I wrote a story about my brief experience playing around with the Wi-Fi enabled Nokia 770 tablet: I've been in Helsinki the past couple of days at Nokia's annual journalist schmooze-fest. Surprisingly though, there's been quite a bit of news coming out of the event. Also, they had a demo room that included some early versions of the Nokia 770 Internet tablet. I'm not totally sure (the PR person I asked couldn't say for sure) but I think this is the first time that Nokia has offered a peak at the actual device. When it was launched, I think all the coverage came from paper. Anyway, I tried to be level in this review but generally I was pretty disappointed. Everything about it was agonizingly slow. I have no idea if that is because these are early versions or if this is how the final products will be. I got basically typical answers from spokespeople about how it will improve but no evidence about why or specific changes that were being made to make the experience better.

There was plenty of discussion among my fellow journalists here about the slowness. It's hard to get past that aspect because it made the whole experience so not pleasant. In addition to slow response time, downloading Web pages was also quite slow. The 770 comes with built-in Wi-Fi so should have been fast but it was a lot like using 3G on a cell phone or PDA. That of course could have been due to an overloaded network at the conference center. Or it could be related to overall slow processing speeds on the device.

I think the best prospects for the Nokia 770 come from the broadband operators and future versions of the device. They could sell or package it to end users. Next year's software is expected to enable voice over IP and instant messaging, two applications that could make the 770 more attractive to users.