gadget: Nokia 770 update
Mar. 4th, 2009 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
amezriThis is day three with Agathon, my Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, so I figured I'd make another entry with observations for those of you interested.
After my initial entry, I was browsing installable applications and found both the complete set of LCARS themes and CBRPager - an application that opens CBR files. Mistake. Device immediately started freaking out and pulling the WSOD - White Screen of Death. I removed both the apps and everything was back to normal.
Once satisfied things were working well, I read three books by Moira Rogers before bed. The battery was only down one bar before I turned it off and I figured that turning it off would save on the battery.
Wrong.
I turned it on the following morning and the battery had one bar left before showing a low battery warning about 20 minutes later. Consulting Internet Tablet Talk, I found out that the power consumption of turning the device on from full power down is actually rather large. General consensus is that it's much better to leave the device on unless you don't plan on using it for a week or more, like you'd treat a cellphone, basically.
So far, I'm finding that to be true. Charged the battery full yesterday afternoon about 3pm and it's about half right now. Have been online for about 4 hours total. When I'm not loading webpages or updating my weather applet (I installed OMWeather), I set the device to Offline Mode, which shuts off the wireless. Bluetooth is off. One great thing about the NIT770 is that the screen shuts off and the keypad locks when you put it in the case/sleeve. I also installed Advanced Backlight for 10 steps of brightness, versus the original 5. As of now, the battery is at about half.
Another applet I've installed and found useful is Personal Launcher, which you can use to put shortcut icons on the home desktop. Right now I've got FBReader, PDF reader, and Notes on there for quick launch.
One problem I was having was that browsing was absolutely slow. Also, image-heavy sites would often crash both the browser and the device, which would once again WSOD and reboot. The solution was basically to break the internet. I disabled images, javascript, and scaled the cache back. Using mobile versions of sites also helps speed loading time. Once I did this, the browser has actually become usable and pages load pretty quickly. It'll be nice to be able to use Agathon when I go places and don't need a netbook, but would like to at least be able to check e-mail.
Oh. I also extended the virtual memory to 8MB on the internal card. That seems to have helped a lot with the speed of opening applications.
As for reading with the NIT770, it's pretty nice. When in FBReader, the zoom button on the top of the device can be used for scrolling pages (see this review). Text is easy to read and you can adjust text size in the settings if you want. I've converted several more books from PDF and HTML to PRC with Mobipocket Creator and generally there are no problems, just tiny formatting things.
I tried reading some fic online and that was kind of painful. Pages loaded just fine, but the text was really tiny. Zooming in was annoying because you have to side-scroll.
So, yep, still happy with my purchase and I can't wait for my 2GB MMC card to get here so I can put more than 6 books at a time on this thing... and maybe increase swap file size for better application opening.
Going to go read now!
After my initial entry, I was browsing installable applications and found both the complete set of LCARS themes and CBRPager - an application that opens CBR files. Mistake. Device immediately started freaking out and pulling the WSOD - White Screen of Death. I removed both the apps and everything was back to normal.
Once satisfied things were working well, I read three books by Moira Rogers before bed. The battery was only down one bar before I turned it off and I figured that turning it off would save on the battery.
Wrong.
I turned it on the following morning and the battery had one bar left before showing a low battery warning about 20 minutes later. Consulting Internet Tablet Talk, I found out that the power consumption of turning the device on from full power down is actually rather large. General consensus is that it's much better to leave the device on unless you don't plan on using it for a week or more, like you'd treat a cellphone, basically.
So far, I'm finding that to be true. Charged the battery full yesterday afternoon about 3pm and it's about half right now. Have been online for about 4 hours total. When I'm not loading webpages or updating my weather applet (I installed OMWeather), I set the device to Offline Mode, which shuts off the wireless. Bluetooth is off. One great thing about the NIT770 is that the screen shuts off and the keypad locks when you put it in the case/sleeve. I also installed Advanced Backlight for 10 steps of brightness, versus the original 5. As of now, the battery is at about half.
Another applet I've installed and found useful is Personal Launcher, which you can use to put shortcut icons on the home desktop. Right now I've got FBReader, PDF reader, and Notes on there for quick launch.
One problem I was having was that browsing was absolutely slow. Also, image-heavy sites would often crash both the browser and the device, which would once again WSOD and reboot. The solution was basically to break the internet. I disabled images, javascript, and scaled the cache back. Using mobile versions of sites also helps speed loading time. Once I did this, the browser has actually become usable and pages load pretty quickly. It'll be nice to be able to use Agathon when I go places and don't need a netbook, but would like to at least be able to check e-mail.
Oh. I also extended the virtual memory to 8MB on the internal card. That seems to have helped a lot with the speed of opening applications.
As for reading with the NIT770, it's pretty nice. When in FBReader, the zoom button on the top of the device can be used for scrolling pages (see this review). Text is easy to read and you can adjust text size in the settings if you want. I've converted several more books from PDF and HTML to PRC with Mobipocket Creator and generally there are no problems, just tiny formatting things.
I tried reading some fic online and that was kind of painful. Pages loaded just fine, but the text was really tiny. Zooming in was annoying because you have to side-scroll.
So, yep, still happy with my purchase and I can't wait for my 2GB MMC card to get here so I can put more than 6 books at a time on this thing... and maybe increase swap file size for better application opening.
Going to go read now!
