I was just looking at the post Reggie made about free wallpaper from the Maemo UI team and wondering why the “Thanks!” feature here at ITT isn’t used more.
I realized I have a lot of thanks to give.
Thanks to Reggie for starting this site, for making it a place I want to visit daily, for spending so much of his time doing the admin tasks like hooking up the news items to the forums and redesigning the layout, for all his efforts on behalf of us ITT users.
Thanks to Ari Jaaksi and his crew at Nokia for bringing us an affordable sensational tablet, for continually improving it, for welcoming user and blogger input to make it better, for partnering with the open-source community on this endeavor, giving back and building tools for others to use.
Thanks to the Nokia higher-ups who allowed this skunkworks initiative to prove its worth then moved it into the corporate mainstream of the N-series and Forum Nokia.
Thanks to Quim Gil for being our advocate inside Nokia and for keeping us informed on what’s going on inside the pale.
Thanks to Nikolay Pultsin (aka Geometer) and Mikhail Sobolev for their tireless development of FBReader, the fabulous e-reader for the Nokia internet tablets (as well as many other platforms now).
Thanks to Daniel Gentleman, aka Thoughtfix, for his reporting on so many aspects of tablets of all sorts.
There are others in our community who have brought much insight to the forums here, posted great information in times of desperate need, ported apps or made them from whole cloth. I encourage all the members here at ITT to add the specific people they want to thank to this list.
At GigaOM, Alistair Croll explains what the Nokia Internet Tablet is all about — positioning Nokia to be completely ready for the open, walkaround web*. It’s not about selling more devices and making money now, but owning the market later.
Croll cites Nokia’s Anssi Vanjoki, EVP of multimedia, as pointing to the overwhelming need outside of the U.S. for web access to be primarily handheld and not tied to a desk. (And not tied to a single carrier for one-person/one-phone telephony.)
Nokia sees that closed platforms cripple the ability to compete in the coming world. Hence its commitment to Linux (as contrasted to Apple’s approach with the iPhone). And more critically that, basically, everyone will want to access the web from anywhere, at any time. Hence the computer that you walk around with had better be suited for the web (800 pixels wide) and light enough to carry everywhere (8 ounces or less).
This strategy explains such disparate events as the accelerated release cycle (three NIT’s within 20+ months), the size- and price-discrepancy compared to the UMPC, and Nokia’s support of the open-source community.
Nokia is taking the long view, Croll says, and when the walkaround web is firmly fixed in place, Nokia will be farther along on the learning curve making the devices we will all want. And be most firmly situated in the public’s mind as the company that gets it.
I just did a quick price check at PriceGrabber and you can surprisingly now get a Nokia N800 internet Tablet for just $235.60 shipped. The cheapest price on the list (before tax and shipping) is just $224.
It is already quite a steal to get the N800 at this price, considering it can be flashed later on with OS 2008. It would be interesting to see how low it goes for.
I haven’t held a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet in my hands, but it seems to me it represents some very astute decisions on the part of the Nokia team.
The 770 and N800 tablets have the largest, highest-resolution screens of any device in the pocket-carryaround category. That comes from an awareness of the high frustration that accompanies surfing the web on a too-narrow screen.
From day one, we’ve been asking how can Nokia take advantage of their units’ display advantage?
Well, having used a Nokia-loaner GPS unit for several months, I can testify that one thing that benefits greatly from a larger, higher-resolution screen is looking at a map, especially traveling at 65 mph when you can’t spend more than a moment or two glancing at it.
So building in GPS has a surface logic anyone can appreciate. But that’s not what I think is astute.
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.
Why the obsession to make the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet be a computer (see, for example, Trusted Reviews)? Or a PDA? Or a cellphone? Allegedly this is because people want to carry fewer devices, hence the upswing in convergence.
But is that really where we are headed?
If you go back a couple generations, there was a time when every family had one television, and before that one radio. And then as they became less expensive, more were added and maybe you even had one per person. Radios are now so cheap, we have one for each possible use — one in each car, one in each bedroom (attached to a clock) and in the kitchen, one in the home stereo system, one in each boombox and in each portable tape or CD player, special ones built on a clip just for going jogging.
In my own household — two adults, two children — we have ten radios. They’re all optimized to a single situation, and we think that’s right. We don’t see this as violating some principle of multiple use (or minimum use either — how many minutes a week is a shower radio on, anyway? Or the guestroom clock-radio?). We follow the “specific devices for specific needs” principle.
And that applies to computers too. To tablets.
You know, if I can access my files on the network, and I use web-apps, why do I care about “synching” my internet tablet with a PC? Just as I want that clip-radio for jogging, I want to carry a small but suitable device for surfing, reading and, you know, anything that might come up — a see-me voip call, some work, some music, a game. But, heck, at other times, I want that laptop. And at still other times, I carry some index cards and a one-dollar Optiflow pen and leave the tablet at home.
