I just noticed this new Ari Jaaksi blog at planet Maemo:
http://planet.maemo.org/

It looks like Ari (at least) has changed his opinion on supporting the 770 users...

Edit: Here is direct link to Ari's blog:
http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2007/01/w...-weve-got.html

It's disappointing to know that Opera - easily the flakiest thing I use on the 770 - is never going to be upgraded on the 770 due to licencing issues.

Here's hoping the MiniMo gets stable...

Yep, considering that it is an internet tablet, and I cannot be shagged installing other stuff on it right now considering the mess around factor.

Last os update screwed my scroll bars on Opera, my wife uses it and is asking questions so Im better off running the battery flat!

Dissapointing? Its a ****ing disgrace... Its a freaking Internet Tablet with a buggier browser than IE.

What I don't understand is that the Nokia 770 runs Linux, and has as one of its chief audiences the Linux hacker community. I've personally been running the same laptop on Linux for 5 years, and the same desktop machines and servers on Linux for more than that. I just recently bought a Nokia 770 and do think it somewhat disgraceful that Nokia could just say, "Sorry, we won't support it due to hardware/licensing difficulties." It just suggests to me that the Nokia engineering team took a hacker, rather than software engineering, approach to developing OS 2007. I would have made backwards compatibility with the 770 a primary goal, if I were on that team.

Clearly, they just like to use entire communities as "test beds" for their new platforms.

What's sadder to me is that I essentially bought the 770 to replace my Palm Vx, a device I bought 10 (yes, _10_) years ago and have used enjoyably since then. With 8MB of Flash memory, I've managed to ease my commutes with offline articles (AvantGo), ebooks (TiBR) and what's more, Palm OS supported Vindigo, which lets you get full city guides on your device. In 8MB.

Those functions I just mentioned were "faster" on the Palm, though it is true I didn't have luxuries like anti-aliased fonts. I'm the kind of person who likes to hold on to his devices until I really come up with a new use case for a new device. Unfortunately, apparently the Nokia technical lead on this project thinks a "1.5 year old device is old." Well, screw you. I don't like to throw away my money. For me, a 1.5 year old is device is "about the right age to buy it", since clearly you guys had lots of friggin bugs in the last year and a half. If I had bought it a year and a half ago, I would be yet more disappointed.

*sigh*

Out of interest, how many OS updates did you get from Palm over those 10 years?

If Nokia didn't think to negotiate a decent price for opera/flash license updates when they arranged for that software to be hildonized in the first place then that is Nokia's problem not mine. It's not an unreasonable expectation to receive browser updates when they are made available for other devices running slightly newer versions of the same O/S.

There is /no/ reason why the new Opera from the 800 should not work on the 770, merely Nokia's lack of foresight.

If we don't see any more updates for Opera then the 770 will be the last Nokia product I purchase!

I keep hearing that, but I haven't encountered it, so I have to assume these comments are mostly hyperbole or involve other factors. IE crashes on me regularly, even the New! Improved! IE7. I get an occasional hiccup with the 770 and N800 browsers, but no outright crashes.

Sorry, I got a good chuckle from the irony in that one.

I'm sure the poster will reply later, but in the meantime.. AFAIK for a Palm Vx there were a number of OS updates, three or four at least. It may even have gone on all the way up to the point when PalmOS 5 was introduced (which was for a completely different architecture - m68k->ARM, although OS5 runs OS4 apps through a just-in-time compiler, so in fact most Palm apps. are to this day still m68k apps! Runs on anything..)

Maybe after all we should just be thankful that Nokia is forging on with its original idea and has put forth a successor to the 770, even if not exactly in the way we expected it to : just today the Zaurus forums were ablaze with (apparently confirmed) news that Sharp has decided to kill the Zaurus line. Why they would choose this moment to pull out of a market they've pioneered years before anyone else, just when it's taking fire with the UMPCs and OQOs and N800 and whatnot is beyond me, but there's no indication either that they're planning to replace the Z with something else...

Now THAT's orphaning !...