Texrat: yeah, there was some reading between the lines on my part, but it was pretty clear that they had tried pretty hard and had kinda given up. They even had tried putting their computers into little mailbox niches and then using the tablets as mobile remote desktops but, alas, it seems that the project was short-lived

i remember going to an evening with S60 event here in NY last year, proudly toting my tablet. The dismissive attitude displayed by the Nokians when I asked about tablet development told me all I need to know about where the N8xO series was in the frame of Nokia priorities.

Hmmm. Based on that post my relaxation may be premature (hee hee hee).

Hmm, of course, it can't be short-lived, they now have a website with a wishlist and everything. So despite the fact that he sounded despondent about the success of the project so far, doesn't mean they're giving up, right? right? I mean, the wishlist page is entitled, "How is Productivity Bundle continued?" ... so they must be continuing... I hope...

Was having a talk with Ricky Cadden today, said something that made him stop and think a bit as we were talking about the tablets...

...the OS is a means to an end. Its not the most important thing, as for a services company only needs to fulfill the niche of being an enabler for the services that tend to make people come back and purchase more from you.

...the hardware is a means to an end. Its not the most important thing, nor is it the bankroll. The browser's contents is the bankroll, and the hardware makes the OS a carrier to get people plugged into the services.

For a company that's used to control of OS and hardware as ways to keep people plugged into a service, its hard to change a corporate culture and business methodology that is built on that.

That's long term vision. I hope that avid tablet fans can start to see that.

Short term vision is aligning the abilities of the tablets with the capabilities of users, software, and a community of developers that wants their ego stroked moreso than the last community. If Nokia comes thru with this, then the long term vision is easier to achieve.

Without a vision people perish, same with products. The IT has gone for a long time with vision that wasn't well communicated, and therefore it didn't exist for the very group that was ready to push it as a solution. The change now is that there is vision, and organization around that vision. The hard part is selling it, and internally, Nokia has a job to do. Externally, this community has to see more than the electrons between its fingers and make this relevant to a wider group of folks. When those two sides come together, things like HSPA, hi res cameras, and multitouch won't matter. Nokia will be making funds off of selling a solution, and you will enjoy having a box to tinker with that has a vision greater than just your tinkering.

I am not arguing. I never said that you are wrong. Neither one of us can predict the future. We just come from opposite angles. You obviously have faith in the platform and some ideas on its future. You think that the future tablet, the one you imagine with the knowledge you have, will be successful on the market for this or that reason.

I am trying to figure out how the future tablet will be, then to find in the products on offer (e.g. iPhone) or historical products (e.g. Zaurus) something as similar as possible, and then use what the market reaction is or was to this similar product to see what the future of that hypothetical tablet might be.


So what do we have?
We have the N810 that we all know.
We will have slightly more powerful hardware.
We will have an hsdpa modem in it. Apparently (you just said so), it will be data only.

What is closest to that? At present, I would say something like the eeepc. Runs Linux, is sold explicitly to browse the web, is sold by operators with a modem and a mobile contract. The eeepc is a fair bit bigger than the N810, but there are other, smaller micro-PCs in the pipeline. They are all the rage in Japan at present. A main advantage of the N810 over those machines is, of course, battery life.

There are also winCE machines more similar to the N810 specifications with a cell modem. They are almost exclusively sold in the Asian market.

The eeepc sells like hot cakes. The smaller machines not that well, due to a combination of high price and a keyboard which is perceived as too small.

As to "new desktop paradigms" go, the eeepc is in a better position. It does help in bringing Linux to the masses. Did we see "all sorts of unexpected third-party stuff happening" with it? Not for the moment.

This is what I fear for the N900 / maemo. Will it be able to create a vibrant software market? This is a recurring problem, it killed the Zaurus, plagues WinCE and Symbian, and has always be a problem for Linux. Linux compensates with a wealth of free software, of course, but is that sufficient? I'm not really sure.

The 770, N800 and N810 also did not manage to create a vibrant software market. Sure, one can port Linux desktop applications to maemo, but the reality is that it is lots of work to render them practical, and that not that many have been ported. I am still waiting for abiword to go out of alpha status. Would that change with an always on connection? I don't see how.

The iPhone is the only product which managed to create a software market (and fast on top of that). Of course, it helped that Apple had a distribution system in place. You should check the iTunes store to see what is available. Much would be worth copying / porting to the tablet. But who is going to do it when no money is to be gained? Free software has its limits.

Will maemo 5 still support N8x0 ? or i Need to buy a new N9x0?

Well, that one's obsolete; it works with an old kernel version (that we're presently stuck with), and if it were to be kept, really ought to be ported to mac80211 anyway. But it is copyrighted code, as well as containing the previously proprietary information on how to run the wifi. Nokia leaned on them to produce a specification, and started writing completely Nokia-owned code for that specification, which they then can release under any license.

