Good point by sherifnix.

For hardware upgrades it makes sense for companies to keep things secret, because if it comes out you risk everybody stop buying the current hardware and the cash flows stop until you finally deliver. (This is called the Osborne effect - the announcement of the successor to the Osborne-I killed the company).

For software, on the other hand, announcing new or upgraded versions can have the opposite effect: People buy the hardware in anticipation of what they can do with it in the future. Many companies realise this, that's why the phenomenon 'vaporware' is so common in the sw business..
Some middle ground would be good I think. Nokia should feel free to announce non-vaporware future software upgrades.

yes. and i just quoted the exact words as i m not familiar at all with this concept ol layer.
sorry for the moth, i meant month. funny though....

and to ''turn [it] into a linux smartphone'' to quote you, maybe not accurate. ''adding a layer '' sounds different to me, rather another stage ... but again i know nothing,

Seb Per: can you shed any more light on the source?

It does seem somewhat at odds from the whole Internet Tablet strategy, apart from WiMAX - which we know about.

Arguably that's a "cellular layer".

Or maybe it's a leather case - perhaps somehow still alive so the cells don't die... ;-)

ill be concise. source is internal.

when i wanted to buy the 770 he said ''wait, something nice is coming''....and few months later the n800 showed up on some webpages., and then was officially released.

so when he said a month ago ''we will add a cellular layer to the tablet'', i asked is this upgrading sw or hw+sw or sw + module in sd card he wouldn't reply. only that sd card have an issue regarding power required by gsm module technology. you can interpret that freely.

there is another layer coming he mentioned, but i dont remember which one, and if it should come before or after the cellular one. sorry. perhaps if you make suggestions, it'll come back.

the drift away from initial strategy i can tell= the success of n800 in usa made the next stage possible. nokia is always validating the marketing feedback before pushing.

with the in-depth review of the chipsets in the n800, done by folks on this board, is it feasible that the n800 could do cellular/3g/gsm/edge type communication as it stands now?

i can add = source sounded rather doubtful but not 100% negative. but the timeframe sounded far enough for.a hardware upgr to take place.

so i guess no. but again, although i'm very interested, i don't know a squat in technology.

I'd put my money on: no.

As it doesn't have a SIM card slot, surely the answer has to be no...

Whether Nokia could fit a SIM card slot into the same outer housing would be a different question.

I would say that 'if' a cellular version arrived then a non-cellular version would also exist at the same time. It happens a lot in the phone market that the same phone is released with different network bands, or without some features (like 3G/wifi for US/China markets), so I see that a new cellular tablet could also be produced without cellular features for certain markets.

Along the add-on hardware line of thought:

http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/pro...oducts_id=7917

Dimensions are 1.75x1.75x0.275 --- admittedly, this thing does quite a bit more beyond making and receiving calls.

(This link was bookmarked because one thing I've always wanted to see is a pure-bluetooth cellular module for PDAs and very light calling. No reason to waste all that battery and money on a screen and keyboard and camera and so forth if I can just remote control the damn thing from my perfectly good N800

I imagine the N800's phone tools would be dramatically improved / created before anything else this drastic. Having it function as a cellphone monitor could allow for a number of nifty capabilities --- it's how I implemented push e-mail, for one! I really ought to write that up and post it.

Finally, N800 battery life isn't anywhere near good enough for me to carry it as a phone in any real capacity: that said, it would be nice to be able to stop yelling "IT'S NOT A PHONE"