Nokia 770 tips

The Nokia 770 is a cool gadget, but the documentation is really quite lacking. The manual is available here, but after reading it I still can’t do a lot of fundamental things. A lot of the answers can be found on the Internet, but I’ve literally spent days searching for the answers to questions on how to do fundamental things.

Before I start listing the things that I’ve learned/found, it’s really useful to get more storage for the 770. Because the onboard flash storage is so small at 128MB, the OS and applications are compressed, slowing down booting, application loading, etc. 2GB RS-MMC cards are available for about $30-40 as of July 2007, and I bought this Kingston card from Newegg. Instructions for modifying your Tablet to boot from the MMC card are available on Maemo.org, but I found the instructions on Examplified.com easier to follow. You’ll be installing a terminal application to get to a Linux command line and getting root access (sudo gainroot from the command line). Enough preamble, it’s time for the tips.

• How do I find out my IP address?
  Run Xterminal, get root access with sudo gainroot, then type ifconfig.
  Or, load Connection Manager, tap on the title bar, Internet Connection, IP address.
• How do I select text in the web browser to cut, then paste?
  Double tap but leave the stylus on the screen at either the beginning or end of the text to be selected. Then drag the stylus to the other end of the text. To copy the selected text to the clipboard, tap on the top frame of the browser windown, then Edit, and Copy. It’s tricky, and may take a couple of tries.
• How do I play new Internet radio stations?
  This one had me baffled for a long time, until I found the posts by Stevenstromer on Internettablettalk.  Here’s what he wrote:
  1. Surf to shoutcast.com, or another stream aggregator, on your 770.
  2. At shoutcast.com, click ‘Tune In’ next to the station you want to stream. The ‘Audio Player’ application should automatically launch, and begin playing your station.
  3. You’ll note that most stations will display in Audio Player as multiple streams. (I believe each listing represents a different server, and the numbers indicated in parenthesis represent the number of active and total possible streams of each host.) Single click on any one server that is not maxed out to select it.
  4. From the Audio Player menu, select Track > Add to favorites. This adds the stream (and not the .pls file that you may have previously tried to manually enter into Audio Player) to the list available from the Internet radio applet.
  5. From the Audio Player menu, select Playlist > Open…
  6. Open the file titled ‘favourites’ that the file manager automatically directs you to. (For those who prefer to work under the hood, the favorites list is actually stored in the file /home/user/MyDocs/.sounds, and can be edited there.)
  7. Your favorites list will display in Audio Player.
  8. Hold the stylus down on the name of the station you’d like to rename, and name it as you’d prefer.
  9. From the Audio Player menu, select Playlist > Save… in order for your changes to be saved.
• How do I read eBooks?
  First, you need to install the free FBReader. Go to http://www.fbreader.org/maemo. Scroll down to the Single click installation and click the link to install the application.Next, it’s convenient to create a new folder to hold the eBooks. As described here in comment #13,
  1. Go to the File Manager on the 770.
  2. Point to the “Memory Card” folder.
  3. Select “File | New Folder…” from the drop down menu or “New Folder…” from the popup menu (which you get by holding the stylus on the “Memory Card” folder for a couple of seconds).
  4. Input the name for the new subfolder, “Books”, and tap “OK”.Now, when you download eBooks, point them to the Memory Card/Books folder. Then load FBReader, tap on the Options button (icon on lower right with the “wrench” and set the Book Path in the General tab to ~/MyDocs/Books:/media/mmc1/Books. Then, click the Add Book to the Library (second icon on the left with the books and the plus sign), click on the file to add to the library, edit the info as appropriate, then click OK.