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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."
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?
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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
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.
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.)
A friend of mine has a tablet.
It's his desktop. He plugs in a keyboard and mouse and uses it as such. He can also pick it up and use it while standing around. It's his work machine - he runs part of a hospital IT structure, and handles a lot of terminals. This involves running around a lot, and not necessarily wanting to set up the laptop.
Really, a tablet is just a laptop that has replaced the keyboard/mouse with a stylus. That allows it to be used while standing up, but it doesn't make quite as good a PC while on-the-go.
My professor uses a tablet PC. It is probably the best learning tool I have seen in the classroom.
He has a slideshow type presentation (in a lecture hall) where he will have problems written. In answering the problem, he is able to write directly on the screen - much like powerpoint's pen feature, but he is able to write much faster than anyone using powerpoint ever could. I would like to see this technology implemented in all of my classes.
Jason
EE Wayne State U
JM
Me. What would I want a harddrive on it for exactly? It is designed to sit on a wireless network. Mine won't leave my apartment, it's a small, easy to use, handheld web client. If I need access to storage I'll point it at my fileserver. This is not a PDA, it's not a "true palmtop computer", it's not an mp3 player, it's a thing for getting on the web easily without a big hulking laptop.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Yep, PartitionMagic to resize and then install. I actually didn't have any external boot devices, which made for an interesting install. I have killed the bootloader a couple times which necessitated popping the drive into another computer. I got a USB floppy drive now which should help. I didn't realize at first it could boot off USB, now that I know that I can probably get a USB key booting. I'm actually in a bit of trouble now because my Windows is in need of a reinstall and I can no longer get the restore image to work since the partition layout has changed. I'll probaby burn the install files to a CD and go that route.
One annoyance is I'm running into a PM bug when trying to convert the Windows partition from NTFS to FAT32 so I can use it from Linux properly. Captive NTFS is just too slow for major use. No one seems to have a good answer for it though it's all over Google.