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A small review of the Nokia 770’s 2006 firmware beta

Jeff Waugh beat me to the punch on a blog about the new firmware for the Nokia 770. I have to agree with him: The Nokia 770 is ready for the enterprise. And for the home.

I installed the 2006 software update last night for the first time. While I have been coordinating with the Nokia and OpenedHand developers for a while, actually using the new software was a surprisingly pleasant experience. That’s an understatement. The software absolutely rocks.

Performance

Many criticized the 2005 firmware for its lack of responsiveness. It felt sluggish at times. Some resorted to setting up a swap partition on the memory card, which helped a bit. So far, I’d have to say that the 2006 firmware feels a lot faster and more responsive than the 2005 firmware. Setting up a swap partition is as easy as checking a box in the control panel and setting a swap size. I haven’t tried setting up swap yet, but I haven’t felt the need. I was browsing a couple webpages, streaming music, and chatting without any real problems.

Visual Improvements

The look and feel has had a number of updates, and I love the results. The old style felt more monotone.. Black, white, grey, some hints of purple. The new style is a vibrant orange. The chrome along the side is rounded, and the Web, Conversation and Application buttons now look somewhat like actual buttons that push in on one side. (I wish I had screenshots at this point.)

The style can, of course, be changed. There are four themes available to choose from, the first (and default) being the orange theme. The second is a variation on the first theme, but in an aqua color. The style of the sidebar changes slightly in this theme. It gets a kind of winterish background.

The third theme is also a variation on the first, but in blue. As in #0000FF. Very blue. The only difference I can see other than the color is that the style of the clock applet changes, which is a neat little touch.

The fourth theme resembles the original style of the 2005 firmware, which some may prefer. A lot of the graphics, such as the clock and applet borders, are changed. This style may look “more professional” to some people.

Home Screen Improvements

The Home screen will at first glance look pretty familiar to existing users, until they notice the Google search bar above the RSS reader, and the contact list under the radio player. Users can now quickly perform a Google search using the search bar (which looks as if it may support other search engines in the future?), and see the presence of their favorite contacts in the contacts list. I’ll get to that part in a bit.

Don’t like the layout of the Home screen? You can finally change it! Under the menu, there’s a Select Applets menu item that allows you to specify which applets you want to see and which you don’t, and a couple items underneath it is an Edit Layout item. With this, you can actually drag around the applets and reorder the display how you see fit. Unfortunately, it uses pixel precision, and there doesn’t appear to be any snap-to-grid of any sort. Still, it’s quite promising.

Thumb Board

The Thumb Board is the new input method introduced in the 2006 firmware. It works as a full-screen keyboard where you type by using your thumbs. To invoke it, just put pressure on an input field with your thumb. You’ll hear a little sound effect and the board will appear.

The thumb board shows the alphabet at a glance, and each key is big enough to be pressed by the tip of a thumb. Other common keys, such as the spacebar, quotes, period, comma, dash, backslash, and colon are also available. Above the letter keys are a set of tabs. Press the “Abc” tab to switch between lowercase and uppercase. The “1!+” tab shows numbers and other common symbols (@, plus, minus, question mark, exclamation mark, etc.). The third tab has less used but still common enough symbols. The more common ones are the brackets, braces, percent, etc., but there’s also a copyright symbol, trademark, fancy quotes, mid dot, and others.

The thumb board may take a little practice at first, but I found I was typing along rather well last night. It feels well thought out, and is my new input method of choice on the 770.

Messaging and Contacts

Now this is where things get cool. This software update is all about the messaging. You’re able to set up accounts on Jabber and Google Talk (I believe there will be more options in the future?) and then manage their presence through an icon on the top. While connected, you can receive IM and Google Talk voice invites. You can also send them, of course, and this is done through the new Contacts list.

The developers decided not to use a traditional buddy list, and I think that was a great move. They have cleanly integrated the concept of a buddy list into a very easy to use addressbook. Your accounts will automatically get their own special groups in the addressbook’s sidebar. Along with your personal groups and account groups are special “Online” and “Recent” groups. “Online” shows you a list of people who are online (as the name suggests). “Recent” shows a list of people you have most recently talked to.

You can add new people to your addressbook or edit the information of contacts from your IM accounts. The information you can set is about what you would expect. First name, last name, nickname, picture, e-mail addresses, IM accounts. Pretty much the bare essentials. When connected to an IM service, each entry in the addressbook that has an IM account on file will have an icon representing the person or account’s presence.

Tap a person and their details come up, along with Call, Chat, and E-mail buttons. Press Call to initiate a Google Talk voice conversation with them. Press Chat to begin an IM conversation. Press e-mail to e-mail. It doesn’t get much more straightforward than that, does it?

