1. How many internet tablets will be sold in 2008 worldwide?
2. Why?
3. Why not?

Some background and remarks: We already have somewhat similar devices as the 770 on the market, such as the Pepper Pad, OQO, so you have to figure in that internet tablets will be made by other vendors as well. They will try to replicate or outperform any success Nokia has with 770, and also they will promote the internet tablet use cases via their own marketing. Right now these devices seem to be just a niche...

It's interesting to speculate who actually will use devices like 770 in the future and for what purposes. The hardware and the OS/development platform allow one to use various kinds of applications, but of course the combined product will not be so attractive for all uses. But internet tablets can get customers from various other market segments and they can be seen competing with various devices. In 2005 it looks like a bit less than 8 million PDA devices were sold, but this market is in decline. Many PDA users seem to be migrating to smart phones and especially communicators - smart phones with QWERTY style keyboards, PIM applications, web browsing, etc. - essentially all you need (phone included) in a single more or less compact device. Some people might prefer an internet tablet to their more bulky laptop, or users on a budget could buy an internet tablet as their first and only computer...

More on this background and discussion you will find in the blog below, but let's hear your predictions here!

I don't think there's much of a long term market for "pure" tablets like the 770. I think there will be convergence with PDAs; not so sure about phones, just because of the size. If I could get blackberry service and a thumb board on something the size of the 770, well, I'd just surgically attach myself to it.

I think the thing people like ourselves fail to forget, is that as the hand full of technologies that are fused together are all advancing in one or many ways. Screens are becoming thinner and gaining higher resolutions, handwriting recognition is becoming more advanced every year, battery technologies are gaining longer life, charge, and capacity. The processors are faster and more efficient than ever, and programing for these next generation of mobile devices are a lot like programing for any PC on the market today, making it less of an issue of transition to and from different platforms.

I'd say this pattern of technological advancement won't stop here. It is inevitable that we will see ever thinner, faster, more efficient mobile devices for some time to come. The future will no doubt see devices to match and leapfrog the 770 in terms of hardware and even software technologies, the uses of the devices will evolve as we discover new ways to incorporate them into our lives. With the advent of new network technologies such as wifi and Bluetooth, we have seen amazing new ways to connect to other devices. I see a continued push for faster, cheaper, and more reliable wireless connectivity for the future mobile devices such as the 770. I also think there will soon be a great focus on UI and interaction of future devices.

My motto is "Don't let the future happen, make it happen."

Nokia hit it right on 3 counts, none of which I've seen done before.

1.) An open source OS enabling the user community to further the usability of the device.

2.) LOW COST. (OQO? HAH!)

3.) Nokia continues to actively support the tablet after the release. Fire and forget policies leave users stranded (cough SHARP cough)

Haven't seen anyone mention this, but Nokia recently acquired Intellisync, which makes the software that synchronizes MS Outlook with Yahoo! Calendar. Also, I just read that Microsoft wants Windows Mobile 5.0 to support direct internet data access for mobile devices without the use of a host computer. The point being that if good web services exist, that an internet tablet and a good set of programs could go pretty far towards assuming the functions of a PDA.

The future of computing, always fun to speculate on.

Always remember the fundamentals - Moores Law always plays a part. Roughly speaking computer power doubles every 18 months. But you can twist this various ways. One thing that happened in the early days of PCs was that prices fell sharply as power increased sharply and because other things (housing, clothing, cars) etc were often hit by inflation PCs rapidly became a bargain.

Moores Law can be used to make predictions of size of devices, even size of screens and telecoms bandwidth. So if the desired outcome is smaller, faster machines with faster networking, then most likely that will happen.

The desire to make ever smaller computers is quite new, so there's a fair bit of catching up to do, but phones, cameras, etc. have led the way on that.

