Years ago, the New Yorker magazine was beginning to lose advertising and looked like it would enter the long decline of high-class magazines. I knew someone who worked there and owned a few shares of stock (about $500 each) and who suggested I buy some, to help support the magazine. I thought about its prospects and decided there was no way to make money positioned where it was. I thought the end was inevitable. I didn’t invest any money.

Condé Nast Publications, however, saw the New Yorker as a cheap way to supply a ready-made outlet for its high-end advertisers buying pages in other CNP publications. And selling those pages pre-empted the ads’ going to competitors. The New Yorker completed Condé Nast’s suite of offerings and saved the company from having to launch a magazine from scratch. CNP had a way to make money with the New Yorker, and indeed it has prospered since then.

I wonder if in the same way the Nokia 770 isn’t so valuable on its own but invaluable as it completes Google’s package of attractions.

The Nokia 770 might not be able to singlehandedly create this new niche of handheld web tablets, but it gives Google an opening into the walkaround web. (You think they want to promote Microsoft’s UMPC initiative?) Now you can check your gmail from anywhere, not just at your desk. Now you can use Google Talk from anywhere — now you can really talk using Google Talk.*

You think I’m exaggerating when I say “from anywhere.” But isn’t Google providing a WiFi cloud over all of San Francisco? What do you bet that every city large enough to have a pro sports franchise gets a WiFi cloud within the next three years? And maybe Google will be helping the effort. Remember: the more WiFi, the better for Google.

And maybe Google will be a broadband provider. Bet you see “free Nokia 770 with 1 year signup” offers then. Actually, I bet we start seeing it from all sorts of broadband suppliers soon.

We’re all going to live in the walkaround web sooner or later. Google benefits from that, especially in its head-to-head competition with Microsoft. Like the New Yorker was to Condé Nast, the Internet Tablet is more valuable to Google than to anyone else — and you know they have a way to make money from it.

* I wonder if this is why Google chose to use a standard protocol for its Google Talk rather than set up something proprietary like Microsoft and AOL did. It means that people using other applications — like Gizmo, right? — will be able to connect with Google Talk. Could be a hard shove downward at Skype’s prospects too, eh?

Full disclosure: Years ago, I used to work for CNP as an editor.