You might regard the Sharp Willcom D4 UMPC (pictured above) as either a competitor to Nokia’s N810 Internet Tablet — or maybe as its next-generation successor.
The D4’s 5-inch screen has 1024×600 resolution: better than the NIT’s 800×480. It comes with 1GB of RAM and a 40GB drive. WiFi and Bluetooth, of course, slide-down keyboard and camera. (No GPS) Befitting a next-generation device, the D4 is the first web tablet utilizing the Atom CPU, Intel’s low-power chip for mobiles (maybe I should say “speedy chip” it runs at 1.33GHz).
Yup, the D4 has everything going for it. “Beating Nokia at its own game even,” you might say.
Except the design parameters for a weblet include more than “screen shows a full web page width.” Light weight — the D4 is twice as heavy as an N810. Fits in a pocket — the D4 is 1 inch wide and 7.4 inches long; but maybe Sharp’s customers have bigger pockets than I do.
Well, sure, they’ll need to. At $1525, the D4 obviously requires deep pockets.
Me, I’ll be buying weblets in $500 installments — is a D4 worth more than three N810s?
Not to me, anyway, with my small-in-every-way pockets.
As I’ve posted before, something went awry when Fedex delivered the N810 I ordered. It never arrived.
After a week, I persuaded LetsTalk to have Fedex reimburse them for the lost package. They did, and the replacement N810 got here Tuesday afternoon.
This morning, a neighbor from another street dropped off the original and merely mis-delivered package. Like Tuesday’s, this was an unassuming brown cardboard box about 11″x11″x9″ with nothing blaring “Fabulous electronics inside!” to alert the unwary (and only a 10-point-type return address indicating the shipper). So eleven days after receipt, my oblivious neighbors opened the package and only then realized it wasn’t some low-priority content intended for them, but someone else’s darling toy.
(Well, that’s what it looks like. I’ve already been asked by one stranger if my N810 is an iPhone.)
So now I’ve got to arrange this baby’s return.
Makes me wonder — wouldn’t it be frustration-removing if somehow the shipping could have involved GPS, with a specific location identified as the drop-off spot? Then I (or the diligent shipping researcher) could have quickly retraced the errant deliveryman’s steps and retrieved the original package on day one.
For that matter, how come we don’t have central GPS reference points that would help locate places? You know, like “the Empire State Building is at 34th and Fifth, so you go up about fifty blocks to get to the Met” only in GPS terms?
I’ll tell you why, it’s because the numbers are technology- and not people-friendly: “The Met is at latitude 40.776073 and longitude -73.964338 and the ESB at latitude 40.75319, longitude -73.985646″ has too many numbers to allow us to get a handle on the locations.
You know, I already have 1-866-59NOKIA permanently etched in my memory. (That’s the LetsTalk phone number.) And 1-800-GOFEDEX. See where I’m going here?
The whole web experience is built upon the understanding that internettablettalk.com is way easier to remember than 74.86.202.247.
At one end, we’ve got street addresses, at the other latitude and longitude. What we really need is a friendly GPS, something in the middle that has a logical structure to it and a way to make the key pieces stand out without renaming 34th Street “40.750 Way”. Or wait, maybe I’m wrong about that. Maybe the Empire State Building does need to be rebranded “750 Empire State” so its universal locator number is part of its identity. After all, I know how to locate “1010 WINS News” on the radio because its frequency is part of the brandname.
Then maybe my house would be located by being +50N and -17W from Montclair’s Central Location Referent (the CLeaR point), and even that Fedex deliveryman wouldn’t have left my package at +51N-12W without worrying about whether mine was the house next to the blue house or not.
In one of those all-too-familiar internet detours, I found myself reading a page on the evolution of various tech companies’ logos at Neatorama. Above is the Nokia logo circa 1865.
Here (in its entirety and without prior permission) is the section on Nokia.
In 1865, Knut Fredrik Idestam established a wood-pulp mill in Tampere, south-western Finland. It took on the name Nokia after moving the mill to the banks of the Nokianvirta river in the town of Nokia. The word "Nokia" in Finnish, by the way, means a dark, furry animal we now call the Pine Marten weasel.
The modern company we know as the Nokia Corporation was actually a merger between Finnish Rubber Works (which also used a Nokia brand), the Nokia Wood Mill, and the Finnish Cable Works in 1967.
Before focusing on telecommunications and cell phones, Nokia produced paper products, bicycle and car tires, shoes, television, electricity generators, and so on.
I like the fish!
Neatorama cites about-nokia.com as its source, where I found this additional info: “In addition to footwear and tyres, Nokia Rubber Works also manufactured rubber bands, industrial parts and raincoats.”
The Finnish Rubber Works is founded in 1898 and in 1904 a factory was set up in the town of Nokia. In 1925 bicycle tyre production starts and in 1932 car tyre production. … Today Nokian Tyres is the largest tyre manufacturer in the Nordic countries and a profitable company in its industry. Nokian Tyres develops and manufactures summer and winter tyres for cars and tyres for a range of heavy machinery.
