If you read all the posts on this thread by Ragnar, Peter@MaemoMarketing, and qgil, you have to conclude that there is no greater-than-3.5" non-phone-option device in the Nokia pipeline; that is, as far as Nokia is concerned, the Tablet is dead and there is not another Tablet in the Nokia pipeline. They say that they aren't going to tell us what new hardware Nokia plans to release, but they have been relentless in telling us that people don't want to carry two devices and that their research shows that most people do not want anything larger than a smartphone. What's-her-name's (can't remember her name -- no disrespect intended) presentation of the stylus-less Maemo 5 pointed in the same direction.

I agree with them that the Tablet is not the sweet-spot in the market that is addressed by the iPhone and the N97 and the rumored N900.

But that doesn't mean that the Tablet format (4"+ screen and no phone capability) is not a large niche, just not as huge a niche as the smartphone's niche.

Furthermore, that niche is obviously there; Nokia has just done a poor job exploiting it on the software end. And they have never really tried to market it (which would have been impossible anyway, due to the software).

We know the market is there because the iPod touch sells well. Yes, the iPod touch is also pocketable in a way that the N8x0 series isn't. But the people I know who opted for the touch over the Tablet made that choice because the interface was smoother, it had the apps they wanted, and browsing seemed much quicker. They made the choice despite feeling they were sacrificing a more desirable screen size (and better resolution). Yes, some people would want the pocketability, but others would want the larger screen.

For me, the N800 hardware was near-perfect for the then-current state of the technology. I am not a Linux user nor a programmer, and I had to work hard to make it act like I wanted. I'm convinced that it would have sold much better if Nokia had made it more consumer-friendly.

The problem was not the hardware, it was the software. Read any of the reviews from when it came out. Review after review said the interface made it of interest "only to hobbyists." In this long review, the reviewer starts out the subsection on User Interface with: "I mentioned in an earlier post that the N800 isn't very user-friendly out of the box and that the average consumer and/or tech newbie would be pretty dumbfounded. I still stand by these words and would like to add that the reason for my original assessment is the device's user interface. ... There's no denying that this is not user-friendly." (Underlining supplied not by me but by the original reviewer.)

At this point, hardware capability has progressed to the point where the N800-successor could do great all the things that it now does well enough. With minor updates, it could, for example, play movies smoothly and browse quicker, and it could sport a transreflective screen. It would be, for many people, perfect for what its uses are. And these are uses that are irreparably impaired by shrinking it. It’s especially disappointing to abandon the Tablet when Nokia may finally have a consumer-friendly interface.

I don't get Nokia's apparent decision (for at least the near-term) to abandon the Tablet niche. How many models of phones does Nokia make? It seems to be thousands! Why walk away from a unique niche, especially when you could finally do it really well? If Nokia gets enough return on all these different phone models, why won’t it also make a Tablet, especially since it is developing the software anyway and hardware-wise could just follow the N800 as a prototype?

If Nokia does not soon come out with another Tablet, their support of this community will be darn ironic. I, for one, will be using the forum as a springboard to install Mer on something like a successor to the Moses Smart Q5, as soon as it offers processor/RAM specs like the rumored N900. And here I’d thought Nokia was in the business of selling hardware.