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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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
I didn't, but hey, why not? We already got the MSN toilet. :-)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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...
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.
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);}