What I'm basically saying is that the incentive for Nokia to carry on with the tablets is ebbing away:

- Nokia tablet sales so far have been relatively small, certainly nowhere near Nokia's phone sales (which are about 400 million units a year)

- Nokia's tablets have continued to be obscure niche items for three years now

- The economy is crumbling, like most companies Nokia will probably have much less spare cash to play with

- Nokia's own touchscreen Symbian phones are hitting the shops in a few months time, with the first model due to launch at a relatively low price (about half that of the iPhone). It seems likely to sell well, with more advanced bigger-screen models due in 2009.

- The market for pocket-sized non-telephony devices is vanishing, and tiny compared to telephony devices

- Making Nokia Maemo touch phones is not the answer because they would be rivals to Nokia Symbian touch phones. Companies try to avoid developing rival product lines, because it duplicates costs while cannibalising sales.

- If Nokia is forced to choose between Maemo phones and Symbian phones, they're very likely to choose Symbian phones because these sell in much larger numbers (about 60 million a year) and have much more operator support.

- Another manufacturer making Maemo phones might work, but no other companies have shown any interest in making Maemo phones (and neither has Nokia really, apart from mobile data)

IMHO the only way Maemo can survive is if it changes radically into something that isn't pocket-sized. My suggestion is explained in the link above.

Originally Posted by Jerome

IApple (again) demonstrated with the iPhone and iPod touch that a modern OS with an easy to use programming environment together with a working distribution system is able to attract more programmers in a matter of months than Symbian has attracted in years.

Nokia has also announced a N900 with a sim slot

Originally Posted by vbrilon

Really? Where?

Originally Posted by Jerome

Apple (again) demonstrated with the iPhone and iPod touch that a modern OS with an easy to use programming environment together with a working distribution system is able to attract more programmers in a matter of months than Symbian has attracted in years.

- Nokia tablet sales so far have been relatively small, certainly nowhere near Nokia's phone sales (which are about 400 million units a year)
- Nokia's tablets have continued to be obscure niche items for three years now

Originally Posted by b-man

I know that this is a slightly off-topic and silly question but since Nokia is planning a fuew mager changes to the N900's hardware and software, do you think that both the N800 and N810 will be discontinued much like the N770 was when OS2007 came out? Since the N900 will likely have a more powerful prosesor and possibly a slightly different chipset allong with more powerful graphics (possibly OpenGL 2.0) and also a different camera.