That's it exactly, the Maemo tablets and iPod Touch were going after totally different customers. Take away the iTunes users and the general media consumers and Apple doesn't have many customers left. The overlap between the tablets and the iPod Touch must have been very small indeed.

The iPod Touch is a media player with restricted web browsing and computing abilities as nice extras. Its focus is on media consumption, that is what most people buy it for. Look at how many of its "apps" are simply interfaces for accessing online media content.

This is what the designer of Canola was saying, if you want a device to succeed it has to be designed with a very specific audience in mind, and that audience has to be large enough to justify the product's development.

A general non-cellular pocket computer is not aimed at a specific mainstream audience, so it was never going to be a viable product for Nokia in the long term. They had to make it more specialised, and they've wisely gone for making it oriented around communications, which is where Nokia's track record is strongest.

Just to put this in perspective:

In its entire history Apple has sold about 230 million iPods. In its entire history Nokia has sold about 2000 million phones, and sells about 300 million more every year. Add in the other manufacturers, and total phones sales are 1000 million every year. Phones are an order of magnitude more widely used than any other gadget, and this idea that it's a stupid market to be in is itself stupid.

Despite all the snobbery, Nokia sells more Symbian smartphones than all iPhones and iPod Touches put together. It's fashionable in some corners to bash Symbian, but Symbian does well because it runs on cheap low-end hardware that ordinary people can actually afford to buy (150 euros unlocked for a touchscreen Symbian vs 300-600 euros unlocked for virtually any other touchscreen smartphone). It's finding a mainstream market and making a product that suits that market.

Part of the problem in these discussion threads is hype being confused with actual sales. Devices can be very popular with the media yet unpopular in the real world, or vice versa, because the media tends to be written by a very unrepresentative sample of the population.

The Amazon Kindle is talked about in hushed tones as some kind of triumph, yet Amazon still won't release any sales figures, with most estimates at something in the region of half a million devices a year, about the same as the original iPod. Well... the original N-Gage sold one million devices in its first year, yet the N-Gage was instantly written off as a total disaster at its launch.

What measure are people using to compare the success and failure of various devices? Userbase? Sales figures? Column inches in newspapers? How cool the device seems?