If "sales" meant physical units, yes. But in the real world, sales usually aren't real. Really! They're agreements on pieces of paper - sometimes even letters of intent rather than binding contracts. I remember a biz in the UK that claimed to have raised £20M when it really had £1M, but that the bank had given them a letter saying that if they met some conditions - which were quite impossible - then, at the bank's option, they could get more. The bank did it as a cheap way of giving positive PR to their client.

Always look for the catch.

Somewhere in Texas, an agitated rat is sitting on some sales figures...and his hands.

ROFL.

I have some N800 launch numbers that would make meanwhile's eyeballs pop-- and I know that sale stock was depleted looong ago.

But me, agitated? O hell no. This is becoming one of the funniest threads in the forum!

Oh, my guess at agitation on your part was not based on this specific thread, but instead on the more general issue of a near total lack of public Internet tablet sales figures. Your reaction to the release of the "300,000" figure seemed to be one of great relief at not having to keep that secret any longer. I figure you can only have more interesting numbers you can't share now.

That reaction was to the announcement of the TV out functionality.

... or with any browser. It even kills firefox on my laptop.

You could disable the flash animation with a click.

Maybe. Otoh, it isn't unknown for organizations to lie to the people who work for them. Nokia's reputation isn't especially good on truth telling - I remember that they got caught hyping early NGage numbers in the UK (using exactly the tactics that I've mentioned). A good rule of thumb is that if you're not important enough to have a reason to lie, then you're not important enough to know the truth, unless it's a direct part of your job.

I also remember a scandal where Nokia tried to punish analysts and journalists who wrote unpleasant things about the company by banning them from conferences, etc, making it impossible for them to do their jobs, and effectively blackmailing the others into posting positive PR for the company... So, yes, I treat anything Nokia says with some skepticism. (They're not alone in this: oh, the stories I could tell you about 3D card manufacturers!)


If I was involved with the Nit professionally, I think I would be far *more* depressed to think that 500K units had been sold than not. Because what the download numbers and other evidence says is that if people are buying the things they're not using them.

But I think that the evidence shows that Nits aren't moving - applying the usual sales curve to those Amazon rank figures says that the Eee is moving on the order of 10-20 times the number of units. And, of course, the platforms that move really big numbers - Dell PDAs, the IPhone, etc - don't appear on that chart. The Nit has a tiny share not just of the overall cake, but even of the niche you-don't-get-to-eat-at-the-big-table cake. Which shouldn't make anyone feel bad about buying one. The hardware is great value, the UI is tolerable, there are some really nice apps, and you're spared a personal relationship with Steve Jobs' ego. More responsive GUI and web browsers that can do a zoom in without giving me time to make tea would be nice in 2009, though. So would a decent PIM - just tell someone to copy DateBook.

Looking at history, I recall it said that the majority of Palm owners never installed extra software on their devices; however, they did come fairly fully featured out of the box whilst the NIT is somewhat of a bare canvas.

Only the more recent palms have wifi, so unless you were willing to struggle with bluetooth, getting them online was tricky and there was no network-aware software installer thing, whereas the NIT makes it easy (if you understand red pill mode).

I would guess that if the NIT did sell in the order of half a million plus then we should see more traffic on these forums, unless most owners tend to dip their toe occasionally into downloading something new and aren't interested in being geeky.

In contrast, the zaurus community is much smaller and very geeky because you'd only buy one if you knew a fair bit about it in the first place, seeing as they've never exactly been high-street-retail items outside Japan!

i have flashblock.