I’ve seen reports that Vim is nice with on-screen keyboard, there is even a plugin to do ESC/Meta inserts 🙂

    Reply
  2. Alexander Bokovoy
    re: Alan Cox’s Latest Toy

    forgot to put name before submitting.

    Reply
  3. alecm
    re: Alan Cox’s Latest Toy

    Hi Alexander!

    If you can put a gig or two of storage in it then yes that would be better, but I am still not quite convinced about having only 128Mb working set. My reference for this would be the 96Mb Toshiba Libretto running NetBSD, equipped with 30Gb of HD. When I took it on vacation with me and wanted to use it for blogging I rapidly ran out of core memory when running NetPBM for an image resize. Stuff like that.

    I freely admit that the 770 is not designed for that sort of thing, but that’s why I wouldn’t buy one. If it had 512Mb of core and a single USB2 port for USB storage, I’d buy one like a shot.

    In its current state it *is* a nice toy, I agree.

    Just not quite right for me, yet. 😎

    Reply
  4. Alexander Bokovoy
    re: Alan Cox’s Latest Toy

    Perfectly true. 🙂

    What’s maybe interesting to you is that it indeed has USB2 port and ability to use external USB storage. With one trick — it doesn’t power it over, you have to use external power when running USB2-based harddrives.

    I’m getting my Nokia 770 next month as part of Developer Device program (and apparently, for free, as Nokia didn’t find a way to get payment in Russia :-).

    Reply
  5. alecm
    re: Alan Cox’s Latest Toy

    Ooh! When’s the 775 due, and how much core will it have? 😎

    Reply
  6. Tess
    re: Alan Cox’s Latest Toy

    Oooh, I’ve been waiting for something like that for ages. But why didn’t they put 3G or GRPS into it as well as the wifi?

    Reply
  7. alecm
    re: Alan Cox’s Latest Toy

    Alan was piggybacking GPRS for it off his bluetooth phone; maybe its an interoperability thing?

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

More posts