The Nokia 770
The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is the first Maemo device, released in November 2005 with a 4.13in 800x480 resistive touchscreen, 64 MB of RAM and no phone radio of any kind, and it is where Nokia's Debian-based Linux line begins.
Everything the later devices did, from the apt archives to the on-screen keyboard, started here. The whole sequence that followed it is set out at The devices, in order.
What the Nokia 770 is
The Nokia 770 is a Wi-Fi and Bluetooth handheld computer that runs a Debian userland, sold under the name Internet Tablet and deliberately not sold as a phone. It has no cellular modem, no camera and no hardware keyboard. Nokia announced it at the LinuxWorld Summit in New York in May 2005 and shipped it that November, running Internet Tablet OS 2005, the first release of Maemo to reach customers.
What distinguishes the 770 from its four siblings is that it is the smallest and slowest of them and the one that established the format. Its 800x480 screen, an unusual resolution on a handheld in 2005, was carried unchanged through the N800, the N810 and the N900 across the next four years. Its 64 MB of RAM was never repeated: every later device in the line had at least twice that.
The Nokia 770: release date and the software it shipped with
The release date of the Nokia 770 was November 2005, and the software it shipped with was Internet Tablet OS 2005, built on the first Maemo platform release. Nokia followed it with Internet Tablet OS 2006, codenamed Gregale, which rewrote parts of the interface and improved the browser on the same hardware. Those two are the whole official software history of the device.
Internet Tablet OS 2007 never came to the 770 as a supported release, because Nokia had moved to the ARM11 hardware of the N800 by then. A community build of OS2007 for the 770 circulated afterwards, assembled outside Nokia and never supported by it, and it ran, slowly, within 64 MB of RAM. This reference records that it existed; it distributes no images.
The Nokia 770: case, screen and input
The case of the Nokia 770 measures roughly 141 x 79 x 19 mm and weighs about 230 g, and it came with a hard sliding cover that doubled as screen protection and as the power gesture. The cover is the detail owners remember: slide it off and the device wakes, slide it on and the screen locks. The body is plastic, there is no stand, and a stylus stows in the back.
Input is entirely by stylus and touchscreen. The 4.13in 800x480 resistive display carries three text methods: a thumb keyboard, a smaller stylus keyboard, and handwriting recognition. There is no hardware keyboard, no D-pad worth the name and no camera. Typing a URL on a 770 is the reason the N810 later shipped with keys.
The Nokia 770: full specifications
The full specifications of the Nokia 770 are set out below, taken from Nokia's own product data for the device. Figures the company never published are left out rather than guessed.
| Item | Nokia 770 Internet Tablet |
|---|---|
| Announced | May 2005, at the LinuxWorld Summit |
| Released | November 2005 |
| Operating system | Internet Tablet OS 2005; later Internet Tablet OS 2006 Gregale |
| Processor | TI OMAP 1710, ARM926 core at 252 MHz |
| Memory | 64 MB RAM |
| Storage | 128 MB internal flash, one RS-MMC card slot |
| Display | 4.13in, 800x480, resistive touchscreen |
| Input | Stylus, on-screen keyboards, handwriting recognition |
| Camera | None |
| Radios | Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth |
| Cellular | None |
| GPS | None built in; Bluetooth receivers supported |
| Battery | BP-5L, 1500 mAh, user replaceable |
| Size and weight | About 141 x 79 x 19 mm, 230 g |
The Nokia 770: kali
The Nokia 770: kali question asks whether the first internet tablet can run Kali Linux, and the honest answer is that it does not in any supported or practical sense. Kali is a penetration-testing distribution built on the same Debian base Maemo was, so the package formats are close, but the 770's 252 MHz ARM926 core and 64 MB of RAM are below what a working Kali image needs, and there is no maintained build for it. The device ran Debian packages through apt on Maemo 5, the way it ran anything else, but the security tooling Kali ships expects a kernel, a memory headroom and a userland the 770 does not have. People who search for the 770 and Kali are usually reaching for a Maemo device they can experiment on, and the answer for that is the N900, the one tablet in the line that the community kept alive with real tooling.
The Nokia 770: battery and battery life
The battery of the Nokia 770 is a BP-5L rated at 1500 mAh, generous for a device with a 252 MHz processor and no modem, and battery life reflected that. With the Wi-Fi radio off the tablet held charge for days, because nothing kept a network registration alive; with the radio associated and the browser rendering pages, it lasted hours. Nokia quoted standby and browsing separately.
