2 Bit Hacker

For the past week or so I’ve had a brand new toy, a Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. It’s a pretty slick device, 802.11b, Bluetooth, an 800×480 touch screen, running a Debian-derivative Linux. I haven’t done a lot of hacking on it yet, but just the built-in apps are pretty nice. I have installed Kismet, and it makes a nice little wardriving platform, though I’ll need to get a Bluetooth GPS if I want to track where I see APs.

I’m also planning on getting a Bluetooth OBDII adapter, so I can run Carman, a pretty nice looking application for monitoring vehicle information. I think with a GPS and the OBDII adapter, I’ll be able to use the 770 in place of a car computer for a while. A second cover for the device could be mounted to the dash relatively easily to give it a stable place to sit while I’m driving.

There are a couple of slight annoyances with it though. For some reason Nokia decided to go with RS-MMC flash cards for it, which are probably the rarest of the sub-SD flash card standards. But that’s not too big a deal. The on-screen keyboard requires two taps to get to some oft-used symbols, like hyphen, which makes it a pain when I’m doing stuff on the command-line. I’m considering trying out a Bluetooth keyboard with it, maybe even a Frogpad, though I’m not sure if that would make text entry more or less of a pain.

I do like the built-in apps though. The e-mail and RSS feed readers are usable, though not terribly special. The default web browser is Opera, and does an excellent job of rendering pages for the small screen. They included a Jabber client, which works well for Google Talk, but can’t handle multiple accounts online at a time, and refuses to connect to our internal Jabber server at work.

Here are some gratuitous screen shots: