The Nokia 770 “does little, and not very well,” writes Washington Post Personal Technology Columnist Rob Pegoraro, in a scathing review. Pegoraro lambastes the 770 on all fronts, while grudgingly admitting that some of the time, it works okay for surfing the Web.

Pegoraro likes the idea of a tiny webpad, he says, but he can't get used to the 770's on-screen keyboard, nor its handwriting recognition system. He complains about the 770's bluetooth and WiFi capabilities. He likes the Opera browser, but not its zoom feature, nor its Flash player, which he describes as outdated.

As many others have done, Pegoraro disparages the 770's email client as having “grotesquely poor stability.” [Editor's note: “Sylpheed is the basis of the built-in email client, but don't hold that against it,” notes a current project to port the full version of Sylpheed to the 770. Most will probably use gmail anyway.]

Other Pegoraro gripes include:

• It's not a phone
• No viewer/player for Microsoft office and media formats
• Feature-poor A/V viewers/players
• RS-MMC expansion, instead of “industry-standard” SD card slot
• No addressbook or calendar
• No “new or name-brand” games
• Takes longer to boot than some laptops
• Offers “only” 4-1/2 hours of battery life, used continuously

Pegoraro concludes that potential 770 buyers likely already own a variety of other, more function-rich gadgets, such as phones, PDAs, iPods, and so on. Thus, they are likely to leave the 770 at home on a shelf, instead of carrying it with them. The full review can be found here.

[Editor's note: readers who enjoy Pegoraro's critique of the 770 may also like Mark Twain's classic work of literary criticism, Fennimore Cooper's Literary Offenses.]

 
This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.