gadget: Nokia 770 first impressions

[amezri]

So I've suddenly decided that I would like to read more eBooks. I order to do that, I wanted to buy some sort of portable eBook reader. There is of course the Kindle (and Kindle 2) from Amazon and then there's Sony's Reader. Both of them had things I really liked (Kindle's free EVDO connection; Reader's additional formats) and things I didn't like (Kindle 2 has no card slot; Reader has no WIFI or EVDO) but the biggest negative for both was the price. I definitely don't have the $300 they'd want for either device.

Googling for eBook readers, I found quite a few alternatives, but they were all still generally in the same price range (or more in some cases). The only exception was the Nokia Internet Tablet 770 -- you can download FBReader for it and the reviews were all pretty positive. Poked through eBay and won myself an NIT 770 for $50. The seller had already upgraded to OS2008 Hacker Edition, so I wouldn't have to do that.

It arrived this afternoon and I immediately got it out of the box and turned it on. Ran all the standard first time user things. Named it Agathon (yes... it's BSG related). Battery died after about 20 minutes, so I charged it for about an hour before playing again.

There were some start-up glitches -- got some sort of load error with the GUI -- and it restarted itself a couple times. Connecting to my wifi was easy, though, and installed rootsh so I could apply some tweaks to make it run faster.

Ended up restarting a few times. Then installed FBReader. Uh. I also installed the LCARS Modern theme because I am a geek.

Here's a picture of Agathon (in case you missed it above, yes, I am being a BSG dork) with an Altoids tin for size comparison:



I then set about getting some eBooks on it. My first problem was that the 64MB RS-MMC card that came with it was only 16MB for some reason. Whatever. I'd already won a 2GB one from eBay for $5, so this is just for playing.

FBReader was having some trouble with HTML files I converted from free PDFs acquired from Moira Rogers. RTF seemed to be less problematic. PDFs were perfectly fine with the included PDF reader, but FBReader has nice controls for reading the files. Tried a ton of PDF to HTML/Word converters, even tried using Gmail to save the HTML view of the PDF, but nothing was working.

I contacted moirarogers and got the proper HTML files (since the site was down at the time) for the free reads I wanted to put on Agathon and she told me about Mobipocket eBook Creator.

Installed. After some format/coding adjustments, discovered it was easy to use and the prc files it outputted were all generally correct. A couple of PDFs I converted weren't 100% for whatever reason (quotation marks show as boxes; linebreaks kind of gone) but overall I'm happy with the result.

I haven't used it to read a whole eBook, but I'm excited to give it a try later. As an emergency, "I need to be on the interwebz!!" it'll definitely be fine, but I don't think it's that great for constant use.


To sum up, awesome device. OS is good, but slow (though honestly, NIT770 was not built to handle OS2008). FBReader is great. Screen is a sufficient size for reading (probably). Off the 1 hour quick charge, I think I got 5 hours of power. It's hard to judge properly since I wasn't actively using it for all 3 hours; it went idle a lot. Glad I bought it and am looking forward to using it as an ebook reader.

Comments

[bibliophile0614.livejournal.com]

No pic :-(

[amezri.livejournal.com]

Fixed! Try again :)

[springwoof.livejournal.com]

:( didn't see the picture of your nifty new toy!

[amezri.livejournal.com]

Fixed! Apparently Twitpic does not allow the hotlinking. Uploaded to LJ gallery. Should work now. :)

[springwoof.livejournal.com]

wow! it's really tiny! Let us know what the reading experience is like, will you?

[amezri.livejournal.com]

Will do another review in a couple days probably :)

[veracity]

Update with how it works in a couple days, please? I've been looking for a good eReader and came up with the same problems. 300 is a bit much, and they seem to be on the lower end of price. I'd like to have a portable book. I love the paperbacks, but man, they're a pain when you're done.

[amezri.livejournal.com]

Will do! I'm going to try reading with it tonight and see how bad the eye strain is. Screen resolution is 800x480, so text is very crisp.

I don't think FBReader will take any files with DRM, but if you can convert it with Mobipocket to a useable format, you'll be fine.

So far, though, I do like it even if it does need a combination of hand holding AND brute force to get it to do what I want. I'm hoping once I have the larger MMC card in hand and can expand the virtual memory, it'll be a bit faster and less crashy.

For now, keep an eye on ebay auctions -- I saw a handful of them that should still be up when I was looking the other day.

[veracity]

Yep, see that's why I was looking for a smaller one. Is it easy to convert the books? 800x480s big enough since you're not gonna be reading it for 12 hours at a time. It'll just be good to have when you're going off and have to kill time at the doctor's office or something. Ya know? I'd have more book choices in my hand.

[amezri.livejournal.com]

I used it for about 2 hours last night reading in bed and it works well as a reader, I think. It's pretty lightweight and easy to hold in just one hand where with the Kindle and Sony Reader, I feel they're kind of large and you need both hands.

Mobipocket Creator will convert Word files, PDFs, and HTML into various other formats. FBReader will read PRC, HTML, and RTF. It's relatively easy to convert from HTML to PRC with Mobipocket Creator - I just set all encoding to UTF-8 and it seemed to work without weirdness. The problems I had going from PDF to HTML were minor and I still had a generally readable file.

I think all OS versions come with a PDF reader and that does work really well. It just doesn't have the same functionality as FBReader for rotating the screen and page scrolling.

I'd say if you can get one on eBay for $100 or less, go for it.

[rpc180.livejournal.com]

I really like the LCARS theme on there! I don't think I could read off something that small unless I was lying down though - I already have problems reading paperbacks on the train :)

[amezri.livejournal.com]

I know, dude. I'm not even that big of a Star Trek fan, but the "modern" LCARS design is nice.

FBReader has option to change font size? So if little text on printed book is a problem, this might help. I think the default font size is already bigger than what's in a mass market anyway.

I'll probably have this with me at the shoot so you can check it out.