I haven’t tried to call anybody yet, but the chat conversatoins work great. The 770 will play a little chime and subtly flash an icon when someone says something in a chat. It’s both easy to notice and easy to choose to ignore. Just how an IM client should be 🙂

The contact list remembers people who were found to be in your buddy lists last time you connected. If you’re not connected to an IM service or even to the internet, initiating a chat will attempt to auto-connect to both.

Package Manager

Finally! A real package manager! The package manager that came with the 2005 update was problematic, and heaven forbid you had an error in your package. Sometimes you couldn’t even uninstall it. The new package manager is clean, easy to use, and actually supports package feeds. I added FBReader’s feed last night as a test. It updated its list, showed FBReader as available (along with a version number and brief summary), and a couple taps later I had it installed.

After installing a package, it will ask where you would like to place the menu item. The placement can be re-editted later. This is a warm welcome to people who are used to digging around in their Extras menu for all sorts of different programs.

Galago!

I’m pleased to say that Galago is being used for integrating presence information and such into the addressbook. This is the first real third party use of Galago. The developers from Nokia and OpenedHand have been key in helping to get Galago into a mature state. There’s a lot more work to do, and various optimizations are being made.

I’d like to see us do on the desktop what Nokia and OpenedHand have managed to do extremely well on the 770.

Overall…

Awesome release. The 2006 firmware is a work of art… And it’s still only a beta. I can’t wait to see the final release, and then I will be recommending this to a lot of people. If you have a 770, download the new firmware and give it a shot.

Bocce Ball

The VMware Hosted UI group (the group I’m a part of) went on a team-building exercise today. We had a nice meal and then went to play Bocce Ball, which is a game that until today I had very little knowledge of. It turns out to be a pretty cool game, with some strategy involved. Our team kicked ass 😉 I’m actually hoping to play again at some point soon. Perhaps we can buy some Bocce Balls and play in the hallways by our new offices.

Oh, yeah, so we moved offices at work. My nice corner office is no longer mine. However, the new office is actually bigger, and the view isn’t too bad. I’ve only spent a few hours in it so far, but it’s not as bad as I feared. I’ll have to take pictures soon.

Lost my hacking mojo

I’ve been trying to get out of this funk I’ve been in the past few weeks. It’s been far too hard to just sit down and code outside of work. I can’t even put together a release. A large part of this is due to the amount of work I’ve been doing for VMware as of late on VMware Server. I think another part of it is that I recently finished up releases of Galago, libnotify, notification-daemon, and Leaftag and

I know this is temporary, but it’s frustrating because there really is a lot of cool stuff I’m looking forward to working on. Some may say to enjoy it, take a break, play some games. Problem is, I don’t even feel like doing that! 😛 Perhaps after work calms down and I’ve spent long enough doing nothing at home, I’ll have more motivation to code.

How do other people usually deal with this?

The oxygen comes in two flavors

The oxygen comes in two flavors: “strong mint” and “grapefruit” and will cost 600 yen a can, including consumption tax.
MSN News

Where to begin…

I remember the idea of canned oxygen even back when I was a kid. It was a joke back then, of course, but the joke went that people are able to put absolutely anything up for sale and there would be people buying it. They could sell oxygen and people would pay for it. Well, it’s not a joke anymore, it’s now a growing market in Japan.

It seems like a silly idea. Pay somewhere around $5.50 and get a can of grapefruit or mint oxygen. At times of stress, or when you feel tired, inhale. But maybe it’s not so crazy. How often do you feel you need to step out of the office a while to get a breath of fresh air? How many times have you decided to forgo getting that fresh air because you just don’t feel you have time? If a can of fresh air is relatively cheap and is available at the local gas station, then maybe, just maybe it could catch on for the busy or stressed out worker who can’t take the time to walk outside for a while.

Oxygen has been sold for years, just not to people who intend and have the ability to breath it while surrounded by air. Scuba divers and people on oxygen tanks are consumers of the product. But they’re not buying it for the flavors. They’re buying it to live under certain conditions. It must have been a hard sell initially to convince people that they should buy oxygen for use when they’re surrounded by oxygen.

According to the article, normal air contains about 21% oxygen, while one of these cans contains 95% oxygen. They claim the high concentration of oxygen brings about “a feeling of invigoration.” I must wonder, though, if a person could get dizzy or in some way high off the stuff. Still, better than the alternatives.

I also have to wonder what it’s like to breathe mint or grapefruit. I would think the smell of roses would be a good choice, or perhaps pine. I’m sure if this takes off, there will be more flavors. Though, as well as it may do in Japan, I’m not sure it would be so popular in the US. I might be surprised, though.

