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Nokia delays Linux-based tablet

Posted by Hemos on from the working-towards dept.

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."

5 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. The UI... by Stu+L+Tissimus · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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."
  2. Great for road trips... wait... by catbertscousin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  3. oh deity... by advocate_one · · Score: 4, Interesting
    please don't rush it out to make Christmas if there's a danger of it being half-assed... if you know it's NOT gonna make Christmas, then take the time to get it right and launch it properly then...

    then again, I'm probably tilting at windmills here... marketing a product

    <sarcasm>"obviously"</sarcasm>
    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.
  4. More of the same by Red+Flayer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  5. It's for geeks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Disclaimer: I haven't used the thing, but I know people who have been playing with it since it was still under wraps.

    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- 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.