When we talk about "newbies" I think a lot of us are talking at cross purposes.

By "newbies", some of us mean people who just want to use the tablets for simple things like browsing the web, while others take "newbies" to mean people who are new to the tablets and may go on to do complex things with them. Those are two totally separate things.

The Tablet Scene site is NOT meant for people new to the tablets who want to learn complex stuff. That's what ITT's newbie forum is for.

Tablet Scene is meant for "casual users", for people who simply don't care about booting from a memory card or changing OSes or anything like that. Tablet Scene is meant for people who use the tablets for their official purpose: surfing the web, checking e-mail, making internet calls etc all of which can be done with the built-in applications.

The contents of ITT is mostly to do with things beyond those built-in functions. ITT is mostly about adding new functions to the tablet, often very obscure functions. Simply filtering ITT won't make it more relevant to casual users, because they don't want most of the functions that ITT covers.

To put it another way: ITT is like a site for people who enjoy messing around with their car engines, while Tablet Scene is for people who just use a car to get them from A to B and don't want to touch the engine.


Yes, this is exactly it.

Tablet Scene is for the kind of people who buy the Nokia tablets as Apple-style consumer devices, while ITT is for the kind of people who buy the Nokia tablets as pocket-sized computers. Both are buying the tablets, but they're buying them with significantly different intentions, and may require significantly different kinds of support.

Going by the history of portable devices, it's the consumer-oriented purchases that will make a device successful. The tablets need more casual users in order to get enough sales to justify their existence, it's not enough to only sell to people who know what a repository is.

Hopefully Tablet Scene will encourage more casual users to get a Nokia tablet, as it makes them realise you don't need to know anything about Linux in order to use the built-in functions. By encouraging more casual users to get a tablet, it will make the tablets more viable, which will benefit hardcore users as well.

I know some people on ITT don't like the idea of the tablets going mainstream (you should see some of the messages I got when I suggested using Canola as the main interface!) but they can stay away from Tablet Scene.



Another important point about videos is that they show something is actually possible, which makes people feel more confident about following the instructions.