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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."

15 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Shock horror by pubjames · · Score: 5, Funny

    Delaying a product's release. That's obviously because they're using Linux. I mean, product delays never happen in the Windows world.

    1. Re:Shock horror by ultrabot · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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
  2. 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."
  3. 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
    1. Re:Great for road trips... wait... by SerpentMage · · Score: 4, Informative

      There is blue tooth built in so then where you don't have WiFi you can use your cell phone and blue tooth to access the Internet.

      --

      "You can't make a race horse of a pig"
      "No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
  4. Tablet PC? by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Tablet PC? by Scoth · · Score: 5, Informative

      I currently use a tablet PC (Fujitsu Stylistic ST4120) for taking notes in my college classes. Instead of lugging around multiple notebooks filled with smeared pencil or messy ink on increasingly worn paper, I have a few directories full of files. Easy to backup so if something should happen to it, I still have all my notes and problem examples. I can do full text searches and find stuff right away rather than frantically flipping through notebook pages trying to find where I scribbled some key fact or note. If I need a hard copy, I can print it and it even looks pretty much like standard notebook paper. I can convert it to text with surprisingly decent handwriting recognition and make it a Word doc, PDF, web page, etc.

      Not to mention some of the side benefits of having everything be digital ink. We were recently doing Karnaugh maps and truth tables in my digital class, so rather than having to redraw the entire thing for each example, I just had to draw a prototype, clipboard it, and paste it whenever I needed another. Five variable truth table? Pull up my template with all the digits filled in, paste it in, and I'm ready to go.

      Tablets definitely have a way to go in lots of markets, but I'm fairly convinced they're the Way of the Future(TM) for things like class notes and such. It's been such a drastic improvement I suspect I'll be hanging onto it for the foreseeable future. I haven't personally had any durability issues, I have a stock screen protector on it I replace now and then. Otherwise I just toss it in the bookbag like the rest of my stuff and forget about it. Case has some scuffing and such but it all works fine.

      Oh, and for the obligatory "does it run Linux?", I do have Gentoo running fairly happily on it. The main reason I keep it in Windows for class is easy screen rotation and the fact that WinXP Tablet Edition really does do a nice job of integrating the tablet features. I also use the dualhead now and then which I still haven't gotten working properly with the i830 chipset.

  5. Mono by Tanaka · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. 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.
  7. 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
  8. Re:Nokia doesn't care about phones by Humorously_Inept · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  9. Re:Nokia doesn't care about phones by thebdj · · Score: 5, Informative

    You realize that Nokia has something like 34% of the total worldwide market share for cellphones?

    You may not always be able to get the fanciest or most wonderful cell phone from Nokia, but they have managed to do well by making cheap phones that the average person actually wants. They have tried slowly moving away from this cheap phone image and some of their more recent phones definitely help to this end.

    --
    "Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
  10. Re:Nokia doesn't care about phones by Richthofen80 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nokia's first generation of cellphones that sold well (circa 1998) were built like tanks. I had a 5400 series phone and that thing STILL works, minus a battery replacement or two in its life. Granted, it can barely SMS, doesn't browse the web, or anything else. But it makes friggin phone calls seven years after it was bought.

    --
    Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
  11. needs a hard drive by poot_rootbeer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  12. Re:It's for geeks by tao · · Score: 4, Informative
    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)

    Not even remotely true. Press the status bar globe icon. Choose "Connect..." Dialog "Select connection" opens. Select connection (signal strength and open/closed status shown for each). Very complicated. NOT.

    The 770 is not a research project. If it was, it wouldn't have been launched at all, just kept under wraps inside Nokia.