Or, alternatively, LET THE FLAME WARS BEGIN!

I think we should also pay attention to the difference with which Apple approached its new technology.

The multi-touch screen was brought to Steve Jobs as a computer interface, but it he re-oriented the project to be an interface for a phone instead.

• The contrast with existing phones is greater than it would be with tablets.
• There's a bigger market.
• Lack of third-party apps would be a much bigger flaw in a computer.

And in taking this approach, Apple was perceived as extending its expertise in getting the user experience right where everybody else gets it wrong (see every iPod-vs-other-MP3-players review).

Not: "30 percent better experience" but "a world apart from the alternatives."

No one thinks Apple's phone, music player or computers are the best hardware at a good price. Heck they're not even considered as being at a fair price. With all of them, you're paying for something other than the hardware (and, no, I'm not talking about marketing).

The Internet Tablets, on the other hand, have consistently delivered the best hardware at the lowest price in a package not matched by any other maker. Different approach to value.

schin007, it would be sooo much more readable if you used paragraph breaks and white space / blank lines once in awhile.

Sorry, I just couldn't bring my self to read it as is.

Yeah i understand. I did that initially. But the forum accepts only posts below 100000 characters and mine went to 1000233. SO had to reduce the spaces in between in fear that i will somehow lose the text.
I will copy and paste it into two different posts.

" You can't walk into a store and buy an IT for $200. They are still $399 and $479."

Come on be practical. You can get one for 250$( add another 50$ for 8 gig card) anywhere with overnight shipping. That is in comparison to Iphone which comes to 430$ with taxes.

" If I had to choose between the IT and an iPhone when I was shopping for a family member or a good friend. I couldn't in my rightmind gift an N800. I'd be asked for a gift receipt to return it within 24 hours."

Yeah you are right. It is hard for the newbie to adjust to the internettablets. But i feel they should be given a choice. Yeah everyone knows that apple makes good stuff which are easy to use. But there " are other options. Just because Microsoft has been thrown down our throats since childhood we can use it very easily. If i was given a mac i would find it extremely frustrating at first but if some one helped me initially i would definitely understand how it works and will start liking it later on. The point here is that everything is a little tough for the first time. yeah admittedly linux is lot more tougher than osX. But as the preaching goes "Give a man a fish and he will eat that day. But teach him how to fish he will eat all his life."
It is the same here. If you take the time and explain for may be one day your family member will have the knowledge on what the n800 is and what it can do. Then he can decide on his own. Options are always good.

" Sure it has divx.."

Come on be practical. You are good enough to understand that playing divx on a tablet takes significant horse power. Playing divx itself is a wonderful thing. Name any mobile device which can play divx. But atleast it can play an industry standard format. I hate the apple because it plays only a proprietery format. nothing else. Imagine downloading an avi/divx/flv file from the internet. what do you do? Go back home and convert it?? That is not being mobile. Mobile means when i download a file i should be able to see it immediatley not go home and convert it again. If that is the case i can as well go home and download it directly on my pc!! Yeah it cant play high resoulution divx videos. But if you really understand that it takes a lot of processing power to run those high resoultion videos then you should be able to live with what it can do. And talking about battery. WIth a wonderful widescreen and brilliant resolution you cant expect it to run forever. But you can always buy an accesory battery and run it for 4-5 hours more. Can you do that with an apple product. I mean iam serious... why do they cripple you like that??

" Sure it has apps like ScummVM but it can't even go full screen."

Personally i never used scummvm. But from what i see. The n800 has a 4.13 screen to apple's 3.5 screen . Even without full screen the viewing area should be more than the iphone. And there are hard ware buttons which logically should be a lot more better for gaming than touch screen buttons whithout haptic feedback.

"Sure it has a mozilla browser and flash support, but it loads so slowly"

Are you sure?? Because almost all tests i have seen seem to state that the n800 performs equally/better than the iphone. And of course if you disable flash they should be significantly faster than when it is enabled. Of course i would not do it. Flash is an integral part of the web 2.0 and the option of having it is really a breakthrough!! I dont see how it is a negative. Infact it shows that the n800 is far more advanced then the itouch.

