Originally Posted by Master of Gizmo (Post 290416)

Are you aware that nokia selected an ebook reader as one of the fremantle stars?

Originally Posted by ragnar (Post 290367)

OQO is a really beautiful piece of hardware. But when you try to cram all the HW specs you can come up with into one small package, you currently end up with a apprx. 1000 dollar piece that isn't particularly portable or elegant. Think Sony Vaio for a bulkier example. It's a really "nasty" (although I think of it as a really interesting) tradeoff between size, performance and price. A bit like speed, quality and price in SW development: you can have two of them, but not all of them.

Now, hardware is developing all the time. In a few years hardware specs that many have mentioned here become reality in reasonable prices. Minituarization isn't cheap, and it takes some time, that's why they'll always be a couple of years behind the non-minituarized versions. I think the real issue is that they will always be "slower". Trying to run what people run on their "fast" computers as such on "slow" computers - it's all relative - will make it feel slow.

Originally Posted by qgil (Post 290397)

"Voters: 60."

I alone have been asked more than 60 times "when are you going to put a phone on that thing"?.

Originally Posted by chlettn (Post 290193)

And really, as ragnar mentioned - if devices with 4.1" screens would be thing customers desire, there would be tons more of that sort. I don't see that. And that Nokia is apparently moving away from that size is really telling enough.

Originally Posted by Dr Tran (Post 289677)

http://www.mobilecrunch.com/2009/05/...s-next-tablet/

Well, we already knew most of the specs already, but there's a bit of new info (if not merge with an old N900 thread)

N900 will have GSM radios and triband 3G with support for T-Mobile.
A full Firefox3 browser
5MP CZ cam, lens cover, LEDx2 flash, 800x480 video

Dates:
* T-Mobile International: July 2009
* T-Mobile USA: August/September 2009
* Middle East, Asia, South-East Asian Pacific: July 2009
* Europe: October 2009

Originally Posted by ragnar (Post 290411)

Best practice is to take the entire population of potential consumers - certainly including the current users - and to test amongst them as a whole. The dpad discussion has been discussed to death, but your assumption in this case is simply not correct. Naturally the results of any dpad study also depend on the hardware and the SW running in that hardware. It's about what kind of user experience we want to provide to the users.

Originally Posted by fms (Post 290404)

On the contrary, recent discussion threads show that we do know what we want.

Originally Posted by fms (Post 290404)

"100 bloggers is not a market" is a common argument used to blow off any ideas of user participation in development process. It is, of course, true that 100 people do not represent the whole market. Thus, blindly following what these people say would be unwise. Nevertheless, when you have got 100 people actively using your product on the daily basis, you should at least listen to what these people have to say about the product. They are essentially testing your product for free, finding new use cases and optimal device configurations. Why not use their experience as one of input components during device design is not clear to me.

Originally Posted by fms (Post 290404)

For example, when active 100 users are telling you that they want a dpad, the chances are pretty high that the remaining N million potential users will also want dpads.