Over at GigaOM, I see Om Malik repeating the belief that the Nokia Internet Tablets need to be phones. Same thing at stuff.tv.

Me, I buy the Nokia party line that you use your phone for some things and your NIT for others and they should complement each other. No reason to make the tablet do phone things.

As for that, I look forward to the day I keep cam calls going for hours, used more as visual IMing than visual phone calling.

And I look forward to the day ubiquitous WiFi enables me to access the internet without thinking about how to jack into it.

And if telecoms in the U.S. offered reasonably-priced data plans, maybe I'd be there already.

That makes me wonder what it would take to get a SIM card put into a future Internet Tablet. Answering that is easy -- the second a mobile-phone company wants one. Which seems completely unlikely.

But honestly, I don't really want my NIT to be a cellphone too.

On the other hand, I think it would be great if I could get a cellphone voice-and-data plan that enabled me to add a SIM-enabled NIT as a second device that just accessed the data plan. Sure, sure, you can BlueTooth to your phone now and that's easy, and enabling the NIT as a phone too would be trivial, but really why tether them or cross them? I'm happy to leave my phone as the phone and be able to take a call while I'm surfing. And what I really want to do is access the web from the car or the train and lots of other places where WiFi doesn't compare to cell-phone networks.

This isn't Nokia holding us back. That I understand. But it's nice after all to think about the day when sticking a SIM into a NIT is an option that makes sense.