Three years ago, the Nokia Internet Tablet was revolutionary: it had a screen wide enough to display a web page, it cost way less than you’d expect, it was meant for carrying around in a way that no laptop/notebook ever had been. WiFi was engendering the walkaround web.
Add a webcam, GPS, keyboard; make it faster, more reliable; keep churning away at the migration of free-libre-open-source software. Three years down the road and the tablet team has not stopped pushing the envelope.
But is Nokia’s tablet revolutionary anymore?
My son’s friend does as much or more with his iPod Touch (16GB model for $269.99) [1], — even though it is more restricted in what it can do.
Both Apple’s and Nokia’s tablets forgo disk drives, emphasizing the screen. But the the iPod touch and its progenitor, the iPhone, instantly persuade you that a keyboard is unneeded and unnecessary. The media aspects — video and YouTube video, music and accessing music via the web — push other considerations aside: the idea that the lame telco phones suffice for the walkaround web couldn’t be more effectively (or contemptuously) dismissed.
Contrary to the optimistic predictions, ubiquitous and free WiFi hasn’t materialized yet. For now, the walkaround web depends on a tablet screen and a data-cellphone connection. That’s where the iPhone is situated, not the Internet Tablet, and by its sales figures you have to concede that bundling the connection with the screen appeals to more people than separating them.
I’m reminded of the quote from a French revolutionary leader [2], “There go the people. I must follow them. I am their leader.”
Um, the people are heading off in another direction.
Are we going with them? And if so, what is necessary for the Nokia Internet Tablet to remain in the forefront of the tablet revolution?
Dropping the price would keep it there. (For a while, anyway.) Some people have argued the interface ought to abandon the computer GUI heritage and adopt a big-graphic Apple-like approach. You know you’ll see phone companies offering some Apple-influenced devices soon.
And there’s the phone.
Some while back, I wished for an impossibility — a slot in the NIT for a SIM card, so it could connect via a telco data plan. Why not just make it a phone then, a la the iPhone? I don’t know. I guess I want it to be a tablet, not a phone, unless I’m using a voip connection.
Subconciously, I must have accepted the argument that Nokia is approaching the iPhone feature-set from two directions — smart phones that would become more and more computery, and the Internet Tablet, which would be always a complement to (and not a replacement for) a cellphone.
But without ubiquitous online access, the NIT just gives us the semi-revolutionary walk-around-the-office-or-home-only web. So, one way or another, that has to change. Maybe it means we’ll see a phone added to the NIT. Or phone/NIT bundles from the carriers. Or WiFi-hotspot/NIT bundles.
Unless it gives me the web everywhere, the NIT falls into the merely convenient and not revolutionary category.
Of course, there is one way we’re still participating in revolutionary activity. That’s via the FLOSS/Linux connection. The keyboard on the N810 may be a step backward from the perspective of the interface, but it greatly simplifies using a ported Linux-desktop app.
And that’s a big deal. Partly because it ensures an inexhaustible supply of software. And underlying the web and our incarnation of it, the walkaround web, is our understanding that it has flourished because of the open nature of that earlier revolution.
Whereas “open” is not a word that appears in frequent proximity of “Apple.” The iPhone is engendering what we might term a Disney revolution, one in which the benefits accrue mostly to one company (which provides more entertaining or novel experiences to us customers than we got before).
When you see Nokia giving its $800-million investment in Symbion to an open-source foundation, you know that it is acting in its own financial interests. Nothing else could explain such sums. The tablet/phone OS field is weighted in favor of Apple and Microsoft and Google, and so Nokia is looking around to see who its friends are.
That would be us.
We’re Nokia’s friends. Us, the Maemo community, the FLOSS community, the Linux believers.
The revolutionary mob, as it were.
