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ragnar is offline ragnar
2007-07-09 , 16:22
Posts: 631 | Thanked: 1,123 times | Joined on Sep 2005 @ Helsinki
#211
Originally Posted by fpp View Post
Thanks for asking such an easy one :-)
Others have already answered most of it, but as it is asked from me here's my take :
As Mil said, Psion PDAs (series 3 and 5) actually were wildly successful, especially here in Europe, despite being very expensive. They still have a rabid fan base today, that will not use anything else. The Zaurus line, despite its age, is still very popular in Japan ; Sharp just couldn't be bothered to market it anywhere else. And Palm, of course, was top gun for a long time in its day.
Sorry to stick to this issue, but I disagree quite strongly on this. Let me start by saying that I love the Psion devices. The Psion 5 still does some things better than nearly any device out there in the market. I think it was a wildly successful device in many terms: engineering, design etc.

But I cannot really buy "wildly successful" in terms of popularity and sales. Nor to any other non-connected PDA device. Zaurus was discontinued some years ago. I don't believe it's a question of "not marketing". Truly great devices and services gain popularity with "zero marketing", and vice versa, no amount of marketing can help to really sell a non-useful device or service.

Quoting numbers from: http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/mhist.htm Be it 25000 Psions a month or 163000 devices year or whatever, that is nowhere near even moderately successful. By successful I mean mass market appeal. A device that the majority of people would seem worthwhile to buy. PDA's focusing on personal information management have never reached this target. Mobile phones are wildly successful.

However...

The real sense of your question, I guess, and a very relevant one, is "where are PDAs today" ? My opinion is that PDA have faltered as a market because they were very specialized devices - the mostly did one thing right, the PIM part. Multimedia was so-so, Net access too, etc.
But that doesn't mean PIM functions have suddenly become irrelevant, just that users want devices that do many things. The dominant PIM devices today are smartphones, who also do music, video, GPS nav and of course voice.
See what I'm getting to ? ITs are all the rage now, but if they stick to their "I'm just an IT" motto, they could end up where the PDAs are now, soon enough, when more multi-purpose devices catch up...
I do agree with this thing, however. I use PIM functions on my E61 phone, since it is my primary device. I use the PC suite to automatically sync with my Outlook calendar. Even if my tablet would have PIM functions, I simply wouldn't use them. Writing down the entries wouldn't be as comfortable or as fast as with my phone. I don't carry the tablet in my pocket all the time so that I could check my calendar or notes.

The IT currently isn't the primary device, it is a mobile companion device, next to my smartphone. I am not trying to say that PIM functions aren't useful in the right context and right device, but I don't really see the tablet currently being that right device. And once again, resources are not infinite.

Still, there are devices in the market that do only "one thing really well" - I guess you can name some of them - and they are wildly successful. If the PIM devices of yesteryear did PIM really well, and well, "nobody bought them", I at least think that tells something about having PIM on your non-primary device.
 
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Texrat is offline Texrat
2007-07-09 , 16:37
Posts: 11,700 | Thanked: 10,045 times | Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA
#212
I think "wildly successful" needs to be quantified. The devices such as Psion found an incredibly strong following among some truly pioneering, ardent users. But were they "wildly popular" in general? No. Did they create and maintain a really dedicated legion of rabid fans? Oh yeah. They N800 has the same potential. Heck, I'd like to think the tablet platform can even exceed it, not just functionally but popularly... that all comes down to communication and execution.

Oh, and there's still some dissonance in your rebuttals, ragnar. One reason cell phones are incredibly more successful than PDAs could very well be their innate use combined with PIM functionality.

Finally, some of use see the cell phone as the companion device. That's the point you're not quite getting. We use the phone as a mere modem and the N800 as the main device. Isn't that one of the beauties of Skype? To that end, we want our phone contacts synced to the tablet, so we can call people via Skype. And it doesn't take "infinite resources" to accomplish this, ragnar, so I'm hoping we can avoid those silly exaggerations and pretend we're realistic adults here. It requires an extra head or three. Get Nokia to fund it. Based on the very obvious user feedback here, it will pay off. Or, keep telling the users (hyperbole ahead) they don't want what they want. Which tactic provides the most potential for success?
Last edited by Texrat; 2007-07-09 at 16:42.
 
