My belief, and I've stated it before, is that Nokia's Maemo platform is just the right thing for next year's Internet and next year's market. Everything is moving towards the place where the tablets will be, and if Nokia doesn't fumble this, they could have a real winner on their hands.

The tablets, and even moreso the Zaurus, were before their times; they had a vision, but the hardware and software platforms just weren't there to fully support it. The tablets can do all sorts of amazing things, they just don't do any of them particularly well.*

However, Apple did an amazing thing; they had a vision, and the iPhone brought it to life despite the lack of good hardware by using lots of sneaky workarounds (like the YouTube back-door). Apple knows that first impressions are very important, and so the iPhone is really focussed on those first impressions. There's a lot more depth to other devices, like the tablets, but you gotta get people to read past the first few pages, and that means making sure things just work when a new user picks up the device...

Non-geeks want to do most of the same things that geeks want to do with a handheld device; they just aren't willing to wrestle with the thing to get it to work. We all want music and video, both streaming and local; we all want social apps (IM/voice/facebook/twitter/email/contacts) to connect us to our friends and family; we all want some way of jotting notes/reminders/todos in a way that can be easily shared with other devices, we all want a way to easily read documents that people send us or that we download (MS Office / PDF / e-books), we all want to be able to keep up on the news (news sites, blogs, stocks, weather, etc), we all want to play games, and of course, we all want to be able to surf the web.

There are lots of other things, kinda "icing on the cake" stuff, that people would use if it was done right, especially a good camera that can do still photos and video, then upload these easily to user-defined location(s); GPS / mapping / location awareness stuff; presentation control; remote control of devices in your home; etc, etc.

We all want that stuff; the geeks will work to make it happen, non-geeks will give up quickly and return the device if it doesn't do what they want.

* EDIT: Please don't argue about this point. I'm as much of a tablet evangelist as anybody, but even I confess that the limitations are in-your-face obvious.