The BP-5L is user replaceable and the same cell the N800 later used, so the two tablets share spares. Third-party extended packs were sold for these devices, but their stated capacities came from the sellers and were never confirmed by any published independent measurement this reference is aware of, so no number is given here.
The Nokia 770: battery extended
The extended battery for the Nokia 770 means the aftermarket packs that claimed more than the 1500 mAh BP-5L rating, and the value to state first is that no credible capacity figure survives for them. They used the same BP-5L footprint and connector, which is why they fit, but the capacity printed on the packaging was a seller's claim, not a measured one, and the device drew the same current from a 252 MHz core with no modem, so the realistic gain was a day or so of standby rather than a second day of browsing. The original BP-5L remains the dependable figure, at 1500 mAh, and it is still the part owners replace.
The Nokia 770: the Linux underneath, and what still runs on it
The Linux underneath the Nokia 770 is a Debian userland on a 2.6 series kernel with the GTK-based Hildon interface above it, and this is the point of the whole device. Nokia published the Maemo software development kit, shipped dpkg and apt under an Application Manager front end, and allowed software the company had not written to be installed from third-party repositories. In 2005 that was not how handheld consumer hardware worked.
Nothing modern targets the 770. Maemo Leste, the Devuan-based revival, supports The Nokia N900 among Nokia hardware and stops there, and the security distributions that produced N900 builds never shipped one for an ARM9 tablet with 64 MB of RAM. What a 770 runs is OS2005, OS2006, and packages from the archives of that era. The people who still maintain and document that material are the same ones described at The forums.
The Nokia 770: what replaced it, and where it sits in the line
What replaced the Nokia 770 was the N800 in January 2007, fourteen months after the 770 shipped, and the replacement doubled the memory to 128 MB, moved to an ARM11 core, added stereo speakers, a pop-out webcam and a second memory card slot. The N810 of November 2007 then added a slide-out keyboard and a GPS receiver. The screen stayed at 4.13in and 800x480 through both.
Placed in the line, the 770 is the origin and the least capable member of it. Four devices followed on the same software family: the N800, the N810, the N900 with a cellular modem in 2009, and The Nokia N9 with MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan in 2011. The 770 is also the answer to why the family existed at all, since Nokia's earlier touchscreen attempts, the 7700 announced in 2003 and never sold and the Symbian-based 7710 of 2004, had already convinced the company that a large touchscreen device needed a different operating system from its phones.
The Nokia 770: replacement
The replacement parts for the Nokia 770 are the battery, the screen and the sliding cover, and of the three the battery is the only one anyone still buys. The BP-5L is the same cell the N800 used, so spares cross between the two, but the screen assembly and the hard cover are no longer manufactured and survive only as second-hand parts from broken units. The body was plastic with no internal soldered display flex, which is why a cracked 770 screen is replaceable at all, and why the device that survives in drawers is the one whose 1500 mAh cell and resistive panel were kept in working order rather than the one whose parts were left to age out.
The Nokia 770: n770
The Nokia 770: n770 confusion comes from the model code, because the old listings and the forum search box shortened the device to the 770 and the 770, and the two spellings point at the same machine. The n770 code is not a second model; it is the same November 2005 internet tablet, the 252 MHz ARM926 tablet with 64 MB of RAM and the 4.13in 800x480 screen, written without the space the product name carried. A listing that calls it an N770 and a listing that calls it a 770 are advertising the same device, and the N prefix some sellers add is one Nokia never used for it. The disambiguation that matters is the 7705 Twist, a CDMA flip phone with a square body that shares only the leading digits and has nothing to do with Maemo or the internet tablets.
The Nokia 770: date release
The date release of the Nokia 770 is November 2005, five months after Nokia announced it at the LinuxWorld Summit in New York in May 2005, and the date that closes the device's own story is January 2007, when the N800 replaced it and the 770 stopped being the newest of the line. The 770 remained the reference point for the whole family through 2009, when the N900 carried a cellular modem into the same slab shape, and the four-year gap between 2005 and 2009 is the span in which a 252 MHz ARM9 tablet with 64 MB of RAM defined what a Linux internet handheld was. The date that matters for a buyer today is that the 770 was first in the line and last in capability, and that every later device it was compared against was a response to it.
Two disambiguations. The Nokia 7705 Twist is an unrelated CDMA flip phone with a square body and has nothing to do with Maemo or the internet tablets. The 770 is also written as the N770 in old listings, but Nokia never used an N prefix for it. This reference carries no prices, no second-hand listings and no firmware images.