Moreover, they did something which was not necessary to solve a problem akin to the HSPA issue you mentioned: Now they have an alpha driver relying on a new infrastructure. So in practice, it's not useful until the kernel gets updated. So they actually backported mac80211 to our kernel just so this released source could actually be used. (And this mac80211 backport may also help with USB dongle support.) This effort, by the way, gives me hope for getting a somewhat Maemo 5-esque release on the N8x0; they're actually using something like N8x0/Maemo 4 for their current development.

Getting the rights to the existing driver and GPLing it would not, IMHO, go as far as what they have done, so I question how well that evidence supports your conclusion. (Though not the validity of your eventual conclusion.)

There's a mixture of hardware and software that goes into the tablets. While it seems they slid a bit on the N810, the hardware on any of the tablets is first-rate vs. non-NIT competitors. And while I can see plenty of faults, plenty of things it would seem like they could have done already on the software side, they're not that bad in perspective. It seems to me that they're coming under "fire" for a combination of not getting the HW+SW to market fast enough, and not being open enough with the SW now.

But I think, given the quality of Nokia hardware I've seen, and what we do know of the N9xx so far, that as late as it will be, it's still going to be out front as far as hardware. (The N810W's a different story. The more I think about it, the less I can see them selling...) And because it's shipping late, it's not surprising (though no less disappointing) that Nokia's not open enough. But they've made some pretty serious commitments (notably with open alpha SDKs, and some devices for developers during that time) that make me think it's going to be hard to help expanding on the success of the N8x0. When you look at it that way, I see them trying to get stuff cleaned up and ready for an upcoming release, so it's understandable that a lot of things aren't released yet, or are still alpha or otherwise non-useful.

I think when it comes release time, the software will be as finished as Diablo (rather than Chinook), and the hardware will be unbeaten; I think with the always-on data built-in, it'll have a lot broader market appeal, and I don't see any other devices coming through between now and then with a big enough breakthrough to leave an abnormal portion of the market saying "Man, that N900's sweet; now I wish I hadn't blown my year's gadget allowance on this xPhone. Oh well." The Googlephone, while perhaps not in the expected state of perpetual beta, isn't that radical a game-changer, and I don't see MIDs getting very much better for performance-portability-price product than they are. The Pandora (did y'all hear? It's shipping with an Angstrom-based system) will stay a niche gamer and hacker device; it's biggest effect (and possibly the biggest threat, if Nokia's stupid) will be draining off some of the hacker/developer community, which will not be entirely offset by taking Karel Jansens away. (This is exacerbated by the reaction against HSPA, which the Pandora does not have.) But the effects of that won't be immediate, and Nokia will have the chance to get some of them back.

Will it be an earth-shaking revolution? Probably not. But I've felt the revolutionary nature of the tablets is overrated for quite some time. I think it will be commercially a bigger success than any of the tablets so far, and I only see one opportunity for them to really shoot themselves in the foot WRT the platform's continued success.

One thing that will really help is to make Maemo run on Pandoras. They'll (presumably) be out there in reach of most potential developers before the N9xx will, so you can either lose some developers from Nokia hardware and Maemo, or you can have more leaving Nokia hardware but staying with Maemo. It should be clear that it's very much in Nokia's interests, if they want to sell devices running Maemo, to keep the developer community working on Maemo. And this non-3G, niche device is not a serious sales threat to the N9x0, either.

I can see the potential for the Pandora to be the de facto SDK dev board even without Nokia backing, if they do ship soon enough, but it would be really smart for Nokia to get behind this and have someone working on getting an alpha SDK running on the Pandora to minimize the number of people who jump to Angstrom, etc. (In case anyone wonders why the Pandora instead of the cheaper Beagle: It's potentially less intimidating (though probably not to useful developers), it's self-contained, it has a touchscreen with no hassle, and (the big one) it serves as both a dev board and a pocketable end-user device.)

Bottom line: I agree it's hugely important for them to get it right, but I feel they have less chances to go horribly wrong than some do. Maybe I'm just a bloody optimist, though, and you guys will be right...

Fingers?!!!!!??????!!!!!!

Who would want to touch a €400,- device with greasy fingers? That's what a stylus is for. And using two styl- ahm, two of these things probably looks more than chinese food than anything else.

I, amongst others, asked this question. The public reply from Peter was that we'd *really* want to buy new hardware anyway. There was no public answer to the question of whether the N8x0 PowerVR drivers would be released so we could also use the ui-which-uses-clutter-but-isn't-clutter-based ui on them, however this would really make sense, so I'm optimistic.