If you have seen the Nokia ads for the N800, at least some of them aren't exactly exemplary. Compare the iPhone ads -- spectacular! Demoing my N800 for my friends isn't enough to match the iPhone onslaught. People only have so much money to spend on these things. They decide partly on hype -- well-done hype.

I think the Woot writeup would have been a better marketing approach - it went something like:

"Is that a new Nokia phone?"

- "No, it's not a phone, it's an Internet Tablet."

"So ho do you make calls?"

- "It's NOT a phone!"

etc.

Agreeing generally with all of the above, when I show people my 770 in all of it's budget doom-playing internet-browsing glory, everyone thinks it is a pretty great thing, especially for the price, and one friend is actually going to buy a 770 because of the fun he had with mine. Of course my one friend versus the 500,000 people who bought iPhones opening weekend... Not very good odds. Hype in advertising is key, but in all honesty, how do you hype something like the internet tablet? Apple is a marketing machine, plus they have their hordes of fanboys and thats not even counting the status symbol trend that the iPod has become. Nokia doesn't have anything even close to that to ride on. Don't get me wrong, Nokia has the numbers. The best selling cellphone of all time? Yeah, it was a Nokia. Still is a Nokia, though I can't recall the model at the moment. But this wasn't a status symbol cellphone. And thats the difference. Nokia needs to make the tablets 'cool' in order to move them like iPhones, but this is a difficult task considering the nature of the tablets we own at the moment. The tablets are not overly user friendly, they dont have amazing user interfaces. They have great features, but, none of those features are 'cool'. If you can figure out a way to make open source a cool thing, I'm sure theres a million people who'd love to hear your secret. In order to hype the tablet to the same level, the tablets would have to be totally redesigned from the inside out, leaving us with a product that those of us happy with our current tablets might find to be very alien and undesirable. Another problem with that is most people dont need or want something like an internet tablet. What the hell could most people use such a thing for? Its the same reason there are far fewer smartphones in peoples pockets than regular phones, even though smartphones have better features, the vast majority of the public really doesnt care one bit about them. Its a possibility that the internet tablets are simply ahead of their time in terms of mass appeal. What Nokia really needs to do is to continue to put out and support these tablets, so when internet tablet-type devices do become as desired as cellphones one day, Nokia will be well established in the market, with a history of good devices and good support, otherwise Apple will just position a new wizbang device to meet the need and pretend they invented the niche themselves.

Heh, I have that conversation all the time. They usually wonder off once they find out you can't make real phone calls with it.

But if I understand correctly, with Skype you can make "real" phone calls to any phone for a nominal fee that is considerably less than $40 a month for two years. All you need is a wireless connection.

If you look at my screen name that last bit is my area code. I'm in a lot of places that doesn't have publicly available wifi. In fact, other than my house and where I work, there are only two other hot spots that offer free wifi. We do have a Barns and Noble, but you have to pay for using their wifi.

Well, getting anecdotal here, I don't visit wifi hotspots very often myself. But I do have a wireless router in my house, and I also have a Vonage phone that costs me $25 a month. If I can get rid of my Vonage phone I would save quite a bit of money using only my home wireless and Skype over my N800.

Isn't Vonage voip? You could also get the other iPhone, the one Linksys makes, I'm pretty sure it does skype.