Where I believe the radical changes might occur are in user interfaces. Speech recognition, built in scanner (using a camera?). Or maybe as with Palm's graffiti there will be new forms of interaction that allow us to meet the machine part way. e.g. years ago I learnt morse code, though was never very good at it, and some African hunters use "click languages" and when communicating with dogs their handlers use various types of signal. So we can adapt, and we can be quite inventive and the Nokia 770 is an ideal platform for such experiment. After all the processing doesn't all have to be done on board, just network to a more powerful machine for OCR, etc.

So I predict something even smaller that taps into real power on the network, not just web servers, and that enables new richer forms of interaction.

Predictions, predictions. Predictions usually fail, but the exercise is amusing.

Let's try to predict from the other end: not "what can we build?" but "what do users want to do?" and "how do we finance it?".

You see: this was why cellular phone caught on: users wanted to talk, and the network was to be financed by calling charges.

Now about the Nokia 770:
-do users want web access on the go with a small tablet? Not that much, I'm afraid: sites get more and more complex, people are used to animations, videos, all things which take computing power and network bandwidth. And site builders want to open thousands of advertisement windows on your desktop.
-do users want E-mail on the go? Yes. But many exchange word documents (heresy, I know, but this is what many people do). And network operators would rather have you use sms at horrid prices per byte. And you need a keyboard. And the device to check E-mail on its own. Think blackberry.
-do users want to phone over the Internet? It's only cheaper and a lot less convenient than a cell phone.
-what else? Music? Cell phones do that. Videos? Get a PSP portable. Games? Cell phone or PSP again. PDA? Cell phones do that. So what else?

About financing:
-users have been trained to get a cell phone for free and to pay for it through calling charges. Heresy, but this is what people do. A 770 at 350€ versus a cell phone at 1€ won't sell. Same with game consoles: cheap consoles, but you pay extra for the games. Nokia has announced "premium content" for the 770, but I haven't seen any.
-cellular network operators have no interest in wifi competition.
-they also hate E-mail or anything that could eat in the surprisingly high revenues they get from SMS.
-wifi networks can't be built, if nobody will finance them. Chicken and egg problem.

So yes, I am not very optimistic. The sharp Zaurus did all what the 770 did 4 years ago and is dead. And it had a keyboard...

Just do the following exercise: talk to your non-geek friends and ask them what they'll DO with the 770. See if they can find a killer application for it. If there is no application, there won't be success.

Most of the sites I peruse regularly either work fine on the 770 or have a "mobile" version that does. This is my #1 use for the device. What we need is a better browser that lets us "cut the crap" the way Firefox on the desktop does.

Think Gmail. Web app. Shows Office attachments. Problem solved...

Agreed !

Games... never under-estimate the importance of games ! :-)

I don't think this is a valid comparison. The Zaurus was never officially sold outside Japan (where it is NOT dead). It was never actively supported by Sharp as a Linux hacker's device. And (apart from the very confidential 6000) it does not have BT and/or Wifi connectivity builtin. I still love my 760, it's a good PDa and portable workhorse, but it's not a good Internet tablet. The 770 is.

Why isn't blackberry the killer app, and the thumboard the killer addition, like I said in my post above? I don't think there's any doubt about the blackberry's success. If BB's were to get screen resolution even close to the 770, I'd drop the 770 and just stick with the BB and get EDGE or EVDO speeds, all paid for by my company.

Similarly, if the 770 got a thumboard and BB service, I'd drop my current BB and just go with the 770.

But you are a geek. The average user is satisfied with Internet Explorer, the selection of bloated sites he/she uses (includes Ebay) and popup windows.


The Zaurus is not dead in Japan, where it is sold as a dictionary and PDA. The 5500 were sold officially in Europe and in the US. The 6000 was sold in the US. Wifi connectivity meant sliding in a CF card. All Zaurii came with a browser: opera or netfront. It is the closest device you can find to the 770, even the hardware is similar.

Yet it failed. I sincerely hope it only failed because it was too early, but I really think parallels can be drawn. And I am pretty sure Nokia drew them.