CONTD...................................

"Sure it has email, but it barely functions with IMAP servers (and gmail)"
yeah i agree the inbuilt email sucks. But there are 3rd party which are also not that good. However i dont have any idea of the mail on iphone. But nokia will improve for sure.


" Sure it has music playback, but it only works with drag and drop directories."

So what is wrong with drag and drop? I mean seriously it is way better than the itunes. If you want to share a music folder with your friend just take out the memory card and that is all. No need to go back to your home and connect to the computer! I find it very convenient. I dont need any cables to carry everywhere. Almost all the laptops come with card readers and i just put my card and copy them on to my memory card. I will take memory card any time in comparison to itunes software. Please tell me what is the disadvantage of drag and drop??


" Sure it has Skype, but it doesn't support the BUILT IN front-facing camera"

YOu should understand that skype for linux supported video recently so it will take a little time. but video is supported by gizmo. Just look at the convenince of video calling anywhere. And then there are gtalk and skype for really cheap calling. Can iphone do any of these?? For that matter it cant even record just video and the most unbeleiveanle thing is that it can t copy and paste. How bad is that if your friend sends you a link?? or you need to post alink for reference?? good luck with that!! Having such a great support for voip is really nice> There again this is the first device which has such extensive support in a mobile device and that too with video.


"Sure its got a nice screen, but it has terrible tearing and no hardware acceleration."


The screen is the best in comparison to any mobile device. Iphone's screen is no where near. I realized that you have to zoom evertime for every page. And the most irritating thing i found was iputting text in a field after zooming. come on you just tap the box and enter stuff. I tried to do this on an apple itouch and it was very very irritating.


" Tell me one thing it does very well? Nothing It gets by on the web, thats about
it."

The iphone can do only onething well kinetic scrolling. Then there is the eyecandy which looks good. Web browsing is not great as you need to keep on tapping and zooming.
Another thing is the built in stand. What a convenience it is!! Where as you should always handle the iphone with your hands. Not always convenient.


" Music and Video - iPhone"

Can you say what the iphone can do better than the n800. Consider the 3rd party music players like kaju(A2dp) and ukmp and media center(with mplayer) and the upcoming canola.
One major major thing is the lack of internet radio and fm radio. I guess that comes under music. Seriously did you ever use internet radio. It is the best use fo the internet tablet. It is like having a hundred gigs at your disposal. i listen to internet radio which is free and then if i like a song i just download it. INternet radio itself beats the iphone. I use it to to stream radio via my phone using bluetooth.
If you never used it you please do. Then you may realise how big a deal it is. One good site is shoutcast.com. And can you explain why apple doesnt include fm radio in any of their devices?? Let me explain this they just want people to buy more and more songs from the itunes. I mean even the tiniest devices made by even lg or samsung or any other companies has an inbuilt fm tuner. It is so convenient to listen to fm stations. The internet tablets are good for music. And coming to videos. The iphone can play just the basic formats nothing more than that. I can just put an 800mb file dvd rip on my n800 and it plays easily. Can you do that??
And then there is the torrent client called transmission. I just start a torrent and download the album direct to my n800. that is really great. Sure that is not legal. But that is how 99% of us on the internet are. Can you do that?


"Email - iPhone" THe n800 has a bad email client. I will agree if the iphone,s email client is good enough and it should be.


"You Tube - iPhone" - Strongly disagree.


Most of the videos i see are never converted to the mobile website. WIth os 2008 youtube is really really good. Then there are the built in speakers. Generally when we show of you tube videos i use the speakers to listen to the sound. That is the best part- stereo speakers. And i reallly hate it when it has to be again re-encoded to another format just for another device. Give me a break. I will definitely take the original youtube website any day in comparision to the re-encoded ones. Just imagine another company making another device and youtube encoding for that again. Come on if you can make your device to work with the web version .... good. If not just get out there and improve your product dont start changing the standard just for that. A good example is all those video formats over there. In the long run it is the customers which lose because of these formats. Nokia never tries to put a format down the customers throat. WIth nokia there is always a choice. That i feel is morally and ethicallly right.


