There must be a fair few Irish bloggers getting up this morning to DHL deliveries, or from during this week anyway, as Expansys shipped their new stock of Nokia 770 internet tablets into the wild, one of them arriving on my desk late yesterday afternoon.

As with every new gadget, instruction kits and leaflets were dumped straight out of the box, diving in instead for the battery, charger and pulling the 2GB RS-MMC card I’d ordered via eBay last week. In goes the card and battery, 770 starts charging and its off through the setup I go. The whole setup process itself shouldn’t really take you any more and two minutes or so, though admittedly I didn’t time the setup but you’ll go through personal details, pairing of a phone device, localisation (no sign of Kilkenny so Dublin will have to do) etc.

The device itself is comfortable to use, the screen rendering sharp for it’s size though on a UI point of view I think a bit more life could have gone into the icon sets. They get the point across but don’t go expecting an iPhone-esque interface. Sizewise you’ll see it above in comparison to my laptop and a standard 17″ Dell monitor (yes, that is PodCamp Ireland logo in the background). Speaking of PodCamp, the first thing I did was pay a visit to SoundSystemPodcast.com on the 770, no problem at all streaming the latest KilkennyMusic.com podcast straight to the tablet.

The web browsing (above) is pretty quick, pages render quite well and can viewed as standard or optimised (like reduce-to-fit). Email setup too is a breeze, if it is your first time to check email you’ll be prompted to set up an account and so I pulled the kenmc.com mail, the device picking up mail but leaving copies on the server so I can deliver them to the laptop later on.

GoogleTalk too itself (‘New Chat’ via the contacts menu, entering your gTalk / Jabber details pulling all your contacts direct from Google) is quite easy, nice big chat window, no problems in maintaining a conversation flow (see how fast you can ‘tap’ on the screen).

Very little done with it thus far bar the above but plenty of opportunities presenting itself. Pretty much fits in the pocket, also fits in the phone holder in the van, sees the MacBook Pro and Sony Ericsson K800i no probelm – that in itself is enough for me. Plenty of toying around with it at the weekend to be done!