Soon enough today’s internet tablets will sell for $50 - $100, and we’ll have a slew of them. (Yes, we’ll have some extraordinary $400 devices then, too.) It’ll be access to the network that they each provide, so it won’t matter which one I pick up: my information won’t be quarantined in separate devices constantly falling out-of-synch with every other device I use. And, likely as not, the capabilities will be downloaded from the network too, or on the network entirely.
Our cellphones and our internet tablets are just the first devices to be pocketable and derive their worth from the network — no connect, no use — while our expectations are driven by the old-paradigm devices of yesteryear (eg, 2005). I mean, after all, would you have even considered buying a PDA back in the day if it didn’t work offline? And, in the end, isn’t that pretty much the way the internet tablet is?
That’s where we’re headed, I think. Not there yet, by any stretch of the imagination, and I yield to no man in counting on the off-network apps in my own 770. But I can feel it coming, every time I reach over to check the alarm on my clock-radio and see the internet tablet resting on the bedside table. Soon enough I’ll have a bedside tablet, and a breakfast table tablet and a tablet in the car that always lives there, like the radio.
Here’s my review of the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet, the gosh-darned most revolutionary device around, smaller, lighter, better-screened, less-expensive and capable of see-me phone calls at voip prices — what do you think, will I like it?
But first, let’s get the formalities out of the way. I’m a fanboy of anyone who shows egregious genius. The makers/builders of the internet tablet twins qualify on several counts. My attitude shows in everything I write about the 770 and the N800. Secondly, speaking my opinion and wanting to further the development of the scene has qualified me to purchase both a 770 and an N800 at steep discount — 58 and 68 percent, respectively, as one of 500 participants in both the 770 and the N800 developer-device programs. (Of course, I know people who got them free!)
So, here’s my review:
The Nokia N800 Internet Tablet came as a shock to observers of the web tablet scene. No one expected Nokia to expand its line and push the tablet envelope so soon and so far, considering that widespread distribution in the U.S. occurred only 12 months ago.
But the strength of the 770’s appeal apparently persuaded Nokia to capitalize on its first-to-market advantage and hug the internet tablet to its N-series, smart-phone bosom. (Hence the “N” prefixing the name.)
Anyone who uses one of these tablets soon experiences a glowing recognition that, holy cow!, the internet doesn’t have to be confined to a desk or laptop-friendly chair. Now you can surf standing up, walking around, riding the train and so on, just as you can use a phone untethered from a phone jack.
This comparison to the cellphone’s liberation of movement comes from Ari Jaaksi, the head of Nokia’s open-source software group and the internet tablet team specifically. And it’s critical to understanding why the N800 and the 770 don’t fit into any neat categories that other reviewers seem to want to force them into.
Not ten minutes before the Fedex truck arrived bearing an N800 for my delectation*, I read the wire-service story about Windows Vista, available for sale via download at various prices topping out at $399. Let’s see . . . quick visit to Compusa . . . hm-m. Yup. $399.99 for Vista Ultimate, $399.99 for Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. Gee, this is a hard decision. Lay out $399.99 for one heckuva OS, or instead get the Linux OS, plus an entire computer thrown in for free. Decisions, decisions!
* but just on loan, to be returned after an off-the-cuff round of testing (my specialty).
There’s nothing outside the standard press release info in the brief writeup on the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet at the New York Times today. But I think the article is worth noting, if only for its headline: “Take an Internet Call or Some Notes, or Just Doodle”.
Well, there is the power of marketing too. Here’s the lede: “You can’t put the world in your pocket but you can put the Web there ….” Yes, the idea of accessing the internet while untethered from your desktop or laptop is fully insinuating itself into the Zeitgeist. As is the notion of using one’s WiFi carryaround to take (or make) phone calls obviously, based on this headline. (If only Ivan Berger, esteemed audio writer* and avid reader, knew how apt his opening sentence’s comparison of the N800 to a paperback book really is! Hopefully he’ll get to try FBReader soon.)
I think the day is nearly over when people wonder why someone would buy an internet tablet instead of (hm-m, let’s see … ) a UMPC, a PSP, an OQO, a myLo, a LifeDrive or even an iPhone. And that’s the news I see in the Times’ brief.
* Full disclosure: Twenty years ago, Ivan and I were colleagues at CBS. Not only do I admire his writing and his brain, I like him personally. Ivan was one of the first to see the real potential in microcomputers. He was such an early adopter that the Smithsonian gratefully accepted the donation of his first small computer, an original Altair 8800b.
