http://www.eletroworld.cn/

just been checking the moses thread, so many it seems, more coming, I can't believe what's going on with "rover".

With all tihs activity in the MID area, how the hell could it hurt Nokia to confirm to a bunch of 3 year early adopter supporters that there will be a maemo 5 tablet in the n8x form factor, or not?

Or will it just kill the busiest this forum has been for a long time?...

n800 clone!
http://cgi.ebay.com/Mobile-Internet-...3A1%7C294%3A50

tbh

This could also be looked at from the opposite direction. PMPs are drifting into MID space feature-wise, traditionally having a pretty low price tag, see SmartQ, Viliv S5 and more to come. Soon this area will be crowded by cheap and capable devices. A next (real) Internet Tablet could have a hard time defending or gaining market share because of its supposedly higher price. Nokia's step in the phone direction is logical to me (a phone manufacturer sells phones after all). Nokia as a corporation doesn't care about 'Community', only some individuals working for Nokia do.

I've thought much about the N900/Rover in the last days. I don't need another phone nor do I sympathise with Nokia(won't ever forget the Bochum layoff).

Mer is the future and SmartQ 5 seems like a good candidate for a Mer lead-device

I'll keep my N800 for nostalgic reasons, though.

Independence ftw!

You're correct that just hardware supremacy is not enough. You need to add it something of perceived value on the service level. Millions of apps from Maemo repositories, Ovi/iTunes style content, geo/social mashups, you name it, the bottom line is you need something extra.

Also, diversifying your platform to different devices (from phone to sub-netbooks) to increase coverage and spread cost might help

Other devices have low prices for a reason. I remember reports about an unresponsive touch screen and bad wifi perfomance on the Smart Q5, for example. I also wonder if battery performance on these devices is what we're used to.

It's like with any consumer produkt: most people go for low price, but quite a few want quality, and the companies that deliver quality are not doing all that bad.

With that resolution, and windows CE, I am afraid that N800 clone is the last thing you can call this device.

I've just started to search for SmQ 5 info. It seems that those bugs are related to a hasty launch with an unfinished software.

The interesting thing is, that people from different directions are allready hacking the device so shortly after launch. So far Ubuntu, Mer, Android and WinCE are up and running.

So there seems to be enough potential to form a broad community supporting and improving the software side. Let's see, how it turns out. I've got my money ready to jump on the bandwagon lol

The trouble is that sometimes (especially in on-line sales) it's hard to make this obvious. On paper (=screen) all the specs look the same. You only see the difference in your hand, or worse, in actual day-to-day use. Not everybody takes the effort to go through forums and endless reviews to find out if there is a catch, what it is, etc. Brand helps, but if you say something that you either have or you don't (like iTunes) that's much harder to hide under the carpet then something as elusive as wifi performance.

You needn't make it obvious, it still works. At least a small percentage of consumers isn't stupid and will notice the difference.

Example:
My company offers two kinds of internet access products under two brand names. The cheap one is targeted at price-sensitive customers, the other one (much more expensive) is for those who expect quality. We don't, of course, even try to make obvious the weaknesses of the cheap product in the marketing material we have for the more expensive one.... The result would be a disaster, our competitors would be the first to point out that we ourselves don't believe in the quality of our products.

So we simply sell two products that have almost the same "data sheet quality" (speed, mailboxes, spamfilter, webspace) for very different prices. - Consumers do know. Those who need or want the better quality buy it. (Maybe they buy it because it's more expensive without knowing the details, who knows?)

Here in France, people are very often impressed by price.
Many times i heard "it's more expensive, so, it has to be better, and so i take this one"
But quality quite often doesn't come with higher price, very often, you just buy the same s**t with just a nicer packaging.

It seems to be quite different with Nokia. I just own 3 of their devices and very pleased by built quality.

Yaser 88 ... this awfull device may look like N800 ... but read the specs ... if Win C.E. is not bad, it cannot compete with Maemo ... and the screen resolution is just pityfull ...