How on earth could you miss all the connectivity features in the N8x0-series!?

I've certainly used those voice features often, either via WIFI or tethered via my mid-range Nokia's GPRS/EDGE connection (chose not to use 3G due pricing and coverage), sometimes in very remote foreign places.

I've occasionally promoted the continued development of a "cellphone companion device" i.e simply a hardware update and refresh of the N8x0 models which, with faster hardware and evolved software, would be even more ideal companions to the existing mobile users, but the main reason why Nokia has abandoned the non-phone tablets may well be political.

The single top-end N900 model with its still somewhat immature cellular telephony features doesn't pose significant threat to the hordes of Symbian developers who are being pushed and pulled towards Nokia's emerging QT-based Symbian environment.

The currently most powerful (by far) Symbian lobby within Nokia may imagine the higher-end features of an affordable Maemo-based "companion device" as a threat both to their own higher-end Symbian models' margins and to all those Symbian developers who can't deploy their QT-wares on Maemo until 2012 at earliest.

So instead of cannibalizing some stagnant Symbian market share in favour of developer and userbase momentum for Maemo, Nokia is conceding ground on both accounts to other Linux-based mid- and upper-range newcomers, including Android.

Sure, this is just a theory and not an all-encompassing or omniscient one at that, but the upcoming Cortex-8 tablets (affordable, despite not having Nokia's economies-of-scale?) seem all destined to run something else than Maemo.