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Archive for May, 2009

Any future for the Nokia Internet Tablet? Doh! Yes!
By  RogerS   May 29th, 2009 7 comment(s)
Categories: GPS, Internet tablet, Maemo, Nokia N810, e-books, flash, keyboard, social networking, voip, walkaround web and webcam

RogerS is RogerSPress on twitterWhen I first encountered the Nokia Internet Tablet, I thought, “Gosh what a great e-reader!” I’ve used each NIT as an e-reader but I learned what it’s great at is, well, doing the internet thing. As its name suggests.

I thought GPS was a natural win. The big screen made maps easier to read than on most dedicated devices. Still, I used my tablet for email more often than GPS.

The voip calls with visuals blew me away. Except no one with a tethered connection bought into cam-calling.

The 770, the N800, the N810 — these were all complete computers! They meant I didn’t have to lug around a laptop just in case I had real work to do. But I did most of my real work on a real computer and my wife never got the hang of using a NIT. My son’s friends found the iPod Touch easier for surfing and he never cottoned to it.

With its touch screen, I didn’t need a keyboard, but I liked the N810 keyboard. The keyboard made apps easier to port anyway.

And Flash! Once it became clear that “internet” meant surfing without sideways scrolling, email, and videos on YouTube, the internet tablet excelled at giving me the internet.

Well, excelled in lots of circumstances. Without a cell-plan data connection the walkaround web had no impact on NIT users. The Apple iPhone has a minuscule segment of the smartphone market but generates 50 percent of mobile web use. Apple’s genius wasn’t in the interface but in browbeating AT&T into affordable web access.

Does the Nokia Internet Tablet have a real future? We have a $200 netbook and it’s easier for conference notetaking than an N810. I have an Amazon Kindle 2 and I can get books for it that aren’t available for FBReader on my NITs. Half the cars have GPS built-in now anyway. So what’s the sweet spot for the Internet Tablet?

Doh!. The internet, same as it’s always been.

Except these days, “the internet” means Twitter, too. With multi-tasking so I can tweet full-screen and use multiple screens to follow several hundred people (in more than one group). With keyboard and touch-screen and audio and photos too. And from anywhere I might be, um-m, walking around.

I can tweet from a phone now, thank you very much, but making sure it fits is no piece of cake. Tweeting means editing down to 140 characters without having to struggle. And reading (following), tweeting and surfing simultaneously? Hey, where’s my computer again? At least Maemo was built for us to do more than one thing at a time.

I expect there will be lots of cellphones released this year that have keyboards and screens of a satisfactory size and cameras. Just having good specs won’t draw much attention. But if the next NIT can ace the Twitter test and fly the Flash flag, it’ll be very much in demand.

Losing the best-res title
By  RogerS   May 26th, 2009 26 comment(s)
Categories: Internet tablet and hardware

If the next Internet Tablet indeed shrinks its screen size, how will it compare to the 3.5″ 960×480 Toshiba Biblio? It’s a

cell phone with integrated e-book reader, a 3.5-inch LCD screen featuring a 960×480 resolution, 7GB internal memory, QWERTY keyboard and Opera Mobile 9.5 including AJAX support

Toshiba Biblio

For a long time, the NIT’s stood out for having a bigger, higher-resolution screen while still being pocketsized. Now the Biblio will hold the title of best-resolution screen. In fact, the more I hear about the N900 and the longer it takes to arrive, I wonder what features it will have that even stand out against the increasingly more capable cellphones.

Image and description from MobileCrunch.

‘You can’t delete blog posts. Ever.”
By  RogerS   May 25th, 2009 2 comment(s)
Categories: Nokia and observations

Russell Beattie is of course a famously garrulous mobile-platform instigator. Now what does he mean by this latest (7 minutes ago) observation (OK, it was a tweet):

Dear colleagues at Nokia: You can’t delete blog posts. Ever.

Anyone in these forums care to clue us in?

The medium (Tweets) and the message (walkaround web)
By  RogerS   May 21st, 2009 4 comment(s)
Categories: Internet tablet, maemo.org, social networking and walkaround web

RogerS is RogerSPress on twitterThese days more of what I have to say about the Nokia Internet Tablet gets said via Twitter than at Internet Tablet Talk (and maemo.org).

