What Are Your N770 Experiences Compared To Zaurus? Options

[dhns]

Dear early adopters of the N770,
as a potential platform for some of my Zaurus applications I consider to add Nokia 770 versions.

Since I am still waiting to get one and have to learn the (different) SDK first, I would like to use the time to hear about your experiences compared to a Zaurus.

Some questions coming to my mind:
* how does the display compare (brightness)?
* is the screen resolution of 400x800px a recognizable improvement?
* how good can it be used without a built-in (clamshell) keyboard?
* what about operation time?
* device handling (thicker, thinner, larger, smaller)?
* how stable and complete is the software compared to a Zaurus Sharp/Qtopia ROM?
* how is performance compared to a Zaurus?

Many thanks,

-- hns

[lardman]

But I have some difficulties with the power down mode. If I leave the device alone, the screen goes dark after 30 seconds. Tapping the screen brings it back. But when I want to use it after one day, there is no reaction to tapping the screen. When I press the on-switch and it comes up for some seconds and goes off again - without any notice. So, the battery seems to be discharged. When I then plug it to the charger - it then reboots fist.

The processor cannot enter 'sleep mode' - using dyntick - unless all of the running apps stop any clocks they have running. This means that the games will cause the battery to drain even while the cover is on. (This assumes the clocks continue running if the games are not paused and I think they do as I had exactly the same thing happen when I stuck the cover on half-way through one of the games.)

Another thing which stops dyntick is enabling usb-host mode so I read on the wiki.


Si

[dhns]

So, here again experiences. This time with software development.

I finally managed to build a gcc-4.0.1-glibc-2.3.5 cross compiler toolchain which runs on MacOS X.

The last stage of building that compiler tries to compile some "hello world" programs in C and C++ to test if the compiler runs.

Now, I plugged the N770 through USB to my Mac - and the MMC was mounted on the desktop. I could simply drag&drop the mentioned executables on the Finder window to copy them to the N770's MMC.

Then, I ssh'ed into the N770 and tried to cd to /media/mmc1. This failed - because the MMC is unmounted from the internal file system while the N770 is connected to USB (Note: it is not sufficient to Eject in the Finder - you have to physically unplug the cable).

After ejecting and unplugging, I could cd and I found my files.

But they did not run from the command line (I think mounting disables executables).

Then, I copied them into internal Flash (strangely the Documents are stored at /home/user/MyDocs/.Document so that I had to use find to locate that).

And then, it worked!

A next test was to copy some gcc-2.95.3-glibc-2.2.2 binaries like xlsfonts (for X/Qt) from the Zaurus to the N770. The X11 apps did fail because one library is missing (libXmu). But one plain command line application did work as well.

So, the summary is: the N770 is basically compatible in binary API to the Zaurus.

But that does only mean that porting applications back and forth is possible - it does not say anything about the efforts to really put in...

-- hns