And here is where I'm gonna vent a little.

You guys think you're discouraged by the moves you see Nokia make in public-- just imagine the addition of internal madness you never get to see.

But since I won't/can't go too far into that I'll limit my gripe to public fiascos.
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1. N-gage

Okay, the original taco-talk-mode device had some silly aspects. Designing it so that users had to remove the battery to swap games was something a first year industrial design student *might* do. And he'd get an F from the instructor.

Now, a good industrial design team would have processed the negative feedback and plowed it into a next-gen device that blew everyone's socks off. There is no excuse for a company like Nokia to stumble twice.

And yet they did. The next N-gage didn't quite do the trick, although it got close.

So what does Nokia do instead of persevering in creating a new market? They gave up, and so N-gage at this point is nothing more than a gaming layer slapped onto smart phones.

In my opinion, a hybrid gameboy/phone type device still has potential if created and supported properly. And it doesn't have to look much like a gameboy out of the box: as we've discussed here before, create an ecosystem around certain phone forms that support add-ons such as a "gaming sleeve". First cell phone company to market that will have a winner. After all, it's more about the AFTERmarket than the intial offering. Companies sell more razor blades than razors.

2. The Internet tablets

Same thing going on it seems, and just as Matan alluded. The tablets are converging toward the iPhone probably because the iPhone was highly successful. But let's get real. The success of the iPhone was due more to Apple's amazing buzz machine more than anything else. Yes, the iPhone introduced novel concepts that became game-changers-- o wait, no they didn't. They simply built upon and refined advents previously introduced by others... including Nokia (a la 7710).

So rather than persist in cultivating the unique "MID" market, it *looks* like Nokia is giving up. On one hand it's easy to blame the economy because whatever momentum was there a year ago is gone or waning now. But then, I can't see the N900 selling like hotcakes in that same climate.

If the N900 is to mimic the iPhone experience, what's the point? The iPhone is now the Kleenex/Coke/Xerox of the slick phone world. It is the standard. Not because it introduced anything completely new, but because Apple completely and competently managed the entire experience from initial vague rumors to global marketing.

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Okay, okay, I seem to be making rank assumptions here. It's just that while I want to hold out hope that Nokia is not abandoning the current form factor, it's getting harder to do so. If only a high-level platform whitepaper could be published... /me fades off into dreamland