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]
Despite the iPhone’s tremendous hype, we all know that it’s a small, small segment of the total mobile-phone market. According to IDC, a market research firm, iPhones comprise just 2 percent of smartphones — compared to the 63 percent powered by Symbian*.
Interesting then that in December, Google reported, it had more internet traffic from iPhones than any other mobile device.
Think this says something about how useful people find the walkaround web? Or why AT&T is giving free access to 10,000 WiFi hotspots to its broadband subscribers?
And why the Internet Tablet has an 800-pixel-wide screen but still fits in your pocket and weighs only 8 ounces?
Ari Jaaksi pointed out more than two years ago that with the arrival of the Internet Tablet the web wasn’t stationary any more. People with laptops aren’t walking around checking the web. And surfing the internet on a cellphone screen is just painful. Those were never harbingers of a web paradigm shift.
But we users of the Nokia 770, N800 and N810 know the truth of Ari’s statement. And iPhone users are learning it too. We need the web, wherever we are — not every second of the day, but at any moment of our day.
And a large screen, light weight and small size are absolute requirements.
I think we’re going to see a much wider commercial acceptance of this “useless” niche this year.
Amazon.com just released its Holiday Best Sellers list (from Nov. 15 through Dec. 19 Based on Units Ordered) and on the personal computer category, the Nokia Internet Tablet makes it to the Top 3 list:
In PCs, the top sellers included Apple MacBook, Nokia Internet Tablet PC and HP Pavilion Entertainment Notebook PC.
Check out the current prizes of the Nokia Internet Tablets at Amazon.com.
The iNdT team must have been actually waiting for the OS2008 update before releasing Canola2 Beta. The Canola official site is now updated with lots of new information about Canola2 Beta, videos, feedback form, and of course the install page. Note however that Maemo.org’s server is being hammered right now and it might take a while for everyone to download and install Canola (9.32 MB).
Photography enthusiasts from the Maemo UI Team have posted some freely downloadable Internet Tablet wallpapers as their holiday gifts to the users. Check them out:
If you have read itT’s Canola2 preview article and has been patiently waiting for the Canola2 beta launch, the wait is almost over. Tomorrow is the day the guys from iNdT are releasing the first public beta of Canola2. Marcelo Oliveira (aka handful) has released some last minute status updates over at his blog — showing the different components of Canola2’s UI, as well as why Canola2 is being released as an ‘open beta‘.
We have also created an itT Canola2 Beta discussion thread to discuss our overall experience, problems, and suggestions as we get to try Canola2 tomorrow.
ACCESS Systems Americas, Inc., formerly PalmSource, Inc. has just released Garnet VM Beta for the Nokia Internet Tablet. This virtual machine software lets you run the full Palm OS Garnet on any model of Nokia Internet Tablet (770, N800, N810), giving you full PIM functionality as well as let you install more than 30,000 free and commercial Palm OS applications.
I have just installed the software on the N810. The emulator runs at the middle of the screen at a 320 x 480. Graffiti works well, the keyboard on the N810 works perfectly, and the sound works as well (note that sound does not work on the 770). It seems like it even has an option to wireless HotSync to your PC as well. There is no option yet to rotate it and stretch it horizontally on the tablet which is my primary request as of the moment. Update: There is an option to rotate the screen by unchecking the Fullscreen option, but it just displays the Palm window horizontally at the same resolution. I hope someone finds a way to stretch the desktop area.
As a long time Palm OS enthusiast, I have been longing for PIM apps on the Internet Tablet and never expected this(!), and I am ecstatic! I have setup a new Palm OS forum so IT users and Palm OS users/developers can chat and mingle.
Time to dig up my registered Palm OS app serial numbers…
From day one of the Internet Tablet era*, I’ve been a believer in the WiFi path. As broadband has increased its penetration wildly over the last few years, this has seemed reasonable. And I attribute the failure of the many Linux tablet predecessors of the Nokia 770 in great part to having preceded the era of easy-to-use, cheap wireless routers and widely available broadband.
We’ve entered that era, and if WiFi clouds aren’t covering all the cities as they should, well, that day is coming.
And yet.
And yet. “WiFi everywhere” is still an aspiration, not a description.
Last week, when I was comparing video-over-internet cam calls to high-priced “video share” cellphone calls, I had to jog myself to include information that you could in fact use your Nokia Internet Tablet from anywhere, not just within range of a wireless access point if you connected to the internet through a cellphone data plan.
This kind of thinking wasn’t native. NIT use = WiFi area is how I instinctively thought about it.
But Ari Jaaksi wrote about being really really untethered from the desktop way back in September 2005 when he described his daughter noodling away on his 770 on a car trip, connected to the internet via the Bluetooth phone in his pocket. And a couple months after that, I got to experience “internet everywhere” firsthand when Nokia lent me a phone and I surfed on the train ride into New York City and then walking downtown to work.
“Internet everywhere” takes the Internet Tablet to a far higher level of usefulness. It really does.
Still I haven’t treated that as an option. U.S. cellphone data plans seem to be ridiculously priced, with all kinds of gotcha’s. Apparently if you level with the telecom rep as to what you intend to do with your NIT and the cellphone, you’re unambiguously determined to require an $80- or $100-a-month plan. I can’t justify that kind of money, or even half that.
That’s why, in the midst of all today’s hullabaloo about the iPhone, the datum that leaped out at me was that you’re paying only $20 for an unlimited data plan when you go the iPhone route.**
That’s the first reasonable price I’ve ever heard of.
When do the rest of us get $20 internet? Why can’t we get it now? Hey, AT&T, I’ll switch to you tomorrow if you give me the same deal!
__________
* That would be May 25, 2005. I exaggerate by a couple weeks — I wasn’t a convert till mid-June.
** Not transferrable, not usable by your laptop using the iPhone to connect to the internet, etc. Reviewer David Pogue says Treo owners at AT&T are paying about $40 for unlimited Internet.
Dan Gentleman (aka Thoughtfix) turns back the time and 
