Good points.... I have to stress out that I'm describing my _subjective_ experience. I'm not saying that others don't find these devices useful beside being lovely (and yes, I'm very proud of my toys ). But my point is that we should focus on how to improve the experience of using this device, and pass to Nokia these desires. This sounds a lot like market-droid-speak, but it isn't. So allow me to quote you in trying to make a constructive approach here (even if it may sound like bashing, and blame-throwing, it isn't; all of you guys, think of this as a post-mortem on the current status of NITs, and a discussion on where we want to take them). Good point. But NIT's are not the ground-breaking devices they want to be, user experince-wise. We've had time to form an idea about what a PDA does, what a PMP does, what do you expect from a low-end and from a high-end laptop since years ago. In this case, it's not about reinventing the wheel from scratch, it's about taking all the wheel designs made so far and figure out how to make a new better wheel. I'd expect incremental inovation from a known base, not starting from 0 like Newton and Palm did. But it seems that the tablets do not capitalize on that knowledge. So you say that two years and three iterations is too short to make a new device for a new market out of thin air. I say it's about enough, and the next iteration should be consumer-level. iPods went from nothing to millions sold in less than 2 years.
I'm not complaining that the tablets are not at consumer-level so far; but I hope that the next iteration will be at true consumer level; I invested too much passion, energy and interest in these specific devices to watch light-heartadly how it is gonna be surpased and killed by iThings that will lock devs (and myself) out of it. So what I'm trying to do is make Nokia listen to my and my fellow NIT users requests for improvement, and take action on them, so in the next iteration we will get a consumer-level tablet that is still very friendly to developers and OSS crowd.
I'm well aware of those pesky lawyers and their legal implications. My point is that the worst position to be in is half-closed and half-OSS. You'll annoy everybody and you'll be in no side. In my country we call this "haveing your *** in two boats will only get you drawned".
Two years, three iterations later, I think that this product line should take momentum. If not now, then when ?. NITs already competitors that are on more-or-less equal terms now, and which hadn't the two year advantage. I strongly suspect that if this line doesn't take off now, it will never get the chance again, even if this happens for simple economic reasons.
The guys and girls who built that did it good starting from nothing. It took them 5 years, yes.
But we (read IT community and designers) already have good ideas on how to proceed - why throw away and re-learning everything from scratch how to make mobile computing ? And spending another 5 years on that ? Maemo as platform is already 3 years old, and it's getting dated by the minute now. The moment Android comes alive on a HTC device, doing everything NIT does, but with better capabilites, NITs and Nokia will be in big trouble.
I'll repet myself, I belive that this is the latest critical point to change the mission of NIT and make it into a mainstream platform. So think about what should be next in NIT line and voice your thoughts.
Damn, running into limitations. Will follow up on next post.