ewaste pda style

Back when PDAs were a thing, I owned one of just about every interesting device. Psion? Yeah. Palm? I had a half a dozen. Newton? Check. Sharp Zaurus? Check. MagicCap device? Got it. Franklin REX? These were the mainstream machines. I had a dozen of the weird ones as well. The worst of those was probably the Agenda VR3.

The Apollo program closed out 1972 with humanity's last manned mission to the moon so far. The eight year lull before Shuttle launched in 1980 seemed like an eternity though Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz took a bit of the edge off.

The PDA market had an Apollonian slump between the release of the last terrific PDA (1999's Palm V) and the release of the original iPhone in 2007. Weird things turned up in the market during that time but they really only ever took a bit of the edge off.

I needed a fix of personal digital love in 2005 and jumped on the new Nokia 770 with vigor. It is hard now to explain why in terms other than a fix. It was perhaps the first PDA-like thing to come with a kernel that supported the Plan 9 file system protocol. Maybe? That seemed breathtakingly important at the time. It also seemed like the perfect platform to run Paul Guyot's Einstein emulation of the Newton. Your PDA platform may have problems if a Newton emulator seems like a high calling.

I can't say that it was awesome, or that it seemed awesome. It seemed then that it would eventually be awesome. And then it wasn't. It was a preview of modern high-DPI displays. Its 4.1 inch screen rocked 225 ppi at 800x480 two years before the iPhone rolled up with the retro resolution of 480x320 at 163 ppi. It was unlocked. It was the first PDA I owned to run a real web browser. It was interesting.

The 770 was easy to tether to a bluetooth phone and I used it this way until I had owned an iPhone for about 15 minutes.

It was beautiful and well made. My copy was made in Estonia, an ancient Baltic country taken as part of the Soviet Union until 1991. That's as close a PDA analogy as I can make to Apollo-Soyuz. It was a relative heavyweight. Mine weighs in at 235g. My iPhone 5s weighs in at 112g. The Palm V weighed 114g.

An old joke says that the Americans spent a million dollars to develop a pressurized pen capable of operating in outer space while the Soviets simply used a pencil. The tale is reversed with the 770. Nokia spent a lot of money to develop the last of the resistive/stylus machines when the Americans, here Apple, simply used a finger.

My 770 goes off to recycling today with its original stylus still tucked safely in its slot.

Nokia 770 tablet (pictured with Sparky for scale)
photo courtesy your correspondent