David Chisnall revisits the Nokia 770

Very nice and through review:

A while ago, I wrote a review of my first impressions of the Nokia (NYSE: NOK) 770 after owning one for about a week. At the time, it was a brand new device; the first affordable handheld running a Free Software stack (Linux, X11, GTK). It was also a new market for Nokia: a mobile phone without the phone component.

The fact that it was not a phone gave Nokia a bit more freedom—it didn’t have to limit the features to ones that would encourage the networks to subsidize the cost of purchase. This did, however, increase the device cost for the end user. To help build an ecosystem around it, Nokia gave a heavy discount (around 60 percent) to Free Software developers.

Since that last review, the machine has lived in my jacket pocket and been carried with me wherever I go. It’s also had a major revision of the firmware.

Has the "Oooh, shiny!" feeling worn off? Read on to find out.

Source: Informit

This is exactly the type of review I love, it’s very critical of the small things that add up to make for a poor experience. He rails on the handwriting recognition engine:

The second input method was optimistically termed handwriting recognition. Interestingly, this was one of the few closed-source components of the entire core stack. I don’t know how much money Nokia paid for it, but they were ripped off. I’ve seen a native handwriting recognition engine written in 20 lines of Smalltalk that did a better job.

It’s something I’ve been moaning about for quite some time. Nice job Dave.