"Mapping - iPhone (debatable if you can actually figure out Maemo Mapper)"


Are you kidding me?? With 50$ you can connect to an actual gps module. There again that is choice. Compared to none with the iphone. The n800 has a myraid of options here with maemo mapper, nokia maps, wayfinder if you want real gps. Here again you have choice.


Photo Viewing - iPhone"

- Here again the n800's screen is far better and with the
help of the upcoming canola and other apps like the media center it is definitely comparable with the n800. of course it doesnt have a 2 mega pixel camera. Yeah it definietly needs a good camere.

Web Browser- Saying that the iphone"s web browser is better than the n800's is a joke. Nuff said.


Yeah i agree that at this point the general consensus is that iphone is easy to use. But i believe in choice. I have educated my friends by telling them what the n800 can do for its price and about 7 of my friends have brought the n800. They are total noobs. They found it a little irritating at first but after some days they can never leave it alone> The most important thing is choice. DOnt always think that
the iphone is the best option. Present the choices and explain and let them chooose. This is what i want to achieve from my post.

There's one thing Nokia Tablet users can do that iPhone users can't.

Shut the #*$&*# up.

(QED.)

I think it would be more constructive to look at the things that work well on the iStuff and use those to improve the tablet.

The tablet has a lot of advantages over iStuff. I won't repeat those here, because it's more constructive to think about the areas that could use improvement. There are some things I think the tablet community could learn from the iStuff:

Out-of-box matters
This is mostly Nokia's problem. The tablet's weak OOB performance hurts Nokia financially, and only Nokia can fix it. This only hurts existing owners if weak sales cause Nokia to abandon Maemo.

The next four deal with HCI, an area in which Apple excels:

A handheld device is not a small desktop device
Apple does not try to force a desktop paradigm onto a handheld device. They thought about how people use these devices from the ground up, and designed an interface that works well for that use. Right now it's really impressive, but in 5 years someone (maybe Apple, maybe someone here, maybe someone else) will have thought up something even better.

Screen real estate matters
This is closely related to the first one. Every application is full-screen. There are no scroll bars. These are things that are so obvious in retrospect that it's hard to go back to the old way of doing things.

Intuition matters
Drag-scrolling and kinetic-scrolling work because they make intuitive sense. So does tapping a big calculator picture and seeing a calculator. So does an arrow that points left causing the view to pan to the left. No one likes frustration.

Form factor matters.
The n810 is a big step in the right direction. People like things that are light, easily pocketable, and made up of mostly screen. And looking good is always good for sales.

Defending the past can be dull and tedious. It's a lot more fun to envision the future, and try to realize that vision.

It's OK to learn from the competition. Apples sure does. Why do you think they're opening up the iStuff to 3rd party developers?

I think the iTablet project is a great example of this. It started out by replicating iStuff functionality. But it's evolving to surpass it.

Agreed on all points, really, though less so on intuition.
Regarding A handheld device is not a small desktop device, which overlaps Screen real estate matters anyway, I think the Hildon idea of no overlapping windows is really a good one. And I think full-screen apps should be default. But that said, I think the ability to have some non-app stuff on-screen is really good. I feel that a lot of space is wasted on the N800 in non-full-screen mode. It should take off just the left side, or just the top, but not all 4 sides, as it does now.
Let me add:
Orientation should work
If desktops can do it, why can't my N800, where it's so much easier to rotate between portrait and landscape? Yet it's left to apps to support, so very few do support it. And, in the N900, a sensor for it would sure be nice.
We need multi-touch
Not sure what to do with multi-touch per se, aside from finger-painting software. But it enables resting your hand on the screen and still using a stylus, enabling you to write on the left half of the screen.

But we should also learn from the iStuff disadvantages:
Hardware buttons are good
But they could stand to be a lot better than their current state.

what apple should do.....

make it more open.
Dont charge exorbitant prices for the respective hardware.
Add additional features like fm radio, internet radio, user replcable battery, and good bluettooth connectivity with a2dp.
And i personally hate jobs releasing a product and saying that so and so is the most advanced technology.


All these are far more important to me than the os.,which at the most will take me a couple of days to master.