sure.
seriously, i know i could be missing something important here.

but:
which of those points is really exciting from your perspective? (and: what is your perspective?)

Why, exactly, do you care? I mean, as long as they keep the NIT product line going, why are you thankful that Maemo wont get the resources necessary to develop it more fully into a phone OS, and thus a great deal more investment/priority throughout the company as a whole, any time soon?

As long as the NIT product line keeps being developed and supported, why do you care at all what other platforms they put Maemo on?

It wasn't designed to be a phone OS, and if it was made into one then operator demands, UI requirements due to form factor etc would ruin it: http://jaaksi.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_archive.html

Besides, with SIP, Jingle and Skype already working well and WiMax coming, who cares if it can make GSM calls?

Khertan,

This is a very nice app. Good beginning for sure! Since Erminig may no longer be supported, I have been 'in the market' so to speak for an app that will sync with Google. This worked well on the first go, but it does crash, alas. A reboot will get it going again, but it isn't stable. I'll bet you knew that, but I wanted to give you some feedback and encouragement.

So thanks for tackling this and please keep up the good work!

Neither was OS X though, and that's been adapted to the iPhone. I agree it's a surprisingly big job to do something like that, and it may take a while to do, but it can be done.

A Symbian tablet phone would be quicker to make of course, and that's what Nokia are doing (in fact they already did it with the 7710 back in 2004) but it might be worth at least experimenting with a Maemo tablet phone.


People who want to connect to the internet while on the move without having to carry a separate phone?

Wimax is a total red herring.

If it ever does go mainstream, Wimax is going to take many many years to spread around the world. 2G, 2.5G, 3G and 3.5G are already here though, and between them they cover practically every inhabited area you're likely to visit. In the case of 3.5G it already provides speeds similar to Wimax.

I have a 3.5G phone which works in practically every city I go to, and it costs 10 euros a month for unlimited data access. I very much doubt Wimax will ever be so cheap or have such wide coverage.

Another reason for phone tablets is that the tablets perhaps won't take off until there is at least one phone model. A lot of people I know are very interested in the tablets but won't touch them until they are phones as well, because they don't want to carry two devices.

A lot of shops won't carry the tablets because they're not phones, even though they're perfectly willing to carry very similar devices like the Nokia E90 which are phones.

Travelling in Africa for the past month has really opened my eyes to the phone argument. Nearly nowhere I go has decent wifi coverage but most places have excellent edge to 3.5g coverage. More than once I have wished that my N810 had a sim slot.

Am I missing something? Why not just use bluetooth and your phone?

If you travel a lot for extended periods the last thing you want is to carry two devices in your pocket. Add a digital camera and it becomes unmanageable. Then add all the chargers, keyboard, mouse, and batteries, etc... and you begin to see why experienced travellers crave a multipurpose devise that is small. I no longer take my laptop because of security, theft and heft. I'm hoping some vendor (perferably Nokia) can combine a NIT with phone and a decent 10mp camera with 2 sdhc slots.

Well, to be honest, "add the digicam and it becomes unmanageable" is taken care of with high-end cameraphones these days...

Myself, I don't want the tablets combined with a phone; I just want a GSM radio. I'd like a N800 with GSM (+3G, of course) connectivity, and a data-only plan. I'll carry a phone when I want a phone, and use VoIP the rest of the time; but for now, I'd find the combination of WWAN without the uncertainty of WiMAX highly attractive.

But long-term, I think WiMAX and/or LTE tablet variants will be satisfactory; I think Nokia really is decently on top of the game there, and I think keeping voice-usage out of the tablets is a good idea. While the GSM-based idea would be nice (and likely, if the ITs had been started two years before), the focus of resources on the longer-term goal is probably wise.

It's not a question of what you want, it's a question of how the tablets are going to survive as a viable product.

Nokia is only going to carry on with this project if people eventually buy the tablets in large numbers (and by Nokia standards that means millions or tens of millions every single year).

People are only going to buy the tablets in such numbers if they have a built-in phone.

If the tablets don't become available with a built-in phone (not just data but voice too), then they're dead in the long term.


For the same reason most people don't use separate phones and cameras.


3.5G networks are here NOW. Not one or two or give years time but now.

We already have the "walkaround web" on 3G and 3.5G networks, not just in a tiny number of cities but worldwide. It's absolutely crazy NOT to have a tablet that uses 3.5G.

I just took a train journey across Finland and according to my phone there were 3.5G networks at the heart of every town, with 3G around those and 2.5G or 2G all the way in between. I didn't drop a connection except in tunnels. The entire country is covered, I could access the internet wherever I was, and often at multi-megabit speeds.

Even if you think Wimax is going to be big in the future, why not have 3.5G right now? What would be the harm?

But I don't think Wimax will be big in the future.

Given that 3.5G networks are already in place in many countries and being built in all the rest, probably to be replaced by 4G within the next few years, and prices of data are tumbling all the time... why would anyone start using Wimax instead?

I've heard people claim Wimax is cheaper but the prices I've heard for Wimax so far are actually several times more expensive than what I already pay for 3.5G.

From where I am, Wimax seems to be the betamax of the wireless networking world. There's nothing technically wrong with it, but another product has already got there first.