CNET editors' review
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CNET editors' rating:
stars
Mediocre
Detailed editors' rating
- Reviewed on: 01/17/2006
The aforementioned cover might seem like an annoyance at first, especially when you realize that it adds extra bulk to the Nokia 770. It's reversible, however, so you can slide it over the backside of the device without worrying about misplacing it. What's more, when you slide it over the screen while the 770 is still on, it automatically puts the unit in standby mode. Slide it off again, and the 770 wakes up instantly--nice. Unfortunately, when you reverse the cover, it blocks access to the stylus silo--a silly and annoying design flaw. Equally irksome, the flat plastic stylus fits only one way into the silo.
The Nokia 770 is almost all screen--touch screen, that is. Its TFT LCD measures 4.1 inches diagonally; by contrast, the display on the Dell Axim X51v PDA measures 3.7 inches. That extra 11 percent may not seem like much, but it's enough to make Web pages easier on the eyes. The real news, however, is resolution: At 800x480 pixels, the 770 can display most Web pages with little or no horizontal scrolling required. The screen renders bright, colorful, and incredibly crisp images, making browsing a much more pleasant experience than you'd expect.
To the left of the Nokia 770's screen, a four-way navigation pad enables one-handed operation--you can use it to hop between links, scroll through lists, and make selections. Below the navigator, Back, Menu, and Home buttons also assist in stylus-free operation. Along the top of the 770, you'll find a full-screen toggle button, which removes all but the nav bar from Web pages; an incredibly handy zoom rocker; and the power button. The 770's USB port, 3.5mm headphone jack, AC connector, and media slot can all be found on the bottom edge.
The Nokia 770's expansion slot is disappointing. Although the 770 seems like it could easily accommodate popular SD media, it instead forces you to use a Reduced Size MMC card. These are not only harder to come by and pricier than SD media but also top out at 1GB. On the plus side, Nokia does supply a 64MB card and an adapter, so you can access it via a standard MMC reader on your PC.
To enter data on the Nokia 770, you can tap-type using an onscreen keyboard or try the handwriting-recognition software. We found the latter fairly awkward, especially compared with the more accommodating systems on most PDAs. Although we could enter standard alphanumeric characters, the engine frequently recognized letters as spaces and gave us uppercase letters when we wanted lowercase.
Nokia's printed manual is terse but comprehensive, covering all topics in very brief detail. Fortunately, we found we could figure out most of the Nokia 770's operations via guesswork. The interface is clean, attractive, and fairly intuitive, though it can be difficult to remember when to press the actual Menu button and when to click its onscreen counterpart; the two buttons launch different sets of menus.
The Nokia 770 may look like a PDA, but it has a decidedly Web-oriented feature set. The device connects to the Web via Wi-Fi hot spots or your Bluetooth- and data-enabled cell phone. This being a Nokia product, the 770 should incorporate some kind of CDMA or GPRS connectivity, but alas, that's not the case. Thankfully, we had an easy time ferreting out hot spots in our area; the 770's internal antenna has excellent range, and the onscreen-connection selector shows signal strength for each discovered network and whether or not it's locked.Your Web-browsing experience is robust, thanks to the fact that the Nokia 770 employs the excellent Opera 8 Mobile browser, which supports such amenities as JavaScript, plug-ins, and even Flash content. Go to the AccuWeather Web site, for instance, and you'll see animated satellite maps. We particularly liked the various view options; you can zoom in and out, and you can choose Optimized View to have pages rescaled to fit the screen width, with little to no loss of formatting. We just wish the 770 were more adept at saving pages for offline viewing. As it stands, you're limited to saving only the current page; you can't store an entire site.
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