I think I should post something to make clear what happened with Tablet Scene and Tablet School:

- I pestered Reggie to make Tablet Scene to provide a more casual alternative to ITT, on the basis that I would put in a lot of time maintaining it, replying to messages and posting articles, while Reggie took care of ITT as he had always done.

- I did that for a while, but for various reasons I decided to take a break from Maemo, so it was my fault that Tablet Scene was allowed to wither on the vine. I let Reggie down, I apologised to him by e-mail, and if you want to blame someone for TS's demise blame me.

- I took a break from Maemo because it became clear that the current maemo devices had little to no consumer appeal. By consumer I mean people who don't know what "compiled code" means. How many people like that are posting regularly on ITT?

- Nokia's last user survey indicated that half of maemo users are software developers. That alone made me feel like I was wasting my time trying to reach out to "ordinary" users, as most maemo users aren't at all "ordinary". The cynics about tablet scene were right, the people like me who thought the tablets had a mainstream audience were wrong.

- I haven't done any more Tablet School tutorials for the above reasons. Why do them if they're not needed? I'm certainly not doing any for maemo.org as it's a developer site, and developers should already know this stuff.

- A maemo device might be successful if it had telephony (like a smartphone), or if it had a proper-size keyboard (like a mini-laptop), or if it had a dedicated primary purpose (like a music player or games console). Current maemo devices have none of these things, and there is no market for general pocket computers without telephony these days. Selling pocket-size computers without telephony support is like selling full-size computers without broadband support: a niche might use them in theory but in the real world no one would buy them.

- Nokia hasn't bothered following up the consumer end of maemo either, the promised maemo.nokia.com (which was supposed to be the official consumer site for the N810) has failed to materialise, and there's been no substantially new maemo hardware since the N800 over two years ago. Even Nokia's software like their excellent Tablet Video Converter has been officially abandoned now. The coming of the global recession has made it even less likely that Nokia would throw money at a non-profitable product line, so either they're going to turn it into a viable product (I'm guessing a mini-laptop) or they're going to drop it completely.

- The Diablo update effectively caused a binary break because it broke many of the download links on maemo.org's download section. Some of my tutorials were therefore broken too, because they depended on pre-Diablo OS2008 applications such as USB Control being installed on the tablet to allow host mode. This break happened without any warning to users, and apparently no warning to developers either. I know there were technically good reasons for the break, but the way it was done made me feel like there was no point doing more tutorials as they might get wiped out by another "upgrade".

Anyway, that's what's happened so please don't blame Reggie for stuff that isn't his fault.

If the next maemo devices are products people are likely to buy in large numbers, I'll be back to do tutorials, but if they're just more hacker toys then there's absolutely no point bothering.

Krisse, I for one have always appreciated your efforts and this post as well.

Krisse, your previous signing-off post mentioned your interest in the 5800. Did you ever spend a lot of time with the 5800, and if so, do you have any reflections you've typed up?

krisse- Your hard work was not in vain. Back in 2007 Tablet School helped me through my newbie stage with my brand new N800.

Yes, I have a 5800 as my primary phone now due to my work on All About Symbian. It's currently the only S60 5th Edition device so we have to use it in order to cover the latest version of Symbian.

It's not really that much like the tablets because it's primarily a phone rather than a computer, but it does show how a computing platform can be used to do a successful consumer product (and Symbian is going open source next year so future Symbian devices may even become as open as the tablets are now).

IMHO the 5800 is an excellent device because Nokia have identified a target audience and gone out of their way to tailor the hardware for that audience:

- The screen is small and narrow enough to use the entire device with one hand, you can operate all its functions with a single thumb. (I haven't touched the stylus at all.)

- The 5800's default standby is built entirely around favourite contacts, including one-touch shortcuts to calls, texts, communication history and that contact's RSS feeds. (You can alter standby to other options if you prefer though.) It's actually very good even as a pure phone, every core function is very easy to access.

