Thread: "Surging iPod touch eclipses the iPhone" ... while Nokia stupidly abandons tablets!
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Peet is offline Peet
2010-01-04 , 05:44
Posts: 302 | Thanked: 254 times | Joined on Oct 2007
#80
Originally Posted by krisse View Post
As for design choices... well, there's not a huge difference between the N900 and N810 except their physical size. There's not a huge design difference between the iPhone and the iPod Touch either.
But the N900 is still larger, heavier and more expensive, and comes with a smaller screen more suited for telephony than internet or media usage. And it's the only Maemo 5 device there is.

And Apple indeed has two rather similar "tablets" of which the itouch is both cheaper and more popular than the iphone. The 3rd party developers (and Apple too) seem quite happy with that decision.

This anti-cellular movement is really getting me down.
What anti-cellular movement??

It is in no way "anti-cellular" if some people want to use their tablet tethered to _other_phones_ for cellular connectivity or simply as WIFI or media tablets. You already know that cellular 3G or higher data connections are often limited (e.g. 1GB per month) and outrageously expensive.

I could just as easily complain about there being an infrared port which most people never use, and I hardly ever use Bluetooth or the memory card slot either. But I'm not going to complain because I recognise that these are important to some people and they don't add any significant problems for me. And the more people that buy this device, the more software support I will receive too.
I'm sorry but I find that argument wholly spurious. These _personal_ connectivity options do not noticeably add to the cost or phone-centric design complexity, and if it comes to that, these connectivity functions could easily be added via USB if you wanted to make the basic tablet cheaper still. Just as I can add EDGE/3G connectivity by tethering via my existing (Nokia) phone.

I understand that you come from Nokia/phone background and desperately want the (top-end) Maemo _phone_ to succeed, but just maybe the larger Maemo platform (and the lower end less-smart Nokia phones) would benefit from a cheaper "companion" tablet device. Do you have any arguments against that idea?

The problems that people cite with cellular are nothing to do with the technology but entirely to do with the business practices of cellular providers. And that's a regulatory problem, not a technological one.
And a neat way around that globally widespread cellular data ripoff problem is to offer a more affordable modern Maemo 5 (and 6) based tablet which would lower the entry threshold and allow more people to experience Maemo.
 

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