Software developers aren't a large group of people though.

Nokia just published their results and despite a large drop in sales due to the recession they're still selling 100 million devices per quarter, close to half a billion per year.

For a Nokia product line to be considered remotely worth their time it has to be selling millions a year in total. Even the old generation N-Gage and N-Gage QD managed to sell one million a year, and that was considered a massive sales disaster.

How many tablets have Nokia sold over the past four years? Nokia won't say, and it's the only product line where they won't say. All other Nokia platforms have had sales figures published but the tablets are a black hole.


I totally understand where you're coming from. If this was a low-key low-budget effort like Pandora I'd totally agree with what you're saying.

And if this was entirely about an open source software platform pushed forward by volunteers it wouldn't matter that much about userbase either.

The problem is the hardware, the only people making maemo-compatible hardware are Nokia, and they're not doing it for fun. Sooner or later their shareholders are going to want to see a return on four years of loss-making investment. What will happen if they don't get it?

Four years is a heck of a long time to go without significant sales, it can't go on forever. There has to be some hit product featuring maemo in order to justify all that time and money spent on it.

The smartphone world might be crowded but that's because it is a large market. Nokia just revealed that the 5800 alone shipped three million units in its first three months. I'd be willing to bet that's more than all Nokia tablet shipments in the last four years.

I'm not saying the tablets have to become phones, just that if they want to survive they have to become something that sells in large quantities. Clearly tablets in their current form don't sell well, so they have to change into something else.