I’ve put my take on the Nokia N900 as an ereader up at Teleread.org. For books, I think the N900 fits better than an iPhone as a Kindle companion reader.
I’ll post the same conclusion but from the perspective of a Nokia Internet Tablet user here shortly.
When 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.
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
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.
These 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 Krisseposted 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.
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.
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.
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.
For the last ten days I’ve been putting an Amazon Kindle 2 through its paces, wondering how desirable a dedicated e-reader is.
The resolution of the Nokia Internet Tablet screen is 225 pixels-per-inch; on the Kindle 2, it’s 167 ppi. In a one-inch square, that means there are nearly twice as many pixels on the full-color NIT screen; too, video plays marvelously there. “White” on the 16-level-gray-scale K2 screen is, well, light gray; animation is not possible; and video doesn’t even enter the realm of speculation.
Yet the K2’s 6-inch-diagonal screen encompasses wonderfully more text than pocket-sized devices. And that is no small thing. In these electronic times I have re-subscribed to the print edition of the New York Times, added magazine subscriptions and now carry NYPL and Montclair library cards in my wallet; still, 90 percent of my reading is done on-screen. The pencil-thin K2 capitalizes on our need for reading to be mobile beyond any previous device.
As for portability, the K2 doesn’t just talk the talk. Native-born to the walkaround web, its purchase enables you to browse all the non-moving-pixel parts of the internet from anywhere within reach of Sprint’s 3G wireless network, for no cost whatsoever. And buy books at any hour, with immediate access.
In so many ways inferior to an Internet Tablet, but not without charm. However, that’s not a Kindle 2 pictured below, but a prototype of the so-called CrunchPad, Michael Arrington’s quest for a $200 “Macbook Air-thin touch-screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel.”
Keeping track of how much time you have left to talk in a presentation or a meeting presents special difficulties. As evidence that no good solution exists for the problem, I point to the universal practice of appointing a single individual to keep track of the time who is delegated to conveys the impending end of the allotted time to the speaker. Any time a simple task is done by a human, you know it’s not all that simple. But we all know that watch displays are too small, the laptop is occupied presenting slides, a one-minute alert is fine but the speaker has no way to know how close am I to the one-minute mark?
I ran across a big countdown timer at online-stopwatch.com, written in Flash. Running on a Nokia Internet Tablet, the numbers are large enough to read from ten feet away or further. It’s a perfect use of the NIT’s 4.3-inch screen.
Different versions of the program display a stop-watch (counting up), splits, or a circle clockface with a single hand sweeping once around the face whatever time you have entered.
You can run this useful app from the website if you want. Me, I simply downloaded the .swf file, put it into a /tools folder, opened it in tablet’s browser and bookmarked that local copy. Easy to grab. And of course the graphics resize nicely as I switch between standard and full-screen display. Hey, thanks, online-stopwatch person!
Last summer my N810 was stolen during a library visit. Since I praised Nokia when it first released the Internet Tablet for ruthlessly paring away the inessentials — the 770’s absence of a phone, hard drive and keyboard stunned most mobile-device observers — I didn’t replace it, but instead relied solely on my N800’s* for my tablet needs.
Besides I already had a Bluetooth keyboard and GPS. I didn’t have to have the newer Internet Tablet if I wanted those features.
Then last Thursday, I ordered an N810 from Buy.com, paying $227.86** for the little treasure that arrived this morning. (It’s sitting next to me on the computer desk, charging now.)
Why?
I’ve been pondering that. Maybe subconsciously I think I’ll use the built-in GPS (even though I rarely use the external GPS I own). I don’t really type faster with the N810’s slide-out keyboard, though I know having it simplifies using some programs. Does losing display real estate to an on-screen keyboard interfere with my thinking processes more than I’ve been aware? Could be. I know that my tap-drags to get an upper-case letter succeeds only about 60-80 percent of the time, so entering some characters is way slower than is good***.
And, trivial as they may seem, I know I’ve missed the screen-lock button and the cover-that-doesn’t-fall-off.
These are little things, and I’m struggling to find any bigger reasons for using an N810 instead of an N800. OK, “little things mean a lot,” but two hundred-plus dollars’ worth?
Still, I’m content with my purchase. Something in me knows this is a good deal, even if I can’t consciously say why. Even though logic says to preserve my cash for some forthcoming, more dazzling new tablet. Not sure why, but definitely sure it’s a good thing.
Like I said, I’m content. And that’s a good measure.
__________
* Um, yes, I’ve acquired three used N800’s, intending to gift them to family in California, Texas and Georgia, but I’m like Scrooge McDuck in his private vault when I’m cooing over my tablets and I can’t seem to let them go . . .
** Including taxes, shipping and handling
*** Years ago, IBM released a study showing that any interruption in typing that was longer than a tenth of a second drastically reduced your efficiency.
I like being able to use my Nokia Internet Tablet as a computer, so that in a pinch I can work in a spreadsheet or edit some word-processing file.
But I got over the notion that it would be a computer for me and not primarily a web and e-reading device a long time ago.
Yes, the NIT really brought the price of a carryaround Linux computer way down.
But today I see[1] that Target has an Asus 7-inch EEE, complete with wifi, keyboard, 800×480 screen and 3 USB ports, for $270. BestBuy has the Asus 8.9-inch EEE (1024×600) for $300. And soon BB will be selling the 10-inch MSI Wind (1024×600, 120GB drive, 1.6 GHz Atom processor and Windows XP Home) for $399.
These are computer-first, carryaround-second devices, with pricing that seems to have sped past Nokia’s. If computing were my primary portable need, I’d be looking at them instead of the 8-ounce pocket-sized NIT.
To stand out in the crowd, the Internet Tablet needs to be the best at what it does best. Versatility counts, but let’s keep in mind what our primary need is, what we want to see first when we turn the device on. And really shine at that.
So, yippee! that the N810 WiMAX Edition is out, and hurray! that HSPA is in the works. Getting the internet — even walking or driving around — that’s what it’s all about.
_____
[1] Via techbargains.com
I met Reggie in Berlin before the Maemo Summit, and he was working on his presentation, What Users Want (which will be posted soon, btw). I looked over the notes that Krisse Juorunen of Internet Tablet School had sent him and made some suggestions. I thought about how the tablet is being used today and how it might be used — which was exactly what Ari Jaaksi asked a group of Maemo users the next evening.
I ended up putting my thoughts down on paper (unable to use the hotel’s power converters with Nokia’s AC-4U battery charger!). I hadn’t put in for a speaking slot, so making notes was just a way to keep my head in the topic while Reggie was working on his slides. He didn’t finish till 4 a.m. on Thursday night, so I kept writing. Here is what I wrote up but didn’t say at the Maemo Summit:
What more do we want?
In Ari Jaaksi’s talk at OSiM World, he characterized the reception of the 770 Internet Tablet as people asking, “What is this PDA that doesn’t have PDA functions? What is this phone that isn’t a phone?”
No one had seen a mobile device like this, explicitly designed for internet use: a full computer without a keyboard, without a hard disk, which fit in your pocket and was light enough that it didn’t act like an anchor.[1]
When 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.
