The Syncing Apple

Word out there is that Nokia already has the next device in their Internet Tablet Platform.

Lets take a guess at its next CPU.

For all the talk about what the 770 can do, given better software, and or RAM, the CPU was designed for a mobile phone, not a Internet Tablet. The CPU inside the 770 is the TI OMAP1710. It’s an impressive CPU, I suppose. But TI just released a whole new family in the OMAP line- the OMAP3 Family. The first CPU in that family is the OMAP3430, and if you look at it’s specs, it kicks ass.

Here is the 1710:

And here is the 3430:

Check out those features. Please Nokia, I pray that you’ll have the OMAP3430 in the 880. I’ll even shell out another $349 to buy it if it does.

Posts that contain Nokia 770 per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

For those of you interested in the Einstein Project (emulation of an Apple Message Pad 2000 on your Nokia 770), I have some news. Good and bad of course.

The Good news: Paul has his own 770, which was donated to him. This will certainly help the eventual development of Einstein on the Nokia platform.

The Bad news: Paul is very busy working on his dissertation, so work on Einstein is paused.

Below is his reply to me (posted with permission):

Hello Andrew,
There is no progress regarding Einstein so far. I am currently very busy with writing my dissertation.
I know it’s currently too slow to be usable.
Regards,
Paul

–Ministre ultraplénipotentiaire en disponibilité. Mobile. Sans baignoire fixe.
http://www.kallisys.com/
http://www-poleia.lip6.fr/~guyot/

Sony has released their eReader today– the PRS-500 is available in the US for $349. Guess what else you can get today for $349? The 770 and PRS-500 share nearly the same screen specs (800×600 for the PRS-500 and 800×480 for the 770) however the PRS-500’s screen is non-color. Beyond that, they are very different machines. However, there is no reason that the 770 couldn’t be doing what the PRS-500 can do… read current eBooks with a fabulous display.

One of the biggest advantages is that the Sony is launching with thousands of real books available to purchase and read. It helps being Sony. Over on the 770 I’m stuck with the freebie books, most of which are not very well formatted to begin with and Plucked webpages. Which is better than nothing for many people, myself included, but why not create a new revenue stream for Nokia? I.e. Nokia could (with a lot of planning admittedly) start (re)selling eBooks for the 770- and even for other Linux GTK devices. Once they have a reader in place.

Roger Sperberg had this to say about the PRS-500 back in Dec 2005. He predicts it will bomb. While I don’t dispute that, I hope it sells well enough to convince someone that the 770 could do with a real ebook reader- one that will work with current, commercial books. Here is Robert’s Open Letter to Dr. Ari Jaaksi regarding eBooks.

Of course the Sony is locked down with DRM, and it doesn’t do much else but allow you to read PDFs…. but they are going to push into an area that the 770 should be all over: eBooks. What is needed is a reader that supports DRM, say MobiPocket, who makes readers for PocketPC and Palm. Al at 770 Fan contacted Mobipocket back in at the start of February, and discovered that MobiPocket is waiting for java on the 770… which is a joke, with memory being what it is now. Nokia should contact MobiPocket and help them get a native GTK PocketRead app for the 770.

Update: This is an interesting spec for ebooks, and a reader supporting them: however it also requires java. The Open Reader is a set of XML specs for eBooks- the first reader built using the OR Spec is Thout from OSoft. OSoft has a list of books they publish for reading with Thout. I think Nokia should take a look at OpenReader perhaps…

Nokia better get their butt in gear for the 2nd generation Internet Tablet- the hype (more analysis) over the Microsoft Origami project is growing, and while it is very much vaporware at this point, a lot could happen this year. This device is aimed squarely at the niche that Nokia has identified. More than a music and video player, less that the Tablet PC. There is no telling how close this is or isn’t to a real device, but one wonders what MS could produce, having all the mistakes of Windows CE under their belt, combined with the experience of 2 generations of the Xbox (a consumer device).

You can hope for the worst (like Windows CE/Mobile, which seems to get worse every version), but with the current 770 interface and applications being so achingly slow ( I don’t believe the device is that underpowered), MS could let loose something in this size factor with the power of a near desktop.

At the very least, please make my 770 faster, so I’ll use it more.

Update: I’m not the only one seeing this intersect with the 770. This piece on Red Herring mentions the 770- but incredibly they talk about it being released only in Europe! Nokia needs to spread the word better….

From the Red Herring:

“Nokia’s device has no cellular connectivity,” he said. “It’s a Wi-Fi device, and they have been taken off guard by its success. It was a sleeper, so I think Microsoft has seen that and is trying to get its share of that market. The Nokia device runs Linux, so that has made Microsoft move even faster to market Origami.”

The new trailer for A Scanner Darkly is out, and there is a feature in the current (March) Wired Magazine about the issues that Linklater has had with the technology to rotoscope this entire movie.

Seeing as how the trailer is very cool, and not too big, I decided to encode it for the 770– which I did using the wonderful encoder from the wiki page.

Here is the resulting 7.2 meg file, which plays and sounds great on my 770.

Lil Red Spider- Time Message Pad (TMP)–

A New version of TMP with lots of new enhancments is out, some are Treo650 specific.

2400mAh EXTENDED LIFE BATTERY - BASI24TR650

You need one of these if you have a Treo and say, chattermail… to have a chance at going 2 days without depleting your battery. $39.

The Minimo Project has released a candidate for wm5— now all I need is for Acer to release the cool QVGA N300  in the USA and I’d have something cool and new to run it on.

Treonauts
has some in-the-hand experience with the Black Berry Connect for Palm. I was very excited about this a year ago when it was announced, as I had just switched from a Blackberry Nextel phone to my new Sprint Treo650. While ChatterMail has been very good to me, I would still run Connect if it made sense, and if it syncs OTA calendar and contacts.

And speaking of OTA PIM and email suites, I’ve recently been using Zimbra as my primary email server, after deploying the free version on my own linux server. They promise syncing to the Treo soon (in the coming months) for the paid version, which would make it very compelling. Their web-based 100% ajaxified client is impressive and has replaced Thunderbird for me.

And, even further afield, the SE M600 Phone looks very interesting. The news I’ve read about it mentions that it may have Blackberry Connect.