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Nokia delays Linux-based tablet
prostoalex writes "Nokia delayed its Linux-based tablet product, the first one to use open-source Maemo tablet. The official site still optimistically promises delivery by Q3 2005, but the word is that Nokia is trying to improve the quality of the product and push the product before Christmas."
Delaying a product's release. That's obviously because they're using Linux. I mean, product delays never happen in the Windows world.
The UI looks very nice, and the hardware's gotten good reviews. (I can only hope they'll let us change the color of that theme...
A wise man once said, "wtf h4x."
A few years back Nokia ignored the flip phone trend and as such I can't even buy a Nokia from Cingular, the largest retailer of phones in North America.
Then Nokia tried making a gaming system (NGAGE) and that failed miserably.
Now they're trying to make a Linux-based tablet computer. It will fail.
What's the deal? Are they TRYING to self-destruct?
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
But you have to have constant WiFi access. I dunno. Might be great for killing time in the coffee shop, but can it be used elsewhere?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
1. Is this really a Tablet PC? Looks more like an oversized PDA to me.
2. As an oversized PDA, this looks rather cool, so try to take my next question in context.
3. Does anyone actually have a use for all these Windows "Tablet PCs"? I mean, the idea seems nice, but I haven't seen any real-world uses for them that laptops don't already meet.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
The maemo guys are doing some amaizing things with this device. They have just ported over Mono amongst other things. Can't wait for mine to arrive.
I heard they were having issues with the dookie daemon. Something about lack of "heap" protection was causing issues with overly large buffer "dumps".
Ok, I admit it, I have the humour of a 6 year old.
Um...Q3 2005 was over a couple of days ago...it's now Q4 2005 unless you're using a business calendar rather than a chronological calendar...
If they're still saying Q3 2005, then I'd say they've already missed.
"... but you can love completely without complete understanding." - Norman Maclean, "A River Runs Through It"
then again, I'm probably tilting at windmills here... marketing a product
comes before getting it right... they've probably got the entire marketing campaign fully booked and rolling already... must get the marketing right and damn the user experience... if it tanks, they can always point the finger at some middle level engineer who caved in and promised it would be ready.Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
The mameo project uses the scratchbox project. Both appear to be totally sponsored by Nokia. I'm not sure how much outside developer input has gone into either project.
Given that people are still having trouble coming up with business models that work with open source, I'm very curious to see how this project pans out. The product looks great, I just wonder how much code will be contributed from outside Nokia. Time will (as always) tell.
Delaying a product in a company that big simply means that there is some major "product marketing" issue rather than technical.
A Linux based device needs the same resources, efforts and care than any other one.
Nokia could be concerned with the Symbian position or simply trying to get the most out of a product.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
Nokia consistently releases products late. I don't know if they are just too optimistic when calendaring product releases, or if there's good business reasons to do so.
Interestingly enough, delays in product rollouts were forecast when Compaq and Nokia announced collaboration way back in 2000:
http://www.wapforum.org/new/20000911158Com.htm. (The prediction is there, although there's a lot of text to scan)
Apparently, Nokia's corporate culture still finds delayed rollouts to be just fine, as we've seen from the N90 and N91... which is odd, since Nokia's profit margins have been eroding since 2004, due to lack of available products in the face of increased competetion from Motorola, et al.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Disclaimer: I haven't used the thing, but I know people who have been playing with it since it was still under wraps.
- it-damnit). Whether the research project the 770 is a part of will yield results for the end user (as opposed to geeks) is something only the future will tell.
The Nokia 770 will be a totally crappy product. It will flop. Nokia knows this, and they are going to release it only to recover some of the investment, by targeting it to the only market segment that could find a use for it: geeks. Yes, my friends, this thing will be the ultimate geek toy, and a lot of you will grab it and hack it and have fun with it. And Nokia knows that, so expect an open platform, lots of development tools, freely available specs and total support for third-party development.
Now for the general public, they are going to have to come up with something better. For exemple, you actually have to configure networking on this thing (e.g. you must know what DHCP is and stuff like that and it won't seamlessly find new SSIDs and stuff like that) while a general-release product would require something closer to MacOS X-like networking (auto discovery, find-whatever-network-is-available-and-connect-to
This type of device is forcing Microsoft's hand.
My organization has received strategic information that Microsoft is porting an XP-derivative to mobile level technology -- sub-tablet XScale hardware. This will compeletely replace Windows Mobile in the 18-24 month timeline.
Microsoft's goal here is to bring the XP developer base to bear on the mobile market, primarily due to the failure to generate sufficient developer interest in Windows Mobile.
This initiative would also have been driven by the movement of most major players in the space to Linux (eg, the Nokia 770 running Linux as opposed to Symbian, the imminent Palm-on-Linux operating system exposing Linux and Palm APIs on a mobile device, etc.)
Am I the only one who misread this as Linux Based Toilet?
