Isn't she gorgeous?
Big, bright, razor sharp screen; surprisingly pure sound; inside, running God's own operating system, finally on hardware actually designed for it; and wirelessly wired to the Internet like a fish to the ocean.
And development tools. Easy to use, well documented, and also running on GNU/Linux by choice. And free software too, of course, duct tape and all. These tools are part of the platform.
One can easily see that some people inside Nokia are sticking out their necks with the N770. Though parts of the gadget's architecture are proprietary, it would undoubtedly not be hard for a competitor that really wanted to, to bring out something similar able to run the same software. I would guess that Nokia's gamble is, that growing the total market will benefit everyone: a rising tide lifts all boats. And growth will be driven by an open, hackable platform becoming best of breed in the mobile space, as it has already done in the Internet server space and looks destined to do on the corporate desktop as well.
Growth at the expense of what? you ask. Well, for example, WinCE. This is pretty much about how big a chunk of the converging mobile and PDA pie Microsoft will be allowed to grab; equivalently, about whether this space will be 0wn3d or Free.
I am not at all sure that Nokia clearly understood all this when the original decision to start building this platform was taken; but by now, after endless delivery backlogs to a seriously underestimated market, I suspect the penny is dropping. (Yet certain design decisions makes one wonder. No Ogg Vorbis support even in the 2006 version; somebody brewed up an external app for this, which basically works. The much better solution of making the built-in audio player do Ogg would be fairly straightforward and is even described as an exercise in the developers docs... go figure.)
There have been critical reviews of the N770 by people evaluating her from an end-user perspective. Much was made of first software version even lacking cell phone functionality -- and that from Nokia.
In a way this critique is fair: those that acquire a 770 to do practical jobs with are likely to be disappointed, finding her, in Faraday's words, as useful as a newborn baby. But it also misses the point. Yes, there are other cell phone manufacturers that use Linux inside. So what. This wasn't ever meant to be an end-user phone. The de-facto N770 target group is, for now, not the mobile phone -- or PDA -- end user. The device is part of a technology demonstration cum community building platform.
One can get Linux to run, with varying amounts of effort, creativity and law abidance, on many other handheld devices, from iPaqs to iPods and games consoles. In fact, it has become something of a challenge to build a device that is somewhat intelligent yet able to miss its date with destiny; just like you cannot teach people both to think for themselves and not love freedom.
For the N770, running Linux was just the starting point. Her de-facto target group is the hacker, the tinkerer, the courtier of playmates technological. Don't take my word for it; Google tells the same story. Seductionware by design, a come-on if ever there was one, from the taunt "...if you want to break your device" if you venture to peek outside your cage door, to the Easter egg that is the desk stand. If your middle name is nerd, you were meant to fall in love with her. "Do you yearn for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?" If that's you, she's your sweetheart.
Postscript: I just hear at the Open Tuesday meeting 6.2.2007 that in Beijing, you can get 'clones' of the N770 for one-tenth of the price of the real thing. Like fake Rolexes. You've done it baby -- you've arrived!