You and my wife would get along well. She loves to go out and buy impractical stuff just because it's on sale or cheap. Walmart may be able to get away with that sales model, but seriously, how many people are going out and impulse-buying N810s? Nokia isn't going to make money with that approach!

Looking at hardware specs and ignoring software is the exact issue I'm talking about. Average people don't care about the hardware when they buy an iPhone. All they see, and all they care about, is what the software does. It's the guitar again, it's the OS/2 thing again. Think of what you COULD do with the guitar... But you can't... Because it only has one string. I can still remember some of my geek hacker friends going out and buying OS/2 because it was so cool. Who cares? If it can't run your basic practical real-life software that you're actually going to use, what's the point? The day IBM released OS/2 Warp, without a competing Office productivity suite along side it, is the day I new it would die. The secret of "practical usability" which seems to elude almost all "hackers" is the reason why Apple has been so successful with their products. Yet companies like Nokia just never seem to catch on.

The iPhone is practically useful out of the box. An N810 isn't. Who ever buys an N810 intending to use only the software it came with? It would end up a hunk of junk sit on the shelf never getting used, and all you'll ever do is think about what you could have done with those impressive hardware specs, if you only had the software... If they already had to write a bunch of software, good for them. But the customer is the only one that matters in sales, so the real question is did they write enough software to make people buy it. If not, they need to get back to work!

That's why Ubuntu is relatively successful, because the basic stuff "just works". It's not like Nokia wrote the included browser, they just ported it. And if they were smart they would have done the same thing for a document editor, spreadsheet, encrypted notepad, etc. The whole point is to make the device practically usable by the average person, so that it sells more, which in turn pays for the R&D. As long as companies like Nokia can't get this into their skulls, they will never be competition to Apple.

As for the price issue, it's hard to compare to other devices because all of it's competition has the basic software out of the box. They aren't competing as an advanced PDA, because the Nokia device doesn't even come with much of the fundamental software that PDA's have. They aren't competing with other pocket computers or iPhones, because those devices offer a lot more, but what do you expect at 2 to 3 times the price (which is to say, if they meant to compete with these, they have a lot of room to increase the price and thereby offer a spectacular software suite along with it that would put those other much more expensive devices to shame). And I find it silly when people compare them to eee PC's, the whole point of an N810 is you can fit it in your pocket.

It seems to me that either the people at Nokia in charge of MID's are either a bunch of hacker geeks with no business sense, or they never did intend to make any money off it, and this whole Maemo thing is itself just a beta project so that they can dabble in MID's until they are ready to ditch Maemo and make a serious, properly supported device with Symbian.