- The price is right, it costs literally half of what the iPhone costs, so it's going after people who simply aren't on Apple's (or Nseries') radar. Even sold unlocked the 5800 only costs about 300 dollars, and on contract it's free. It's a text-book example of Nintendo-style targetting of cheaper hardware at a mass market.

- There's an iPhone-style app shop launching next month called Ovi Store, which apparently has "thousands" of registered developers already. That level of interest is only possible because the store is being deployed on devices that people buy in large numbers. Niche products like the tablets can't do that, there just aren't enough potential customers.

I'm not saying maemo needs to copy the 5800 directly, I'm just saying that maemo devices need to be designed for particular functions: phones or media players or netbooks or consoles or... just anything with an established market or a potential market.

Nokia's Symbian and NokiaOS devices are all aimed at someone, they all have a particular look, shape and feel which would suit a particular kind of function or person. None of the maemo tablets do this.

It was right of Nokia to experiment with the tablets, and the success of the iPhone/iPod Touch, Nintendo DS and EEE PC show that Nokia were correctly anticipating something big by focusing on portable touchscreens and mobile computing, but Nokia now needs to move on to the next stage and build a maemo product that ordinary people want to buy.

Asus did it by shrinking a laptop as far as it would reasonably (and cheaply!) go, Nintendo did it by focusing on games, Apple did it with telephony on the iPhone and media on the iPod Touch. Nokia could do those, or they could do something else, but whatever they do they should do it now.

Focus doesn't mean dropping other features, it just means giving people a clear idea of why they would buy it, and shops a clear idea of where they should stock it (remember how much trouble amazon.com and nokia.com had in classifying the tablets?).

Maemo as a platform is excellent, but it is going to waste if the platform itself is the only primary attraction on its hardware.

In short, Nokia needs to give people excuses for buying maemo devices: I need a phone, I need a laptop, I need a music player, I need a console etc.

Hi Krisse,
As one of the 'consumer' buyers of an N810, I really appreciated the work you did with Tablet school. I love my N810, it's got a wealth of great software, does a lot more than the ipod touch as a media device and is a great bit of kit. It's only let down has been Nokia in not investing any quality 'in house' apps, or helping the developers. It's been further hindered by the lack of free wi-fi around the world. Anyone remember when governments would harp on about the communication and information age, how wifi would be everywhere and people would be online all the time (unfortunately the phone companies got there first!)

Sorry to rmable, but the short of it is that the failiure of the N8*0's is not down to you guys, in fact both this site and Tablet Scene have taken the internet tablet to a different conclusion, where software is shared freely and ideas are allowed to grow without the fear of lawsuits or warranty invalidations. It's a free computing society, it doesn't have the polish of Apple or the array of support of Wintel, but we all have a computer and a community capable of being something more.

Now will someone please make a genesis/megadrive emulator? Pretty please.

I'm also "consumer" type user, relatively new. When I first got my N810 I spent about half a day on Table Scene reading the tutorials, and they were very helpful. But I come to this website nearly every day because the discussions here are more interesting to me, even if some of them are over my head.

I don't post much because most of my questions are answered by searching and I don't have any useful new info to add.

Is there going to be a tutorial on how to use a finger-driven browser without having to zoom in and out all the time?

I'm confused. Are you saying that you zoom in and out all the time on your n8x0? Or are you saying that you've noticed iPhone users need to zoom in and out all the time? If it's the latter, that might be the least of your worries with an RX-51. Remember, iPhones only have 2/5 the pixels. They have no choice but to play silly finger games while trying to have a good browsing experience. Or did I not get your point at all?

You'd have that problem on any browser that uses a physically small screen to view sites designed for PCs.

Even if you had enough pixels to show every site at full resolution with no scrolling, the human eye won't be able to see text smaller than about a millimetre in height, so you'd still have to zoom in and out to read stuff.

The only way out of that problem is to somehow enlarge the screen when you're using it, with either a physically larger screen or a built-in projector or something like that.