Thread: 770 Improvement Ideas Found on Blogs
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Ceklund is offline Ceklund
2006-07-07 , 05:33
Posts: 112 | Thanked: 6 times | Joined on Feb 2006
#1
I keep running over all sorts of 770 improvement ideas by accident, via blogs and such, and decided ... why not just go ahead and have the ideas collected in one place here on the ITTF? I will try to omit those ideas I have seen here more than once, if I can, unless the comments are so creative I just have to use them anyway. These are basically anonymous blogs, so if it was your idea, KUDOS to you and your genius. It will be kept alive here, and we want to know the other new ideas you've had since then! If there are more ideas that I missed (and I will miss a lot, I'm sure), please go ahead and update this post!

If Nokia should happen to stop by to read our posts here some day, we want to be ready for them (wink) !!
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1) Increase battery life.

Give us a separate battery pack that can be worn by the user and connects to the 770, powering it through a full day of work.

I doubt that anyone reading the 770 blogs will agree that these two things are necessary but people who would otherwise be able to use a 770 in their work will not be able to if it cannot maintain power all day long and if it cannot keep an X session as the 770 moves from one wireless access point to the next, exactly the way in which a cell phone keeps its connection as it moves from one cell tower to the next.

If you do these things then the working people of the world will find the 770 useful but if you will have missed the biggest opportunity that the 770 represents. I, for one, could not build any vertical market software for the working people if it won't run all day. A working person would not think twice about wearing a separate, day-long battery pack if it allowed them to use the 770 throughout an entire work shift.
The PSP15 Sony PSP Battery works with the 770 and at 6000 mAh, it's 4 times the capacity of the built-in battery. It's not too expensive either. http://www.batterygeek.net/Batteryge..._100_black.htm
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2) Drop Mmc, Add Mini-drive.
A 5th-gen iPod is one-third the size of the 770 yet it has 30 gigs of hard drive space! Why should people have to anguish that their 2 Gig-cards aren't working with 2006 OS when they could have something similar to an iPod 30-Gig HD on board? If 2 Gigs is good, then 30 Gigs is better. And we don't need an external card at all, since we can just email docs, notes, URL's to ourselves anyway. Free up that space, or else use it wiser.
ThoughtFix offered this idea on his blog: "Theoretical hack - iPod nano as self-powered external hard drive:I can get 3.3 volts from my iPod nano by following this guide on hackaday. However I don't know if that will be enough to tell the Nokia 770 that there is a USB device there and to go into host mode. Judging by post 17 here, it appears the USB chip may be powered by the 5V from the USB line so it may not turn on with only 3.3. I'd be afraid to try it without knowing more about the chips.
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3) Remote Control Features.

A little piece of software I'd love to see in it is a universal remote control software. It would fit even better in my living room with this. Plus it would be less "geeky" and more open to everyone. I'm not sure the bluetooth port enables IR though...
It'd be nice if someone designed a remote-control designer App that would allow us to take a snapshot of an actual remote control, input the device's IR pin code, and then draw all the buttons on a layer space overtop of the image. And then have the software map all the IR signals to those buttons, and allow us to save the final Remote Control as a User-defined finished remote we could then upload to the Tableteer website for download. We could walk into any house, anywhere, and simply load up the remote(s) for their device(s), and control it(them). People might even have fun simply designing the Remote Controls, let alone using them.

Are there any Bluetooth IR devices like a spy-like gadget pen? The 770 could pair to that and send the infared out from such a device in your pocket.

I actually found a Bluetooth-to-Infrared device made for PDA use here! Here is a brief snippet:
Butterfly Remote contains a Bluetooth-to-infrared link unit and a remote control software running on Symbian Series60 devices, such as Nokia 6600 and NGage QD game phone....The Bluetooth link is built into a small box, which can be mounted on wall or ceiling...Butterfly Remote turns inputs from the mobile phone over the Bluetooth link to infrared commands.
It works on NOKIA devices! Haahaha! What irony!
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4)Stop the Pop Ups.
Mail browser: I wish I could stop the popup windows from showing up like in Mozilla/Firefox. This is a small annoyance on a desktop, but a very time consuming task on the Nokia 770. More than that, some popup windows have this animated stuff (probably flash) that make the browser crash.
There is an application now for the 770 called Privoxy that seeks to do just that. At this time, however, it is not designed for mass consumption. It doesn't install, you must be root. Most people don't understand root, nor do they want to take the risks to figure it out. Once Privoxy is made for mass consumption instead of the 770 elite, you will have your wish.
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5) Tabbed Browsing.
Another important feature I wish we had would be tabbed browsing. Why load another instance of Opera on the 770's already cramped resources when we could just load another window? Only use the icons and interface once, just have the screens change?
This feature is now possible through a nearly-complete port of Minimo for the 770. The 770 version of Minimo now has tabbed browsing! It works better than Opera in most cases, too, and is more efficient memory wise! The first mass-consumption release will be out fairly soon.
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6) Better Alarm Support.
All the PIM applications fail to utilize a proper alarm. What I miss most is not being able to set up an alarm for my appointments (GPE crashes when you set this up and they claim it does not work anyway because of kernel/hardware limitations). I cannot not even set up an alarm on the basic 770 clock!! And it won't work with the cover on.
KERNEL CONCEPTS, makers of the GPE Calendar, state the following at this time: "The Nokia 770 doesn't ship with an AT daemon, so alerts don't work so far. "

The "Handhelds, Linux and Heroes" website also writes (June 11th) that "It is able to handle alarms on its own as long it is running - but there is hope for an alarm feature because OS 2006 ships an alarm clock supporting alarms while the device is off already."
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7) Change How Joystick Works in Browser!
Does anyone really want to use the stylus for everything? I'm afraid to inadvertantly click on a link so I always use the slider and my 770's mesh overlay is starting to actually fray apart along the path the Stylus travels as I scroll up and down web pages unto ad nauseum!

Another Anonymous Poster writes:
Why can't we use the nav button to scroll through pages like a scroll wheel? Most people reading stuff want to hold it with one hand (left) and read, not have to use the right hand to scroll. It could be done with 1 hand, if there were an option to scroll with the nav. Does anyone really want to use the nav the way it is now- bumbling from link to link???
Who does like the joystick's function in Opera? This joystick requires pressing in short or long presses to kind of amble and lurch along the page in invalidic proportions and it gets tiring, and is quite ineffective. We should be able to:

A) Scroll in realtime using the joystick buttons (like you're flying over the page).
B) Set in the Control Panel how fast we can scroll right/left only.
C) Set how fast we can scroll up/down only. Both of options B and C should have tension controls built in to slow us down as we reach the edge of each border for a smoother feel, more controlled experience.
D) Clicking the inside button instantly brings up the "FIND ON PAGE" function and keyboard. Pressing enter after choosing our word automatically drops keyboard, then you fly over the page like Google Earth to your item and highlights it. In search mode, clicking the up/down buttons causes the search to instantly travel up/down respectively to the former/next incidence of the word requested. Clicking the inside button again returns you to the non-search Regular mode.
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8) Make 770's Internal Files Accessible From USB
Why can't I access the files that are stored on the 770's internal memory (not on the mmc) with usb mass storage? Once I plug in my device, I lose access to those files. Kind of dumb. That then requires enormous reshuffling efforts to transfer here and there and back again when it could be made to work RIGHT.
END of PART 1
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1 Gig Generic MMC, Sprint EV-DO for data(25-45 Kb/s d/l speeds), & Samsung A940: one GREAT phone!
Last edited by Ceklund; 2006-07-07 at 20:34.