I believe the Nokia tablet is going to thrive in direct proportion to our community’s success in promoting/extending/liberating Maemo. Because Nokia may not ever release a $100 NIT with a SIM-card slot, but some enterprising Asian manufacturer likely will. And running Maemo on all those Microsoft-spec’d UMPC’s is going to bring even more people into the fold who are interested in tablet-sized apps working better. Every improvement developed on the outside will benefit the Internet Tablets that Nokia makes, and a larger pool of tablet users (especially Maemo tablet users) means a larger potential audience for Nokia to sell to.
And maybe the N810’s built-in GPS and cam calling will finally get the attention it deserves.
So I’m looking forward to the meeting in Berlin next month. Will it be a revolutionary congress that dissolves into infighting and factions? Or one that presses forward to spread the revolution?
Every time I mention the Nokia Internet Tablets — on the web or in conversation — I always describe them as running “a full Debian Linux (modified to be aware of the hardware keys).” I used to say “virtual keyboard and hardware keys” but the N810 obviates that.
This passes the truth-in-advertising test, I think. But it’s not one-hundred percent true.
Sure you can take just about any Linux application and compile it so that you get something that runs on a NIT. This screenshot of the particularly idiosyncratic font-creation program Fontforge running on my N810 is proof enough for me.
Even if some apps are slow or not really suited to a tablet, I am generally tempted to say you can do anything on a NIT that you need to do on a computer.
Except you can’t print.
Can’t print out that email with the address and time of the meeting. Can’t print that web page with the neat info. Can’t print out the short notes entered on the train coming in to work. Can’t print out that sketch of the new design to hand to your wife.
Supporting every printer imaginable — OK, it’s not something I want to ask for. I think a “full” Linux ought to, but I’m pragmatic enough to know that’s a fool’s errand.
It would be nice if some apps could print to a generic inkjet or Postscript device.
See, sometimes I want to surf away from my desk, on the walkaround web.
And sometimes I want to walk around with a piece of paper in my hand.
I think maybe I mistitled the two posts I wrote recently about setting up a environment for internet tablet software development. No one read them. And maybe that’s because people don’t realize what they’re about.
The point of these posts and the thread started by BOFH and contributed to by OSEmuTech, Run Linux on top of Windows, without a virtual machine, is that you don’t have to have a Linux computer — or a dual-boot Linux, or Linux running on a virtual machine — in order to write and test applications for the Nokia Internet Tablets.
And that seems to me to be newsworthy.
So I’m repeating myself by posting again, but this time under a more appropriate heading.
Point: You can easily install andLinux on your Windows computer. Took me all of five minutes.
Point: What you don’t get with this (to quote the andLinux FAQ) is:
another desktop
the bench of applications that usually ship with Linux distributions (you have to fetch whatever you want)
a printer driver
trouble with further drivers
Point: You can run Linux apps side-by-side with your Windows apps, and use the Windows desktop for all the file-management stuff you already know how to do. And use your Windows printer drivers.
This is way cool, and I think we should make a big thing of it!
Since the internet tablets have an ARM processor (and not an x86-based cpu the way desktops and laptops do), you need to be able to write an app for the NIT, see how it looks while you’re on your own computer, and make a version that will run on a NIT.
So you install Scratchbox and Maemo 4.0.1 to do that. Pete Savage has written a full step-by-step how-to that tells you each thing you need to do. Even I, a perennial Linux tourist (and never a resident), managed it on my first try.
I’m going to repeat myself again: This is way cool! I definitely think we should make a big thing of it!
This screen capture shows the example application from Pete Savage’s how-to on getting Scratchbox working to compile and test software for the Nokia N800. A Maemo development environment, in other words.
Being one man’s continuing quest for happiness despite years of unfulfillment
I’ve been using computers a long time (don’t ask) and using microcomputers long before Microsoft even sold an OS. I was a DOS guy before I could afford a Macintosh, though I was using Macs at work starting back in 1985. And I happily benefitted from the Mac’s strength in desktop publishing software for more than a decade.
When I re-oriented my publishing career towards XML and e-books in 1999, I was forced to be a dual-platform guy. There just weren’t any XML tools on the Mac, so I bought a cheapo PC and moved back and forth between my two computers depending on the task.