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fpp is offline fpp
2007-07-09 , 17:01
Posts: 2,853 | Thanked: 968 times | Joined on Nov 2005
#213
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
fpp, awesome post. Excellent example of details. You said it much better than I could, thanks.
Thanks. English is not my native language, and I tend to be somewhat perfectionist, so this does take time. And all this has been said before, but it's worth summing up now that we have @nokia ears around :-)
 
Milhouse is offline Milhouse
2007-07-09 , 17:22
Posts: 3,401 | Thanked: 1,255 times | Joined on Nov 2005 @ London, UK
#214
Originally Posted by ragnar View Post
Quoting numbers from: http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/mhist.htm Be it 25000 Psions a month or 163000 devices year or whatever, that is nowhere near even moderately successful. By successful I mean mass market appeal.
Ragnar.... annual sales of 163,000 for the Psion 3a in 1994 is pretty damned good! Psion were/are a tiny company, and remember those figures are from THIRTEEN years ago when most people didn't know what a PDA was let alone know about or have access to the internet. And global corporations such as Nokia themselves were shifting nowhere near as many phones in 1994 as they do now. The Psion devices certainly had mass market appeal, it's just that in the early 1990s that mass market was significantly smaller than the tech savvy world we live in today.

I'm not sure what you're basing your judgment on, but some historical perspective might be in order.
 
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fpp is offline fpp
2007-07-09 , 17:39
Posts: 2,853 | Thanked: 968 times | Joined on Nov 2005
#215
Originally Posted by ragnar View Post
Sorry to stick to this issue, but I disagree quite strongly on this. Let me start by saying that I love the Psion devices. The Psion 5 still does some things better than nearly any device out there in the market. I think it was a wildly successful device in many terms: engineering, design etc.
But I cannot really buy "wildly successful" in terms of popularity and sales. Nor to any other non-connected PDA device. Zaurus was discontinued some years ago. I don't believe it's a question of "not marketing". Truly great devices and services gain popularity with "zero marketing", and vice versa, no amount of marketing can help to really sell a non-useful device or service.
Actually the Zaurus line was only "officially" discontinued early this year, and despite this the latest models are still easily available through import dealers (like in Germany). I still think that if Sharp had localized, sold and supported them abroad the audience would have gone way beyond the enthusiast Linux hacker crowd, as it obviously did in Japan. Same for the Psions : if those machines had been at today's electronic gadgets prices, of course they'd had sold more. But they were available everywhere and visible in shops, which the tablets are not. To me both qualify as "successful".
Quoting numbers from: http://www.ericlindsay.com/epoc/mhist.htm Be it 25000 Psions a month or 163000 devices year or whatever, that is nowhere near even moderately successful. By successful I mean mass market appeal. A device that the majority of people would seem worthwhile to buy. PDA's focusing on personal information management have never reached this target. Mobile phones are wildly successful.
Don't you find it strange that enquiries about sales of the 770/N800 are met with polite demurral ? Don't you find it strange that even lowly phones carry PIM essentials as a matter of fact ?
I do agree with this thing, however. I use PIM functions on my E61 phone, since it is my primary device. I use the PC suite to automatically sync with my Outlook calendar. Even if my tablet would have PIM functions, I simply wouldn't use them. Writing down the entries wouldn't be as comfortable or as fast as with my phone. I don't carry the tablet in my pocket all the time so that I could check my calendar or notes.
Our different points of view definitely come from totally opposed use cases. My Tablet IS my primary device, as the Psion then the Zaurus were before. In fact I didn't have a phone until I bought the tablet, and I chose the cheapest Nokia model that had EDGE and BT at the time. I don't want a device that's more expensive than the tablet, with yet another keyboard and big screen. To me, a phone is a modem. Sometimes I speak into it, but not much. And I only use its calendar function because the tablet has none -- but I'd take GPE or Dates instead of that trinket any day if only they could sync with something.