A blog post usually takes me a couple hours to create, from working out what I have to say to cleaning up the version transmigrated to the forums. A bit less when I don’t make a graphic too. Being shorter — under 25 words — tweets take me only 5 to 15 minutes to compose.

No room for folderol (even though that’s my specialty as a blogger). No visuals expected. One link per item not only suffices but pressures you to say less; two links I’ve never done.

And with my hummingbird attention span, I finish a tweet and soon I’m on to the next think. But I have a couple dozen more-or-less-completed blogs that were never posted for want of the final . . . polish I’m inclined to say, but really it’s more a final galvanizing-to-life. A lot of work for no result.

There’s another reason, which relates to something Krisse posted recently. The world at large is unaware of the NIT’s sterling features, and just explaining what they are serves a real use. But the proportion of NIT owners who are developers is so great that the message is distorted in our forums. It’s like Oxford or Stony Brook — all university, no kindergarten.

So this thought leads me to two others. Is there any practical way for maemo.org to stream Internet Tablet-related tweets along with its other NIT/mameo coverage? (And any desire for people to see it here?) I leave this to the community at large to discuss because I won’t be writing a blog post about it.

I will, however, be writing about whether Twitter might not be the real internet app that the Internet Tablet was made for. The next one, anyway, the one that fits in your pocket, has a keyboard and 800-pixel-wide screen, and connects to the internet wherever you happen to walking around. Instead of today’s thought (”How might maemo.org benefit from Twitter”), maybe the essential issue is how might the Internet Tablet benefit Twitter users.

Twittery graphic from Ryan Putnam at vector.tutsplus.com. Thanks!

Putting ebooks, NIT and big sales into the same sentence
By  RogerS   May 19th, 2009 39 comment(s)
Categories: Internet tablet, Nokia N810 and e-books

In case you hadn’t noticed, ebook sales are rocketing up and up and up. (Well, it is my field, so I have.) Just in order to buy an ebook from Amazon, you have to first buy a $360 Kindle; yet in little more than a year, 10 percent of Amazon’s total book sales were ebooks. Of course, its book catalog includes millions of different titles, but only 300,000 or so are available as ebooks. For titles sold in both p and e, the ebook portion is already 35 percent.

This is relevant, I think, because the Internet Tablet — with its 225-pixel-per-inch screen resolution — has always suggested itself as a top-rank ereader.

Is this really viable or am I delusional (as often before about ebooks)?

French ebook maker Bookeen says three different ebook markets are forming: one for education (eg, must have big screen), one for general book reading and one for reading both book and newspaper-y content. These last two, for convenience sake, Bookeen dubs the “book iPod” and the “book iPhone.” A “book iPhone” necessarily includes a 3G or WiFi connection, else content can’t be kept fresh.

Kindle (showing NYTimes) with book-stack

Amazon, of course, straddles all three markets, with its 10-inch Kindle DX and free-3G, thin-as-a-pencil Kindle 2. Critically, you can read Kindle-DRMed ebooks on an iPhone as well; and Amazon just acquired the Stanza ereader, the hugely successful iPhone app.

It’s easy for me to say the Kindle and Stanza apps belong on the Internet Tablet, but who here knows what Amazon will do?

The Nokia N810 fits in your pocket, already runs Flash, has a keyboard and that 800-pixel-wide screen, and includes built-in WiFi. It equals or surpasses the iPhone as an ereader in every respect except one — walkaround connectivity. But Amazon’s success hinges in part on the synching between different ereading devices, and the lack of 3G could blackball the N810 as an Amazon platform.

Next generation then. If people at Nokia think the billion-dollar ebook market could boost the NIT too, I hope they get Amazon on the phone.

Some 2.2 million people are going to be buying an awkward monochrome, monopurpose device like the Kindle — this year and next — just so they can feed their reading habit. Think how many would be happy paying their money for a full-color, Flash-capable, pocket-size Internet Tablet. It’s got to be a lot, I think.

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