iPhones, Woot and Internet Tablets

On Friday I knew I wasn't going to be picking up an iPhone. Although it was clearly an event, it wasn't on my list. I felt a pang of jealousy for all the people I saw in line at the Apple store by our office.

I arrived home Friday afternoon and before me was a smallish box with the Woot label on the side. I quickly turned my thoughts to the box. Earlier in the week I was looking for my daily Wot fix and saw the Nokia N770 available for $125 + shipping. This device was recently retailing at about $350. Two very interesting things about the device intrigued me. One, it was one of the first devices in the wifi appliance category. Two, it was built on an open platform around Linux so there is a ton of software available. At $350 not too interesting to me. At $125 it was a must have.

So while man of my pals were in line getting their iPhones, I was trying to set up my Internet Tablet.

In brief, the N770 allows you to connect to either your wifi, or through your phone using Bluetooth. I spent something like 5 seconds setting up Bluetooth with my Sprint EVDO handset and away I went. There was little difference between the wifi and the phone from what I could tell. The device has a web browser, email client, media management, voip support and other things that are common on PDA or PDA like devices.

I spent the better part of the weekend playing with the device and will follow up with a write up shortly with a reference to the Mylo and some other devices to put the N770 in context. The short review is, I really dig the N770. If you can get one for cheap go grab it.