Maybe Nokia employees have overly easy access to luxury phones, and that skews their judgment :-)
 
ragnar is offline ragnar
2007-07-09 , 17:45
Posts: 631 | Thanked: 1,123 times | Joined on Sep 2005 @ Helsinki
#216
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
Oh, and there's still some dissonance in your rebuttals, ragnar. One reason cell phones are incredibly more successful than PDAs could very well be their innate use combined with PIM functionality.
Finally, some of use see the cell phone as the companion device. That's the point you're not quite getting. We use the phone as a mere modem and the N800 as the main device. Isn't that one of the beauties of Skype? To that end, we want our phone contacts synced to the tablet, so we can call people via Skype. And it doesn't take "infinite resources" to accomplish this, ragnar, so I'm hoping we can avoid those silly exaggerations and pretend we're realistic adults here. It requires an extra head or three. Get Nokia to fund it. Based on the very obvious user feedback here, it will pay off. Or, keep telling the users (hyperbole ahead) they don't want what they want. Which tactic provides the most potential for success?
I think Gil had it right when he asked for moving into specific features. Contact syncing in my books is a somewhat different feature than "PIM" in general. The tablet already has contact book synchronization features for the protocols it is supporting (gmail, jabber). Being able to get all the contacts from your phone ... well, if you can't call these contacts, that feature might not be so useful. For that specific feature, yes, it's already there to some extent. The Maemo Skype app afaik also does this for its contacts. As of infinite resources, I didn't mean that it would take infinite resources, rather that there isn't infinite resources to do every feature in the world.

But, doing "PIM" means so many things to different people, so I really think you could be specific in what exactly the device should be able to do. After that one could estimate how much work doing that would take.

In general, there is the issue of providing offline versus online applications. PIM is one good example of this. Hopefully we all agree that the real value of PIM comes from the fact that the information there is valid and sychronized throughout all the sources where this information is accessed from. There are online services that essentially allow the user to perform PIM actions (calendar, notes etc.) And such services can usually be developed to target multiple devices, the IT included.

That's also a part of the fundamental idea of an internet tablet device: instead of creating an offline client application for every feature/service that the user would want to use, the tablet (with its browser and other internet applications) should provide access to these online services. This is of course not yet fully realized, but it's an innate part of the thinking. Offline applications are costly to develop, maintain and update. Of course the issue is not black and white, but it is more on the range of shades: how much of a feature does the device provide on its online capabilities and how much is also available offline. With "infinite resources" there are thousands Nokia developers available for us and we create and maintain great offline clients for every conceivable feature, but that's really not the idea behind the internet tablet.
 
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Texrat is offline Texrat
2007-07-09 , 17:52
Posts: 11,700 | Thanked: 10,045 times | Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA
#217
I agree with your points, ragnar, and it looks to me they've already been addressed in previous posts here... that includes the possibility of online contact hosting, which may very well be the preferred approach. I suggest a survey.

Oh and I am REALLY LOVING this conversation lately!!!
Last edited by Texrat; 2007-07-09 at 17:54.
 
Milhouse is offline Milhouse
2007-07-09 , 18:08
Posts: 3,401 | Thanked: 1,255 times | Joined on Nov 2005 @ London, UK
#218
The lack of a coherent PIM (even just Contacts) strategy on the Tablets is leading to the ridiculous situation where every communications application implements their own Contacts solution. Look at the situation we have today, Google Talk manages it's own contacts, Gizmo manages it's own contacts and now Skype also manages it's own completely seperate contacts list. I don't use the appalling eMail client on the Internet Tablet but that also has it's own database of email addresses which are seperate from every other application I've just mentioned.