Heck, I can’t resist. Here’s the captivating Nokia tyre ad (click to get the full Monty) and one of the old logos:
Dell sells a lot of items it doesn’t make, including the Nokia N800 and N810 Internet Tablets. I haven’t seen a lower price for the N810 than this (screen captured on Dec.17): $419.99.
There probably aren’t many visitors to the itT site that need to look up words in Khmer, Thai, Burmese or Lao. Especially since you can’t view Unicoded web-pages in those languages on a Nokia Internet Tablet. (Drat!)
Without the work done to establish a Unicode version of Khmer, without the beautiful Khmer Unicode fonts, without the evangelizing of standards and open software in Khmer, without the literally millions of “messages” translated to localize Firefox (Mekhala), Thunderbird (Moyura), OpenOffice and openSUSE for Khmer users, all performed by Khmer Software Initiative, there would be no use at all for the dictionary extension I’ve worked on.
So I am glad to see today that KhmerOS has been selected as one of the nine finalists worldwide in the Stockholm Challenge (one of the two finalists in the economic development category). Recognition for this work is made by the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), which promotes innovation and advancement in the acronymic areas of K4D (Knowledge for Development) and ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). Congratulations to the developers at KhmerOS! You’ve done great work!
Walt Mossberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal, hit the nail on the head:
[T]he iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. [Emphasis added.] Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well ….
Maybe it’s beginning to sink in that there’s now a category of devices fitting in-between PDA’s and notebooks. They’re computers, and they’re something else. (Not every-thing else.) Apple’s iPhone and the Nokia Internet Tablet are just the first, best exemplars.
The iPhone doesn’t have a hard drive or a keyboard. It commits huge resources to its gorgeous screen and flexible OS. It’s driven largely by realization that we all want a walkaround web.
Same for the Nokia Internet Tablet.
No, they’re not competitors (except for people’s discretionary income). What I see, though, is that — different as they are — each conceptualizes the same insight. That’s why I wrote, back in January, that the iPhone validates the Internet Tablet.
It seems like Intel is announcing later this week their own flavor of internet tablets they are calling MIDs (Mobile Internet Devices). From a presentation document (PDF) Intel has officially released, what we can gather are the following:
Foundation leverages Gnome Linux Desktop Technology, GTK+, DBUS, GConf
Intel developed user interface called ‘Master User Interface’
New Linux distro called RedFlag MIDINUX (v1.0 to be available sometime May)
Support of the Intel 915 chipsets
Finger-friendly
Browser, news reader, IM, VoIP
Media player, audio recorder, image viewer, camera
GPS, email, PDF reader, Bluetooth
18 second boot time, 3.2 second resume time
From the screenshots, the MIDs look like Maemo with Intel’s customized front-end Master User Interface (MUI), finger freindly, application launcher.
It is not yet clear how far Maemo and RedFlag MIDINUX will inter-operate but you can be sure that both platforms will be covered in Internet Tablet Talk.
IMO, from the standpoint of the US market, I think the 770 looks like it could be reasonably successful. However, it’s hard to know what Nokia’s expectations of the 770s “re-release” are without knowing how much they have put into its development.
After looking into subnnotebook PCs, tablet PCs, UMPCs, Sony’s ultrasomething PC, and PDA communicators, IMO, the 770 still has no direct competitors. Unless I’m mistaken, any other way of surfing the web on an 800×480 or higher res screen always involves a full OS PC that costs around $1000 (UMPC) to $2000 (dualcor cPc). The Nokia 9300 phone is an exception, and costs $500 or so.
The new Sony micro PC comes closest to delivering similar functions as the 770 in a desirable form factor at a similar size. $1400 difference is a lot of money. However, the 770 is a more limited device, in a way that directly affects the desirability of the 770. So, for instance, many people are commited to other IM networks, and a lot of people don’t use gmail or other google services. As a networking device, if the 770 is going to take off in the consumer market, it will have to mean that whole networks of people will buy into the 770 and Google Talk.
The more I think about it, the more I think it could make sense for me to buy 770s for my friends and family - when I hit the lottery. But really, let’s say you want to stay in touch with someone, anywhere really, either in the same city or traveling around the technological (networked) world. The 770 is a pretty slick device that gets the job done with enough generic functions to make it a good individual tool as well.
I think the itT forum represents a mix of people, some of whom are learning how to customize the 770, and some who are using the built in functions and are more representative of the general consumer market. I’m in the latter camp. So I’d be curious what other people thought about this.
As it happens, I finished working on my computer Tuesday night just after midnight. But if I had stayed at it a little while longer, the timestamp at two minutes and three seconds past one a.m. would have been 01:02:03 04/05/06.
