It finally arrived

I had to wait a very, very, very long time, but my Nokia 770 has finally arrived. I love it. It took about 2 minutes to find and install the driver for the nokia bluetooth keyboard I bought, and now I’m typing this post from the 770!

Things I love so far: the full-screen and zoom buttons. The large, crisp screen. The debian-based package management. The intuitivity of the interface. The sturdyness of the device.

And most of all the fact that it runs GNU/Linux. The community at maemo.org is growing, and the increasing availability of third-party Free Software is the main attraction of this device to me. I was trying to explain this to a friend yesterday – comparing the ‘walled gardens’ that Palm or (shudder) CE devices are with the openness of the 770, and I think it made sense to her. I think Nokia is going to sell a heck of a lot of these things.

What does puzzle me though, is the noise some people are making about the fact that the 770 ships without PIM software installed. So what? Just head over to maemo.org, and see what you can download from there. And if what you want is not there yet, it’s certainly just a matter of time before someone will write or port a PIM to the 770. That’s the key; software WILL be available, we don’t depend on the supplier of the device to give us more features! Now THAT is the power of the Free Software community…