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krisse's Avatar
Posts: 1,540 | Thanked: 1,045 times | Joined on Feb 2007
#10
Originally Posted by DataPath View Post
Isn't the iPhone a good argument that a hardware keyboard isn't necessary for a mainstream device? I would have thought that the N800's soft keyboard spoke for itself, but apparently not.
I don't think we need to have just one style of device. As long as they're all the same platform there's potential for many different sizes and form factors to suit different people's tastes and needs. This would be the best way to expand support for the platform.

Don't forget, the iPhone isn't exactly mainstream, at least not yet. 1 million sales in a few months is absolutely nothing by phone standards, Nokia alone sells 1 million every single day and they're only a third of the market. I think the iPhone will sell well compared to iPods, but in its current form it will never be more than a niche of the overall phone market, because there is no way for a single device to appeal to the majority of the market. Personal tastes are too diverse, there can't be a perfect phone in the same way there can't be a perfect film or a perfect book.

There's nothing to stop Nokia bringing out two or three tablet models a year in parallel, just as they bring out a dozen similarly-specced smartphone models every year. The recently announced E51 smartphone is a candybar shape and absolutely tiny, just 61cc, whereas the also recently announced N95 8GB is a slider and much bigger, but they both run exactly the same S60 3.1 software platform at about the same speed.

On top of all that, aren't we expecting some non-Nokia Maemo devices to appear at some point?