Apple’s announcement of the software investment fund makes a lot of sense- it helps spur development for its mobile platform and it does something productive with the mountain of cash the company is sitting on.

I believe Nokia needs to consider doing something more to spur software development for its tablets. (The only reason I have not purchased one yet is the dearth of polished, useful software.)

Aside from throwing some money at hosting to address issues that have been previously aired here, I think Nokia should announce something like $1M per year for 5 years that would be allocated to tablet developers based on the number of votes from unique tablet owners. (Sort of a “Digg” model for Maemo garage.)

If there were 1 million projects and each received a vote, each developer could receive $1. If there were 100 projects, and each received the same number of votes, each developer would receive $10,000. The “market” gets to reward the most useful projects.

I think this throws the money where it’s needed, as it’s needed, and gets the ball rolling while still keeping the overall investment very low- a happy compromise between Apple’s approach and Nokia’s strategy.

But, everyone has an opinion, right?