A cell phone should be small enough to wear like a watch, a tablet should fit easily in your pocket (5 inches max display).

Here here! WTH Nokia? When I bought into the INTERNET TABLET form factor, with my N800, I specifically was NOT buying a smart phone and I was not buying from a smart phone line of products (770, N800, N810, N810WE). They were labeled all over the boxes as a TABLET. Going the phone route with the N900 was a good way to piss all over a market they virtually dominated at the time with almost no competition until they decided to ME TOO it against iPhone and Android, while those guys started in on their own myriad of wifi-only and cellular-enabled TABLETS with larger screens, faster processors, more memory... meanwhile, the N900 performs poorly as a phone and Maemo grows older, less enticing and less useful in light of its competitors.

I'm with you... they should never have left the TABLET form factor and if they ever hope to remain relevant as technology keeps moving on, they need to get back into it. I do fear it's far too late for them, though. Idiots.

And this is yet another reason why I think it's possibly too late for Nokia. Microsoft is NOT a compelling operating system for phones and tablets. Microsoft has been trying for YEARS--more than a decade--to come out with a good tablet. Nothing. Nothing. If Nokia expects a Windows or Windows Mobile to run on a tablet, it will compete again the far more mature and better made iOS and Android devices--and though they're the strongest competition, there's still also RIM's OS (Playbook) and HP's WebOS out there to keep in mind... and even those two are ALREADY is far more customers' hands than Microsoft's Mobile OS much less any kind of a Microsoft tablet.

I'm glad you repeatedly used the word "should" to indicate a variable opinion.

Actually I was just saying this to a colleague at work yesterday morning when he was trying to get an ipad2.

I would love a beefed up N810 or N800 with a faster CPU and more ram. They are both slightly different beasts for slightly different market segments, and for a brief period it seemed that Nokia had a really sensible idea about having a product range larger than one device.

They were years ahead of their time, and apart from the CPU/RAM compare very favourably to devices like the Dell Streak 5.

Don't get me wrong, I love my N900, but there is definitely a place in the market for a tablet device(s) running Maemo, which I think is the best mobile OS so far.

Heck, if they would just build a faster, RAM-richer N810, I'd be satisfied if they just stuck Diablo on it again!

I would buy one. But even a modest success of such a tablet released by Nokia would be a humiliating sign of the huge profit opportunity Nokia handed to Apple by giving the tablet market to Steve just as he was ready to take maximum advantage of Nokia's lapse.

Nokia was King Midas in reverse -- just as it dropped tablets, they turned into gold.

(I wonder where that opinionated guy went who kept insisting that book readers were just a niche product while we were arguing that the N900 should have more tablet-like and ereader features? By rejecting tablets, Nokia went from a niche to the ditch.)

This statement is false. I could tell you why but you would choose not to believe me. Regardless, here's an opinion from someone that actually owns and uses an n900 as their primary device for both computing and communication:

For being portable and pocketable, the Maemo 5 n900 is the best phone and tablet ever created. There is nothing that is better, and there is nothing that can replace it. And here in the U.S., when combined with T-Mobile and T-Mobile plans, it is the untouchable mobile computing champion.

And importantly, I'm a happy owner of an n800 and an n810. Also, I'm a former satisfied Verizon customer of over 8 years.

The Nokia tablet story is very sad; they could have owned the world.

I'm looking for a second N900 myself -- I already bought a second one, but sold it on my friend's insistence. My short and mid-term plan is to keep the N900 as my phone but get a tablet (probably the EEE Pad Transformer in a few days). Longer term, I might replace the N900 with something like the Veer.

Unfortunately... only we got owned by Nokia...

Maybe we should just bind together and purchase some hardware ourselves?

http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?...oduct_en&fsb=y

Here is a 10" running meego? specs are too low for me though
http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/44...ive_touch.html

I would be happy with the Galaxy Tab 7'' hw, provided it runned a full gnu-linux with X along with Android.
And, I'd add a better camera since the stock one sucks, and usb host.