Whoa, 3 hours of browsing time? :-/
http://europe.nokia.com/nokia/0,,75023,00.html
I mean, Thats pretty lame compared to a Treo or something. Portability means alot less when you still need to be within walking distance of a power socket all day to use the damn thing.
If I am to buy that pointless propaganda article posted the other day, Then I guess they will be scrapping Linux and using Windws instead?
I mean come on, an "open source" tablet and the mockups don't even show it reading /. ?!!!! This is misguided vaporware!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
for any christmas product. For example, Apple's Nano while recently unveiled must have already been discussed and purchasing planned for any retailers that matter to Apple through 12/05.
Most of the purchasing for large retailers christmas season was done over the summer. The only thing left by now is for the product brands to make their delivery dates.
Unless they've made some commitments they won't be able to keep to retailers, I'm not sure how getting it done before christmas helps.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We've seen what apple did with the nano. This thing
... :)
is too fat and lacks memory. With proper engineering
it is evident that a nano-thickness device is possible.
True, it takes more power than an mp3 player, but the
width and height provided by the bigger form factor
give room for a larger battery without increasing
thickness.
Maybe apple is working on one
Why haven't they included infra-red on this thing? It could have been great as a remote control...
Anyway, I don't really see the need for this thing. It seems to be targeted for home-use, but what makes this better than a desktop computer? Portability? Who wants to surf the web on a tiny display with awkward controls? We already know the tablet PC's have no success, this is just another bad attempt at something that people don't really need.
Sure, it might be fun to play around with, but I just don't see this as anything but a toy for gizmo-heads that will flop within a couple of months...
Actually, they're using the Mayan calendar.
/sarcasm off
They're a multi-national corporation. Of COURSE they are using the business calendar based quarters.
For this thing to be anything more than a novelty--for it to be a true palmtop computer instead of a dressed-up PDA--it needs to have more storage capacity than 128MB onboard flash and a card slot for additional flash memory.
A 20-30GB hard drive, of the type Apple uses in their standard iPods, would add 7mm to the device's thickness and $100 to the price, but would add to the thing's usefulness immeasurably.
Nobody even wants MP3 Players with under 512MB of storage these days. Who are they going to sell this to?
I'd like to see Cahokia push *somebody* into making a trip planning/mapping client for this. Yes, *if* you have WiFi or a phone with GPRS|EDGE, you could use Google Maps.
If.
You.
Like.
To.
Wait.
But a local mapping client on this would be great. Granted, I somehow doubt that Cahokia could get Streets and Trips or Street Atlas, but if they partnered with Rand McNally or somebody like that they could get a 1G flash drive with the map data on it.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Damn. I really want this thing.
...and want a larger screen, you can get a Pepper Pad and get it now. I'm a satisfied customer...
->www.chuma.org, ranting and Newtons, what more could you want?
How is stale webpage content optimistic that still estimates a date that has passed?
It sounds depressing to me for the marketing for the device to be so idle. In fact, it sounds painfully reminiscent of the defunct Motorola MPx 300.
What? I just bought a Nokia 3120 from Cingular. So far it's a great phone. As for ignoring the flip phone trend, I think it wasn't such a bad idea. I work for Sprint, doing technical support, and I get a good number of customers who despise flip phones for their fragility. Admittedly, I'm one of those people, so I may be a little biased, but Nokia isn't exactly self-destructing.
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
I think there is a market for mini-tablets--if not now, then for certain in the near future.
People are really using the Internet. People buy things, check their email, look up movie times, just generally Google for things. If you are looking up movie times, you can use any public Internet access terminal... but for email and buying things, you will want a trusted computer. And a small trusted computer you carry around is a great idea.
I have a policy of not typing in any password I care about to a public Internet terminal. There could be a keystroke logger running... especially if the terminal is a PC running Windows and IE, and thus vulnerable to attack by spyware and worms.
To me, the perfect portable device would be small enough to carry conveniently, but big enough that the screen is usable. This implies both a minimum as well as a maximum size. For a PDA, the minimum size is much smaller. I use my PDA heavily, but as an Internet device my PDA sucks. This looks like the perfect size. (I want to try one out in real life, though; so far I have just seen this on the web.)
This size of screen would also be great as a photo viewer and portable movie player. Unfortunately the 770 doesn't have an SD card slot (it has a mini-MMC slot) and I'm not sure how good a 200 MHz processor would be for viewing movies.
In the not-too-distant future, people will start paying for purchases at stores using a "digital wallet". Currently, you hand a credit card to a complete stranger at a store, and hope that the stranger doesn't make a copy of the number; a digital wallet would be more secure, while being very easy to use. The store computer would send a request for payment to the wallet, and the user would accept or decline. This device would make a perfect digital wallet. A PDA would also work as a digital wallet, but I can see people buying a mini-tablet who wouldn't buy a PDA.
