By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, April 16, 2006

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet ought to possess all the ingredients necessary for tech success. This thin, light device -- essentially, a touch-sensitive color screen framed by a few buttons -- looks like an artifact from science fiction. It comes from a company with a long history of innovation in mobile devices. And it runs on the tinkering-friendly, open-source Linux operating system.

But while this $360 gadget might fit in great on "Star Trek," in the real world it competes with a galaxy of other handheld devices -- most of which do more than the Nokia 770, and do it far more reliably and gracefully. The Nokia 770's aptitude at providing a pocket-size window on the Web can't overcome its ineptitude at almost everything else.

Nokia didn't start with a bad idea. It shouldn't be necessary to buy a full-fledged computer -- with all the labor that entails -- just to hop on the Web. With the 770 ( http://www.nokiausa.com/770 ), the idea is to replace the laptop you'd otherwise use to go online at home and anywhere else you can get wireless Internet access. Instead of five pounds of bulky laptop, you have 8.25 ounces of tablet that measures just 5 1/2 -by-3-by 3/4 inches, small enough to stash in a jeans or jacket pocket.

Nokia has plenty of company in this effort. People have been trying to make a go of selling simple Web terminals for years. But none of them has succeeded, and it doesn't look like the 770 will do any better.

Its biggest flaw is the keyboard that Nokia left out. You can enter text only by tapping a tightly packed on-screen keyboard, with help from an automatic word-completion option, or by taking your chances with handwriting recognition that's either ploddingly slow or wildly inaccurate. That alone should sink anything built for constant Web and e-mail use.

The 770 can get online via WiFi wireless networking or through a Bluetooth pairing with a cellphone. In practice, only WiFi is likely to work, given a) how often wireless carriers disable dial-up networking capability on their Bluetooth phones and b) how hard it can be to configure that Bluetooth link even when the carrier condescends to allow it.

WiFi on the 770, however, may not work much better. The review model I tested frequently failed to log on to my home network's wireless signal for no apparent reason; uselessly vague error messages such as "network problem" left me guessing about the cause.

The 770 fared better on other networks, but never as well as any laptop I've used.

The most important program on this device is its Web browser, a version of the Opera program. Given the constraints of the 770's wide-format screen (just 800 by 480 pixels), it does an impressive job of displaying standard Web pages.

This browser can open multiple pages at once -- you switch among them by tapping on identical, unlabeled icons at the left of the screen -- but it almost always crashed without warning if left open with too many pages for too long.

It's also unwise to lean too heavily on its page-zooming option, which often crunched letters together when it enlarged them. Plan on squinting a lot instead.

Unfortunately, while Nokia bundled a decent, current browser, it forgot to do the same for the plug-in software needed for a passable impersonation of big-computer browsing. Its obsolete Macromedia Flash player couldn't display most of the interactive content I tried, such as the game-tracking features on ESPN and Major League Baseball's sites.

You won't have much better luck with streaming media online because of the lack of playback software for Windows Media and QuickTime formats.

Nokia throws in a basic e-mail program and a news reader for the RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds offered by many sites. But the mail application exhibited grotesquely poor stability (it crashes every time I try to open a message stuck in my outbox) and the RSS reader requires you to add subscriptions by entering each site's address, instead of just clicking on its link in the browser; it's also not set up by default to check for updates automatically.

As for downloadable documents, you can read Portable Document Format files but little else; if somebody e-mails you a Microsoft Word or Excel file, you're stuck.

You can employ a 770 as a portable photo album or a digital-music player, but only in the most basic sense. Its Images and Audio Player programs make even the stripped-down programs bundled on most handhelds look like iTunes and iPhoto by comparison.

And because Nokia foolishly included a cut-down "RS-MMC" (Reduced Size MultiMediaCard) slot instead of an industry-standard SD card slot, you'll pay more for the needed add-on storage (only 64 megabytes of memory are available onboard) and have a harder time finding it in stores.

The 770 has a handful of other simple applications -- a notepad, a clock, a chess game -- and that's it, although you can add more if you look online.

Now think about what's not on this eye-catching gadget: a real address book; a calendar; any new, name-brand games; a cellphone. (Nokia says a software update in the first half of this year will add instant-messaging and voice-over-Internet-protocol capability).

The Nokia 770 takes longer to boot up than some desktop computers (nearly a minute) and offers battery life no longer than that of many laptops (4 1/4 hours of nearly continuous browsing). In two weeks of testing, it locked up and spontaneously rebooted more often than any computer I've used in that time.

It's not as if the Nokia 770 will be the first portable gadget somebody buys. It's going to have to earn its way into pockets, purses, bags and backpacks already occupied by phones, Palm or Pocket PC handhelds, iPods, Sony PSP or Nintendo DS game machines or laptops -- often, more than one of those. With that competition, a 770 will probably land in a different place: the shelf.

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro atrob@twp.com.