Losing the best-res title
 

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Well, as discussed before, Nokia will be issuing a netbook. But as Architengi incisively asks,

Will there be a need for an NIT if pocket internet is capably delivered on a cellphone and Maemo moves to the next bigger-sized device?

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

As someone pointed out, if it makes sense for Archos to have 4-5-6-7 inch devices, it can make sense for Nokia, too. The gap between a netbook and a phone is certainly large, so the question is 'just' what target audience are they envisioning (IF they are envisioning anything above 3.5").

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Archos revenue was ~ $180M dollar last year, Nokia's ~ $70B. For all we know Nokia could have sold more NIT's than all of Archos' line put together with one device with a 4.1" screen.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Likely yes. I'm one of those individuals who prefer to have two seperate devices then one combined device. I can easily kill the battery on my tablet with usage. I don't want that happening to my phone so I'm screwed when I need it the most.

Not to mention there aren't many phones out there that can do what I want it to do easily. The iPhone requires hacking (only to have said hacks erased with an Apple update). Android (it's getting there). Though both need slightly bigger screens.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Has anybody really found/stated the real numbers for the NIT sales?

I keep hearing "it's better than you think" or something as vague, but nothing exact.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Not the first. The Archos5 has the same resolution, same with some Sony phone. In fact, I believe the new sidekick has a higher res screen! And screen resolution is nothing compared to usability and apps. So unless this is running Symbian or WinMo or Android, why bother.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Yes, as long as battery capacity of smartphones is as poor as today, there's no benefit from cramming all functionality into one device. Yesterday my G1 phone died during the day because some 3rd party app behaved badly and drained battery while running in the background.
I think Apple did the right thing when disallowing multitasking for 3rd party apps. Although not having multitasking sucks.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Yes. I can't walk down the street holding using a netbook, and a phone is (generally) too small to be very useful when browsing the news while lying on the sofa. 4-5" can be the best of both worlds.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Yes, the elusive sofabook... although that does not necessarily mean pocketable (7" is a good sofabook size, too). But if you DO want to make it pocketable, that's a ~4-5" depending on bezel right there.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Maybe it's just my market ignorrance, but that sure sounded like 'Nokia could double sales if they had all those sizes' and not 'different sizes makes no sense' :D The point is that Archos *does* use screen size as a product differentiator (to the level that screen size goes into the product name) and it seems to work for them on the market they're targeting (which is not the same as the N8x0).

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Devil's advocate: By eliminating the redundancies of the 2-device model, you can combine basically everything but one battery in one device. Replace the other one with a battery pack or spare batteries for the all-in-one, and suddenly you have more total stored energy, less total power consumption, and don't risk losing half your functionality while you've got plenty of juice for the other half -- you should be better off.

Realistically: swapping out spare batteries almost invariably requires a shutdown, and charging from a USB pack is too slow, and can be awkward to leave connected while device and battery pack are in pockets/holsters. But if you can get around those, the total-energy advantage is significant.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Yes, naturally for video consumption (which is a very key use case for Archos), the capacity to sell size size variants is attractive for them. We have a couple Archos units here for testing purposes, they're... Well, at least they've certainly got big screens. ;)

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

This is a design choice, not a technical necessity. Space considerations of course mean that you leave out everything you can, but in the times battery swapping was more common, most devices had small coin batteries to keep a suspended system alive (actually, the N810 is my first device that doesn't have this feature). I guess usage patterns just showed most people don't swap batteries all that often so the space-requirement comes out as a bigger issue than the occasional reboot.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Coin-cells, or a better implementation, IMHO, capacitors (so you never had to mess with changing the backup battery). I'd kill for either of these on my tablets, and have even considered some hacking to add it... But the current situation being what it is, there's just no way Nokia's going to give us that revolutionary old feature. I suspect this shift is partly linked to the switch from off-the-shelf AA/AAA cells common in many older devices to the ubiquitous Li-ion-polymer cells.

All cellphones are designed with the dual assumption that battery replenishment is by charging, never changing, and that state is trivial (so rebooting is no problem). The latter is revealed in the awkward compromises of putting SIM slots, microSD slots, and even data cable contacts behind the battery. Together, these make adding a backup power system doubly pointless, and even though Maemo devices to date seem to have ducked the second, the first seems firmly in place.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Yes, but ...

The NIT as predicated has the same screen as that cellphone.

Me, I agree with you. I'm not making any of those decisions, however.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

According to this old report over 300,000 upto and including the n800 which really supprised me.
Tablet Sales

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Yes, but they have multithreading and shared libraries. That leaves room for interesting things. The key is not to call other apps. There are even shared data sources, so I think there's plenty of programming games that can be played. I'm an iPhone development newbie but I'm optimistic about the possibilities. What sucks is the current cut-and-paste issue.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

And, Roger, I agree too, except ...

that rumored NIT ain't a NIT, it's a maemo cellphone.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

I second that. And another phone (besides my compulsory work phone) is what I was hoping the n900 would allow me to get rid of

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Since the toshiba resolution is easily divided by 3, I think they are talking sub pixels. Ie each red green and blue dot are counted as a pixel. In honest people talk, this would give it a resolution of 320x480. nothing special.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

I was just wondering about those resolution numbers, myself. That's an awfully small screen to have 960x480 pixels on it. If those numbers are true, it has 20% more horizontal resolution than the Maemo devices... talk about dense dpi...

EDIT: "Toshiba Biblio e-reader handled, deemed extremely small" ... that's 960x480? Really?

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Unless they use non-square pixels, it can't be 320x480 (that's 3:2 aspect ratio, which the device clearly isn't). 480x960 is in line with the display's proportions. Here's a closeup of the screen, the resolution seems fairly smooth, 2:1 aspect ratio, no sign of discoloration caused by subpixel rendering. While the picture is not perfectly in focus so I cannot judge the exact resolution it certainly seems more to me than triple-up math.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Yes, and this pic seems to suggest that the resolution is pretty high, too.

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Guess number 2. Its a grayscale display. from looking at the provided pictures, it appears to be grayscale. Maybe its e-ink . The included article compares it to the kindle

Re: Losing the best-res title
 

Can't be, walks like a TFT, quacks like a TFT (backlight, color of turned off display)... Also, the image qole linked to clearly shows color.

But, why stop at the biblio, the crafty Japanese also made the Fujitsu F03A which packs the same resolution into 3.2". Or the Sharp 931SH with a brutal 1024x480 / 3.8" screen. I don't know who manufactures the eye-implants required to see all the pixels on these babies...