Nokia Internet Tablet : Sysadmins’ friend?

A bane of the system administrator’s (SA) job is on-call work. You either end up lugging a laptop or making a dash for the nearest machine when things go wrong. . It would be nice to have something that was a bit more portable but had enough tools to fix most issues. The Nokia Internet Tablets (N770 and N800) offer a mostly complete Linux environment and are quite portable, but can they really offer SA’s more freedom?

Out of the box, the N770 offers the basics: web browsing, e-mail, IM (via Google Talk) and some multimedia support. These native apps, while generally useful, don’t apply for most system tasks. We’ll take a look at what works, what doesn’t, and what can be added.

Let’s start with the bad:

1. The default email client bites. It’s bad. Really, really bad. It’s extremely slow, and has no support for custom IMAP folders. The Claws^[1] mail client is being ported to the Maemo platform. This port still in the testing phase, however it is already a viable replacement. Ironic considering the default client is a port of Sylpheed (Claws’ predecessor).
2. Contact/calendar sync for Linux only works with the GPE^[2] stack. Unfortunately, they don’t integrate into any of the default apps. It’s also not particularly reliable or 100% accurate when syncing with Evolution.
3. When the battery gets low, things get consistently crashy. The N770 will randomly reboot under significant load (like browsing the web or playing music). I don’t know if this particular issue has been fixed with the newer N800, but I certainly hope so.
4. Web browsing can be slow. The CPU isn’t the most powerful, so complex pages can take as much as a minute. It has an older version of the Flash plug-in, but no Java. There’s a port of Firefox for embedded devices called Minimo^[3] that does seem to be more stable than the Opera-based default browser. But it’s still very slow loading and, at best, at alpha level.

Now, the good:

1. VPNC and Openvpn both work well. There’s a gui for vpnc, but I was unable to connect to our corporate vpn with it. Running from the CLI worked without issue.
2. CLI is surprisingly useful. If you touch the screen with two fingers a nice full screen keyboard pops up. The predictive typing is quite good, and learns word combinations. There’s also full ssh packages, vim, bash, and a replacement busybox with proper ping and traceroute. Other useful CLI apps available^[4] include Netcat, Nmap and a VNC Viewer.
3. Battery life is very good. I generally got about three hours with typical CLI usage (even with active connections). Multimedia and heavy web browsing dropped me down to around two hours.
4. Wireless works and works well. I was able to join encrypted (WEP/WPA2) and open networks without issue. Bluetooth tethering is also a breeze with connection profiles provided for major US cell networks.
5. Expansion is cheap. You can pick up 2G rs-mmc cards for around $50 from CDW–possibly even cheaper from Amazon or other online vendors. It’s also easy to transfer files to it via usb. No need for a separate card reader.

Despite the issues with the default stack, the N770 can be useful if you’re sans laptop. In the months I’ve had it, it has come in handy on several occasions for minor issues. It’s no replacement for a pc, but can be a valuable tool once customized.

Thanks to Nokia for providing the test units.

^[1] http://www.claws-mail.org/
^[2] http://gpe.handhelds.org/
^[3] http://www.mozilla.org/projects/minimo/
^[4] http://downloads.maemo.org/

This entry was posted by Matthew Schick on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 6:26 am and is filed under review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.