Sorry, I should have been clearer.

Usually, most of the time, there is no contradiction between having a vibrant development community and having a mass-market product. In fact most of the time those two things go hand in hand.

But with maemo we've got the vibrant community without a mass market product, and it's unclear (at least to me) what happens next.

Is Nokia going to carry on making a "bare bones" Maemo product that tech enthusiasts can fill with their own favourite apps, or are they going to bring out a Maemo product with lots of high quality pre-installed apps, like Nokia phones have?


I totally agree, but it's difficult to see where the sales will come from if things don't change:

Phones - sell best

Media players - sell well

Mini-laptops - sell well

Consoles - sell well

Pocket computers without telephony - sell badly

Hmm, how many netbooks have a 3G modem soldered on-board? I think if they don't have 3G USB stick but appear on-board they are actually having a MiniPCI Express. Laptops or netbooks don't have WiFi soldered on-board either; its a MiniPCI Express card in almost all cases. You see soldered on-board rather on smaller embedded devices. Allowing the user to disconnect and connect a device takes significant amount of space over having it on-board without easy access for the end-user. Allowing the end-user this ability on a laptop is no problem. On a netbook this a bit more of a problem. On a smartphone this is a problem, and a smartphone falls in approx the same boat as a tablet in terms of size and portability, so you cannot expect every little part to be modular. You're just going to assume the end-user wants/needs certain hardware features. It isn't always possible to put off such on-board hardware. At least in the case of IGPs this is not the case, except when an other GPU is present. (Stock) BIOSes simply do not allow you to put the IGP off. Which costs a few W every hour. It'd surprise me if ARM boards would not allow you to put off on-board chips providing WLAN (802.11g) or WWAN (HSDPA) or at the very least allow you to enter PSM. So if you believe it costs extra money; yes, as does all the other hardware on your <fill in a device> which you might not use much or not at all. That it costs space; yes, ofcourse. Power, I'd say, if you won't use it, it won't use (much) power. From what I remember older Linux kernels had higher ticks and worse power saving modes, even on USB too, therefore less efficient.

In the case of Bluetooth, WWAN, and WLAN, at least, not in use is off. Idle power usage for the whole device is measured in mW. For OMAP3, it may very well be in single-digit mW—I'd love to hear more on this subject from Igor.

My interpretation of what he meant is that the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet was a unique device, that could have been the first of a new class of devices. But instead, from all appearances, it looks like Nokia is going to turn the tablets into just another iPhone clone.

@allnameswereout

I think there are too many exceptions to some of your conclusions. For every modular piece in a cell phone I can give you an example of something soldered on to a desktop motherboard. The reasons are usually case-by-case so they appear random, and that can sometimes make generalizing difficult.

Here's an exposed picture of the smallest stand-alone device that I own. Notice the modular microSD card and the modular battery. The iPhone doesn't have this. But with the buzz that's going around about Apple, AT&T and Verizon, I wouldn't be surprised if modular cell phone transceivers are less than a year away. The concept of modularity is dynamic. It expands and contracts based on different factors. Those are left for the reader. Making modular cellular RX-51's I leave for Nokia.

I want one of those BrentDC-style avatars, too!

Yeah, I was already bored with that. How do like my new one?

EDIT:

So as not to forget, here was my ever-so-brief, but memorable, previous avatar:


R.I.P. 1240878660 - 1240880460

Boys and girls, I'm not sure, but something might be happening. Look at this url:

http://maemo.org/api_refs/5.0/beta/

The time stamps of these directories are less than 5 hours old.

EDIT:

Yep, libhildon looks to have gone from 2.1.42 to 2.1.62. Crazy.

Very observant, daperl.

To take a page from the Classic Texrat lexicon: "Tee hee!"

Is it Tuesday already?