Thread: Maemo Advocacy
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ragnar is offline ragnar
2007-07-09 , 17:45
Posts: 631 | Thanked: 1,123 times | Joined on Sep 2005 @ Helsinki
#216
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
Oh, and there's still some dissonance in your rebuttals, ragnar. One reason cell phones are incredibly more successful than PDAs could very well be their innate use combined with PIM functionality.
Finally, some of use see the cell phone as the companion device. That's the point you're not quite getting. We use the phone as a mere modem and the N800 as the main device. Isn't that one of the beauties of Skype? To that end, we want our phone contacts synced to the tablet, so we can call people via Skype. And it doesn't take "infinite resources" to accomplish this, ragnar, so I'm hoping we can avoid those silly exaggerations and pretend we're realistic adults here. It requires an extra head or three. Get Nokia to fund it. Based on the very obvious user feedback here, it will pay off. Or, keep telling the users (hyperbole ahead) they don't want what they want. Which tactic provides the most potential for success?
I think Gil had it right when he asked for moving into specific features. Contact syncing in my books is a somewhat different feature than "PIM" in general. The tablet already has contact book synchronization features for the protocols it is supporting (gmail, jabber). Being able to get all the contacts from your phone ... well, if you can't call these contacts, that feature might not be so useful. For that specific feature, yes, it's already there to some extent. The Maemo Skype app afaik also does this for its contacts. As of infinite resources, I didn't mean that it would take infinite resources, rather that there isn't infinite resources to do every feature in the world.

But, doing "PIM" means so many things to different people, so I really think you could be specific in what exactly the device should be able to do. After that one could estimate how much work doing that would take.

In general, there is the issue of providing offline versus online applications. PIM is one good example of this. Hopefully we all agree that the real value of PIM comes from the fact that the information there is valid and sychronized throughout all the sources where this information is accessed from. There are online services that essentially allow the user to perform PIM actions (calendar, notes etc.) And such services can usually be developed to target multiple devices, the IT included.

That's also a part of the fundamental idea of an internet tablet device: instead of creating an offline client application for every feature/service that the user would want to use, the tablet (with its browser and other internet applications) should provide access to these online services. This is of course not yet fully realized, but it's an innate part of the thinking. Offline applications are costly to develop, maintain and update. Of course the issue is not black and white, but it is more on the range of shades: how much of a feature does the device provide on its online capabilities and how much is also available offline. With "infinite resources" there are thousands Nokia developers available for us and we create and maintain great offline clients for every conceivable feature, but that's really not the idea behind the internet tablet.