If the Tablets had a coherent system-wide Contacts database, all these applications could tap into a single list and avoid the duplicated data, increased development effort and incompatible GUIs. Add a system-wide Calendar and To-Do list along with phone or PC syncing and voila, Internet Tablet PIM for the masses.
Last edited by Milhouse; 2007-07-09 at 18:11.
 
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Texrat is offline Texrat
2007-07-09 , 18:18
Posts: 11,700 | Thanked: 10,045 times | Joined on Jun 2006 @ North Texas, USA
#219
I'm creating a separate post to go off on a little "rant" here.

Before it was even launched, the 770 had a scope. It had an agenda. Nokia defined the product and laid out their plans for its deployment. That included intended use.

Those last two words are key-- lay them aside for a moment.

The N800 refined this. Suddenly the device had a home: Multimedia Devices (hence the N prefix). Under that aegis, its intended use as an internet tablet was broadened a bit. Multimedia applications were now a must. The argument could be made that the current state of the Internet supports this, as Flash and other media formats are driving viewership. No contradiction, no fuzziness there... just an expanded scope. For sake of the point I'm going to make I'll gloss over the debate over how effective or ineffective this effort has been. The point is the scope.

Users have been of course thrilled over easter eggs like the FM radio, because it enables them to shed a device. It functions well enough that most are happy with this solution, from what I can see. But this can cause confusion for people being told the N800 is an INTERNET TABLET. The FM radio is sweet, but certainly not internet related.

The confusion is compounded further by, of all ironic aspects, the degree of openness and other functionality. A programmable Linux device! With WiFi! And VOIP! That's not an internet tablet folks-- that's a new form factor for laptops. Call it a palm top ().

So here we come to the point: the device's scope is, to an extent, now getting out of Nokia's hands. The users have taken the ball and run. They see potential that isn't confined by the borders of the Multimedia Device defintion. They see that this little jewel crosses into Enterprise Devices with swaggering ease... that is, as long as the support is there.

But Nokia sticks steadfastedly to prior goals. Qgil and ragnar now ask for community input (thank God for that!) on specifics but, we've already provided it, many times. Maybe it needs to now be hunted, gathered, collated and stapled for ease of consumption, but it's there! We've offered our feedback. We've explained our needs and wants ad infinitum. And now we the community find ourselves wrestling for a steering wheel because we're impatient with progress and argumentive over Nokia's current scope for the platform. Nokia isn't going to give up the bus, but maybe we can find consensus. Nokia would certainly benefit from listening to users that represent potential new customers and then changing course where viable to grab more market share.

I don't think the debate needs to be contentious though (we have recent proof right here) nor does it need to dwell on absolutes and unrealistic expectations. IMO what's needed here is a council. That's right: a body of community reps who can distill the chaos here into concise bullet points fit for the Powerpoint presentations that drive Nokia as a company (). I recommend people like Milhouse and fpp and thoughtfix and even that ol' curmudgeon Karel for starters. And there should be strong debate even among this body, so that all viewpoints are presented and no assumptions are presented as data. Maybe we even need a new forum section for Tablet Advocacy...lol.

Anyway, just more blathering from me I know... but what do you guys think?

/soapbox
Last edited by Texrat; 2007-07-09 at 18:37.
 
ragnar is offline ragnar
2007-07-09 , 18:36
Posts: 631 | Thanked: 1,123 times | Joined on Sep 2005 @ Helsinki
#220
Originally Posted by Milhouse View Post
If the Tablets had a coherent system-wide Contacts database, all these applications could tap into a single list and avoid the duplicated data, increased development effort and incompatible GUIs. Add a system-wide Calendar and To-Do list along with phone or PC syncing and voila, Internet Tablet PIM for the masses.
But: there *is* a system-wide Contacts database, the applications can tap into it. That was the thinking exactly originally, and that still is the thinking. It is extensible for new protocols and new services. However: Gizmo and Skype are external applications and services, they can choose to do so if they want it. But then again, they don't have to. So far, as you see, they didn't do so.
 
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