Old news for most of whom it concerns, but I’d like to air some thoughts about it nonetheless.

My impression so far - again, as a hacker, not an end user: I like it, and I like it alot. The refreshed look-and-feel is one thing, as well as the integrated IM and Google Talk, but to me the underlying system bits are more interesting.

First, though, the device feels much more responsive. Both when navigating around on the device itself as well as when using the web browser. Good job to whomever did that.

And the new Application Manager is very nice, and having a proper package repository system up and running is invaluable. I’m very pleased they decided to drop the /var/lib/install model from the earlier versions. Also, being able to use “apt” to cleanly remove parts of the stock system, e.g. games and RSS-reader (which I’m sure are nice, but I don’t really use them) is very handy.

As for the “beta” part of the release name, I haven’t found any showstopping bugs or flaws yet, so things are really looking promising. Great work, team. Looking forward to the final release!

One small disappointment, though. It was a bit sad to see binary compatibility with ARMedslack packages go (it was incredibly handy to just drop a few precompiled binaries into /home/user/bin and off you go), but I guess the switch was done in the name of the greater good.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 13:15 and is filed under tech, nokia770. 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.