As I used XML more and my Mac grew ever more gray-bearded, I started buying new programs for the PC instead of for the Mac. This was a huge emotional issue. Where the dollars go, there follows the heart (at least in electronics). Gradually I was transformed from a full-blown Mac enthusiast (and off-hours tech support for various family members long-distance) into a full-time WinXP user. It helped that my job now supplied me with a laptop that I carried from Manhattan office to home office (where I work two days a week) to out-of-state offices every week or three.
When the replacement for XP — then known as Longhorn, now as Vista — first raised its head, I found myself unable to accept the transition. Microsoft wanted me to pay more for the OS than I thought I should pay for the computer itself. And forget Apple. That was a company everyone agreed was the next Polaroid, Xerox and Kodak combined, destined never to regain financial security or market strength.*
I figured then that my next OS would be Linux.
I won’t go into my beliefs regarding open software, copyright and monopolies. Suffice to say that I’m an extremist. Probably many of you here at ITT have followed the same path towards the sanity of open software (maybe not as far as I). But that pushed me towards Linux, too, of course. Continue reading ‘Me and Linux, round 4 and a half’
Shortly after the first internet tablet was announced but months before it was released, Nokia indicated that language support would not extend to Asian languges for space reasons. The OS needed to be trimmer.
That decision was perfectly understandable.
I’m sure many users will cheer the arrival of CJK capability. Anyway, the speakers of Chinese, Japanese and Korean.
As it happens, the language I personally am most interested in is Khmer (Cambodian). There aren’t a lot of people who speak Khmer and probably the market for internet tablets in Cambodia is too small to be bothered with.
That’s probably true of a hundred other languages, however.
While I’d like to be able to use my NIT to do everything any Linux computer can do, again I see the logic that that’s not really one of the essential design goals of the internet tablets.
But being able to display most any web page is.
And if there are huge swaths of Unicode that can’t be displayed on an internet tablet screen, that’s a big asterisk that needs to be placed next to “internet” in the device name, with a footnote specifying “except in countries lacking Western or Chinese-ideograph-based scripts.”
Unicode, internationalization, combining and displaying characters in complex scripts like Khmer (in which sometimes letters stack and the order the letters display isn’t always the order in which they’re keyed) or Indic languages — this isn’t really optional if one is making a device to display pages on the internet. It’s required. IMO.
Photo from Karoliina Salminen’s blog of the Hildon UI running on a laptop computer at way beyond 800×480. This is just a teaser of what is coming from Lucas Rocha, she notes.
Hm-m. This means future generations of internet tablets can be freed from the hardware specifics of the Nokia 770. (I changed “internet tablets” to lower-case, because I got to thinking how a UMPC might be dual-bootable, plus there’s that H9 UMPC we heard about earlier in the week.) Nokia could release a next-gen tablet with such a different spec sheet that the 770’s end-of-life could be extended as as the low-end, lowest-cost (and more restricted) model.
I wonder too if this doesn’t lead to overlapping and smaller-than-full-size windows in Hildon too, an in-no-way-belovedlimitation of the current UI.
Maemo.org just announced the Nokia N800 Developer Device Program where selected open-source developers can purchase the new Nokia N800 for only $99 Euros (limited to 500 devices).
Hello,
Nokia is launching a Developer Device Program to provide
open source developers with Nokia N800 Internet Tablets at
a discount. Maemo.org will be providing 500 devices at a
price of 99 Euros per device to selected open source
developers. Eligible developers will be provided a
discount code to be used at the Nokia N800 online shop.
Please visit http://www.maemo.org/ for details.
On behalf of the maemo team,
Ferenc
The SDK for Maemo 3.0 ‘Bora’ has also been released for the developers. Some of the major changes are as follows:
New improved maemo-installer script that makes installing the maemo 3.0 SDK effortless.