Athena is dead :(

I woke up this morning to a disconnected SSH session between my laptop and my desktop, Athena. I checked gaim. Nope, still on the Internet. Maybe I got disconnected in the middle of the night, I thought? So I walked into my office room and checked on Athena. Dead. Just, dead. I couldn’t turn it on at all. Fortunately, there was nothing major on there, as I moved everything important to the Terastation, though I’m sure the drives are probably fine. It looks like the CPU fan died in the night and the CPU overheated, or something.

I’ve been suspecting this for the past week, for some reason, and have been pricing computers. I think I’ve settled on this Dell Dimension E510. It has a Pentium D dual-core 2.8GHz, 800FSB, 1GB RAM, 20″ Dell 2007FP LCD, 128MB ATI Radeon X300, 80GB HD, 16X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/ double layer write capability, and Windows XP Media Center 2005 Edition with a full install CD. That’s all for $779. I plan to take some of the hardware from Athena and put it in this yet unnamed box.

Fortunately I use my laptop for almost everything nowadays, so not having Athena around won’t hurt my productivity much. Still, it’s a real shame. I loved that little computer. It’s kind of neat getting a new one, though.

Nintendo: Wii are not amused

So Nintendo today announced the Revolution’s new name: Wii. Yes, Wii. The reaction so far as been about as negative as you’d expect, with all kinds of bad puns made. A number of the bad puns were made by Nintendo, as demonstrated on the site I just linked to.

I must wonder what they’re thinking. It’s like the whole “Touching is good” thing they did with the DS. And then there were games like Touch Kirby’s Magic Paintbrush. Someone over at Nintendo either really doesn’t understand the potential puns and such in English, or is rolling around laughing now.

Bad, Nintendo. Bad.

libsexy 0.1.8 released

It didn’t take long, but we found some regressions in the 0.1.7 release. Some C99isms slipped in to libsexy, and the Python bindings broke. These problems have been fixed and a 0.1.8 release has been made.

Another bug that has been reported to me is that ever since we moved to dynamically loading libenchant, spell checking has been broken for those who haven’t installed libenchant devel packages. We now check for the proper non-devel library first, fixing this issue.

As always, the new files are available on the libsexy site.

Ducks, videos and turtle hopping

Ducks

As busy as I’ve been lately, I was able to take the opportunity last Saturday to visit my family and my girlfriend. I took my little 5-year old sister Jenna and my girlfriend Jamie to feed ducks, which was a first for Jenna. She was a bit scared at first when the ducks started to approach her, but she quickly got over it. It wasn’t the warmest of days, and after a while Jamie and I decided it was time to leave. We told Jenna it’s time to stop and that it’s getting too cold, but
Jenna is a stubborn girl who enjoys the cold. “Just cuddle together” was her response, and she continued to feed the ducks. Ah well. Once we assured her we would come back another time, she willingly left.

Videos

I was browsing around del.icio.us today and came across an interesting site, YouTube. It’s a tag-based video posting site where people can upload videos and they’ll be played in a Flash wrapper, like Google Video uses. I’ve found a few neat videos so far, but haven’t explored it as much as I’d like. I’ve never heard of it before tonight, though, so I thought I’d post it for others to play with.

Turtle Hopping

So it turns out that there’s a number of developers writing new versions of Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda games. They’re not bad, either. I haven’t played very far into any of them, but they definitely look promising. The main ones I’ve found are Super Mario: Blue Twilight (a 2D side-scroller similar to SMB3 but with some Mario 64 elements, taking place in a halloween land), Super Mario War (kill all the other Marios before they kill you), Super Maryo World (a Mario game written in JavaScript), and Super Mario Pac (a combination of Super Mario World and Super Mario Sunshine).

On top of that, there’s a set of instructions for accessing developer-only areas of Super Mario Bros 3. A room full of Tanooki suits! Awesome.

As for the Legend of Zelda, check out Zelda Classic. It’s Windows-only for now, but they claim there’s a Linux version coming out. It’s the Zelda engine (plus some additional features) with support for custom games. There are many game sets provided by other users, some mediocre, some excellent and detailed. I recommend playing around with it.

And now, for the old-style unmodified retro games. Sure you could download emulators and do things that way, but why bother when there’s 1980-games.com, Every Video Game Online, Game-Oldies, Play Infocom Adventures Online, and C64s.com? Nice ways to quickly kill a few minutes from anywhere.

For the Tetris-type puzzle fans out there, I present to you Stackopolis!

(Can you tell I’m going through a nostalgia phase?)

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