Popularity of Nokia 770?
 

Does someone know how popular the N770 is?

How many units were sold?

Will it be mass market device , or will it end as an another toy for geeks?

According to analysts, less than 25000 units. The 770 will be more of a cult device, but the market will grow in coming years - see that other thread.

I would be VERY surprised if the number is that low.

You miss the third possibility: its future successor will be a mass market device.

I'd say the 770 will end up being the guinea pig for Nokia's first foray into the new Internet Tablet market. It has been greatly accepted by early adopters and will be known in the future as a "geek toy". However, it will also be known as the forerunner of Internet Tablet market (that is if Nokia continues its interest in the platform into the future). I don't know how successful the device has been in the consumer market, but knowing how Nokia comes out with several new mobile phones every year, that will not likely matter. The fact that Nokia underestimated demand for the 770 proves that people want such a device. The way I see it, Nokia should count themselves lucky more people didn't see the greater possibilities of the device as quickly as those of us did. It is now time for Nokia to follow through with their idea. Bring on the customer support, OS upgrades, and follow-up devices. Oh, and throw in a little marketing once you've got your supply issues straight.

no one I have showed it to has failed to be impressed. even non-geeks. problem is, it's too hard to get content on it. video has to be done a certain way, and windows movie maker thing won't do what's needed, pls files aren't supported, flash 6 is too old, not enough memory to handle complex web sites like gmail in full mode. non-geeks can't deal with working around these issues.

Ill say it once, and Ill say it again, the 770 suffered from extremely poor marketing. Non geeks loves devices like this. Look at how horrible the sidekick is but look how well it did on the market. WHY??? Marketing.

For some reason nokia felt that since their name was on the product it would fly out the door itself.

I mean, the avg person I ask about the 770 have no idea on earth what the heck it is, cause they haven't even heard of it.

ah, but it did fly out the door. it was sold out in many markets for months. which tells me that Nokia was very unsure of this device and didn't make nearly enough. had they marketed it and made a butload of them, they would literaly be everywhere, but with a lot of frustrated non-techie users who would not buy version 2

OK but is there really going to be a sucessor other than the Origami.
It's been about a year since the 770 was announced and it has sold better than expected. So WHEN is Nokia's sucessor going to be announced? I am waiting for the second generation but the Origami is sounding like a real threat. Lack of a new product by Nokia is going to rsult in loss of momentum and market share.

To be a successor, Nokia has to improve spec of 770.
All toys now have a lot of memory to be as music player, video player etc.
Nokia made a nice toy, but Nokia lost even charging indicator, supplied
us with funny bag and less accessories just to make it cheap.
Good thing, it is not closed unit like Pepper Pad and now we have
much more software even Pepper Pad sale started early...

it sold well... yes it did... To us. The techno geeks. But the problem here is that we only represent probably less than 1% of the complete market.

And they didn't fly out the door. I mean first off compusa only had like 3 units per store, how hard is it to sell 3 units.

It again comes down to marketing. The 770 is a great device with great possiblity, but if no one knows about it. It will remain a niche product, and soon will fade due to its not making enough money. Personally I would like to see the internet tablets expand and new versions made. But, with no followings expect for us, it won't be worth it to nokia. (example: NGage)

Nokia's successor has been announced in the form of a software upgrade with i.p. telephony...

The roadmap is pretty clear: the present 770 is a beta device for geeks, then later this year you'll have the next software, better adapted to non-geeks. If *that* one is successful, Nokia will carry on further developping the concept (as usual, probably: more memory and a faster processor only at first).

If Nokia were to actually market the 770, they would be nailed with class action lawsuits.

This is a Beta product. It lacks important functionality out of the box. As an experiment, I am sure it would be considered a success - it might even break even, which is no small feat!

Nokia is pretty good at thinking long-term. I would guess that their desire is to make another platform viable for late 2007 for mass market. I think that the biggest risk to Maemo is RIM regaining momentum after the Blackberry patent mess. That could spell a smaller potential market for the internet tablet.

The biggest strength they have is de-coupling the phone and AP from the device, which can fill a different niche than other toys out there. The open source aspect could help it make into uses not previously thought up. ...assuming the next gen doesn't see power/memory problems we have today!

It wouldn't take much to qualify as a second generation product.
I would be satisfied with a faster - 400mhz processor ,and about twice the memory

Without an announcement at CeBit of somethng by Nokia, Microsoft is going to run over the 770 and leave it as roadkill.

The pepper was dead when it came out because it had too few features and too high a price- you can buy a laptop for the same money. They still haven't brought out a second generation of their product and I don't think they will unless they are planning on a move to the origami platform as a Msoft partner.

Microsoft has been watching the market and has a pretty good idea of what it needs to offer to bring out a sucessfull product. The Origami is being positioned to be that product and Nokia has to move quickly to avoid gettng run over

Not to reignite the old hardware debate, but if they start cramming more into this thing, it'll rival a laptop in price - - no thanks! What I *do* think would be a marvellous idea is if they could possibly halve the internal storage to 32MB (big enough for your documents, etc) and use the other 32 for a swapfile. Would that make it more prone to failure to do the abundance of R/W activity? Ionno.

If they replaced the flash memory with normal RAM, the R/W failure would be out of the way. But, obviously, using RAM for a swapfile is kinda dumb: use RAM for -- well, RAM.

The best thing that could be done for the 770 is IMO still the complete removal of Nokia's Linux "distribution" from it and replacing it with something more lightweight, either Qtopia or GPE based. It would run circles around the original 770 with the same hardware. See the Zauri, or Siemens SimPad, the one with Linux installed.

um, maemo is GPE based.

Yes, but hardly lightweight, is it?

I would have thought that by now there would have been an alternative distribution for the 770, less glitzsy and more geared towards speed and general Linuxiness. Maybe a port from the OpenEmbedded project (althought that isn't without its flaws either)?

OpenEmbedded is what is used to build opie and gpe. And GPE will run on the 770, i've seen talk of it in #gpe in irc, don't think it's ready for prime time yet though.

You misunderstand. "Primetime" is what Nokia put on the 770: idiot-proof, tamper-proof, speed-proof.

Why not have a faster-than-light, geekoid distribution for those who want a snappy handheld without the funky borders? It's perhaps not for everyone, but it is right for some.

Has anyone succeeded in getting ARMedSlack to boot on a 770? With all the freedom granted to 770 users by Nokia I sure wish the OS was less closed off. There are a lot of components I would love to lop off of it as I don't use them.

I snickered at myself for suggesting more memory for use with a swap space but normal RAM is probably quite a bit more expensive than what's in there currently... I'm not sure about additional power consumption, etc. Is the internal memory vs. internal storage separate? (There are some great dissection pics out there which may answer this)

in the context of openembeded based systems, "primetime" means that you can install it without too much tinkreing, it will usualy continue to work after a suspend or reboot, and there's enouhg usefull apps working to be good for something more than testing buggy apps.

Talk about marketing. I live in Germany, and here even employees of electronics stores or cellphone stores usually have no clue about what a Nokia 770 is. One guy even told me "those things aren't sold in shops, you are supposed to buy one from the internet". Actually, another shop of the same chain had a 770 for sale.

I think, even though it has a quite straightforward GUI, the device is still too complicated for the average non-tech-person. I mean, hand it over to some unsuspecting subject and tell him (or her?) to set up a bluetooth connection to a cellphone.