New libraries to provide access to terminal features: Camera, Hildon input methods, Address book, UPNP, Alarms, GPS, and more
New Single Click Application Installation feature is supported in Nokia N800.
SDK rootstraps for both ARMEL and i386 architectures that support software development for Nokia N800 Internet Tablet and OS 2007.
Updated documentation: porting guide, maemo tutorial, updated API documentation, new how-to documents to cover features like Nokia N800 Camera, Alarm interface and more.
OK, I know it sounds early, considering that I haven’t yet installed or used IT 2006, the new OS for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. I don’t know what it really does or doesn’t do well. But I’ve already started forming my wish list for the next OS release.
My two biggest frustrations with the 770 are fairly personal and one of them is so personal as to be idiosyncratic. But they both deal with the unrealized potential of the 770 for note-taking and organization.
Btw, I don’t want the 770 to be a PIM replacement, though clearly lots of other folk do. Phone numbers, addresses, alarm reminders — I’m happy enough with those functions in my cell phone.
But note taking is a whole ‘nother category.
No one believes tapping into Notes or an editor like AbiWord is fast enough to make notes while you’re thinking or in a meeting. And don’t even mention BT keyboards — I do my best thinking on the twenty-minute walk between work and the train station.
I’ve been exploring use of the GTD system propounded by David Allen in his book Getting Things Done, and despite my highly electronified state, I’m heavily dependent on scribbling things on 3×5 cards. No other way to get so much information down quickly enough.
But I can’t use the handwriting recognition engine in the Nokia 770 because it just doesn’t work. (”Adequate” is a failing grade here.)
The screen resolution of the 770 is 225 pixels per inch — about five times that of the UMPC and most laptops. It’s so high that it seems ideal for actually being able to decipher handwriting and translate scribbles into keystrokes.
I urge Nokia to license the PhatWare HWR engine used in Calligrapher and PenOffice and use it instead of their current feeble software. I really would use Notes then for just what it’s supposed to be, to jot down quick notes.
As for my other wish: Like others, I’m wanting more capability out of Opera. But in my case, giving me a complete desktop Opera 9.0 wouldn’t satisfy me.
That’s because I like to use a TiddlyWiki-based micro-content wiki called MonkeyGTD. (Jeremy Ruston wrote TW, and Simon Baird customized it to MonkeyGTD.) TW and its derivants are single-html-page wikis, whose “tiddlies” correspond to pages in a standard wiki and which typically are short entries rather than the full-blown kinds of things you want and expect from a full page. A TiddlyWiki is meant to be stored locally and is perfect for tracking lots of cross-linked notes. All the programming in TW is done in Javascript.
My problem is that Opera won’t save changes you make within it to an html file, even one stored locally. (A modification lets you do this through Java on a desktop machine with Opera.) So I’m ready for a different browser, and if Nokia doesn’t supply it, I’d like to be able to remove Opera and free up that space for a browser that can do what I need.
Being able to quickly make notes with a viable HWR application and to consult, add to and check off all the things I need to do in a small browser-based GTD application — these are how I’d like to make the 770 work for me. Can we get those in the next go-around, please?
The new version of Internet Tablet 2006 OS has passed from beta to release. Don’t know what date that was official, but it had been promised for the end of the second quarter, which was Friday. I consider anything before start of business today, Monday, as being on-time, so congratulations are in order for Ari Jaaksi and his crew.
The big news of this second major OS release for the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet is of course the capability to make VoIP calls and to use Nokia-supplied instant messaging, both via Google Talk. Users of the beta have noted faster, more reliable operation in this release as well. A large “finger” keyboard for easier input is a notable addition.
We heard about it from Ari Jaaksi’s blog, which includes five screen captures and a pointer to tableteer.nokia.com, a 770-specialized site that provides visitors who arrive there on a 770 with special content (you get the regular Nokia 770 page with other computers). It is oriented towards new users, at least at present, with guidance on how to take advantage of the 770’s capabilities.
Btw, there’s a new Flash animation showing off the 770 at Nokia.com.
