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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."
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
It does when the software is manifestly nowhere near ready for release. You can go and download Maemo and see for yourself. I wouldn't expect to see it until early 2006 at least.
I always suspected their Q3 predictions were woefully optimistic and/or a deliberately misleading way to get GNOME developers to hawk Nokia's vapourware free of charge during the conference season.
can you imagine what the market for devices like this will look like once municipal wifi comes of age? Hello voip cell phone/pda/computer. Everyone will have one of these things on their hip. Something else to diddle with on the subway besides their iPods and Blackberries.
useless sig advice - Read Nabokov.
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]
Are they trying to self-destruct or are they taking risks in an effort to bring interesting new technology to market? If a company doesn't try new things, then it will stagnate and die. The fact that the North American market doesn't want new things doesn't mean that companies have to stop trying. Samsung, for example, sells you silver flips but have you ever seen the crazy shit they're selling in Korea? It's the same with Nokia. America is a "developing" market insofar as mobile technology goes.
~Someday, I hope to be an aspiring author.
I always suspected their Q3 predictions were woefully optimistic and/or a deliberately misleading way to get GNOME developers to hawk Nokia's vapourware free of charge during the conference season.
Uh, it's not vaporware, prototype hardware has been distributed to developers, the Maemo platform has been published and can be downloaded for free, etc. etc.
I'm actually delighted that Nokia finally went "public" with Maemo in time, instead of keeping it under NDA forever (i.e. until the release). The tablet device is going to be a proof of concept product, so it's necessarily bound to be late.
Why do some people *always* have to whine, even when a big corporation like Nokia does the obviously right thing that will inevitably benefit the whole Linux community?
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
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.
Only in the USA...
Do cell phone providers use at least three totally incompatible technologies to piss off users
I don't think this device is competing against Treo 650. If you want a competitor to the Treo, you have to look at something like the 9300
Je ne parle pas francais.
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 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