This is also the perfect size for a device to use during a long airplane flight. You would want an extra battery pack for long flights. (Given that the specs say it has a 1500 mAh battery, and that's good for 3 hours, a battery pack with four NiMH AA cells could probably run it for at least another 3 hours and possibly as much as 6.)
For the near term, I'm not really sure how many of these things they will actually sell. But in the middle to long term, I think mini-tablets will sell very well.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
whiskey tango foxtrot? I actually saw the bloody thing for sale here in Portugal already. Unless it was just a show piece...
I've seen the pictures, and while the tablet looks promising, it is obviously designed for right handed users. It would be cool if Nokia modified its design and made the table compatible with right and left-handed users. If they made the navigation buttons screen based, you could change the orientation from landscape to portrait, move the buttons from the left to the right side of the screen, or even hide them all together.
They do actually debug their products before releasing them.
Nokia phones are relatively quite bug-free compared to other brands.
(I know this from people who supply them with components.)
From now on I'm not buying anything that doesn't come with GPS/WAAS built in and a JAVA API to get info from that GPS for onboard applications. (Even if it's just a text only serial port API) GPS is so cheap to implement now, only companies that are making obsolete devices would create a handheld without it. Come on Nokia get with the decade/century.
be aware that thats great in europe where software patents don't apply yet but for the americas mono is a can of worms. see:
m ent_id=32499 [osnews.com]
.net as their claim that MS will never sue.
m ailserver.di.unip [archive.org].....
http://osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=11889&com
"1. It is not illegal to use mono or to develop mono.
2. C#/.net libraries are ECMA standards
However,
1. Microsoft has the right to charge a RAND (reasonable and non-descriminatory) fee at any time for the use of these standards.
2. They have never, ever, stated in any binding way that they would not do so in the future.
3. *any* fee, even minimal would result in the instant death of any OSS project dependent on those standards.
4. RAND can (and frequently does in the proprietary software world) mean several dollars per download! Or requiring build licenses for all developers producing binaries (every end user of gentoo for example!) that are in the hundreds of $ range. These are all reasonable and non-descriminatory in that context!
Miguel De Icasa and Ximian/Mono people *know* this full well but don't want to admit how dangerous mono adoption is for the gnome community. They cite a BS casual mailing list post from the head engineer of
See how much crap this is for yourself (from official Mono faq):
http://web.archive.org/web/20030609164123/http://
http://www.go-mono.com/faq.html#patents [go-mono.com]
Jim Miller's off hand email is the *only* assurance anyone has every received that MS would never charge a RAND fee! If this were truly MS's commitment then they could release a statement or legally commit themselves to that! This email is not not not legally binding people! Until MS makes a legally binding agreement to never charge for use of these standards, it is not ok to use mono!
See also Seth Nickels' blog on this subject "Why Mono is currently an unnacceptable risk":
http://www.gnome.org/~seth/blog/2004/May [gnome.org]
The two main arguments against what I'm saying are realy crap also:
1. Java is also proprietary: Yes but Sun has licensed Java in such a way that they are legally prohibited from charging *any* royalties at all for existing releases of Java. We know with 100% certainty that Sun will never try and collect any RAND fee. Ever. The situation with Java is totally different for this reason.
2. You are always infringing somewhere, worrying about this is wasting your time: True, there is always a danger of unknowingly infringing. However, in this case mono is knowingly using patented software. If MS decided to collect or sue, mono and gnome would have absolutely zero defense! Furthermore, MS is well known for destroying threatening companies when it suits them to do so! They have done this many times in the past. Remeber how they *lost* an anti-trust lawsuit? It is because they are agressive, unscrupulous and incredibly rich. They can and will crush gnome if gnome threatens MS! Mono is the ultimate submarine. We build it, integrate it so gnome can't live without it, then they kill gnome by charging for builds. Bam. Gnome is dead on that day.
Take Away: Mono is cool but way too dangerous. Smart people and companies are staying away from it (which turns out to be *most* companies bye the way. That is why Redhat and others are pushing Java as an alternative). People who back mono either have motive (ximian), are misinformed (most of the people on this forum), or just dumb (people who are really drooling over the potential of mono so they are ignoring the risk, probably ximian and some gnome developers again)"
I'm glad you had a "handheld" in the subject line there, or I'd wonder what you'd be eating and so on, heh.
... I *think* the "quick surf at home" usecase is a big one here, and that speaks against including GPS since you're using it at home anyway. But, of course, the device is pocketable so it will hopefully be used by people moving about as well. I guess they have to use an external GPS device for their positioning needs. There are GPS receivers that use Bluetooeth to communicate, so perhaps that's a possibility.
On a more serious note, that's a valid point of course
I just wish they would release the device some time soon, I'm very curious about what the actual price will end up at, if it's the rumoured $350 or what. Also it'll be fun to see what that figure translates to in local currency this week, since I'm not in the US.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
This one will not be able to attract enough customers to buy it, at least not at this price!
Has all innovation gone to China already?!? http://www.jinke.com.cn/english/v2/index.asp