The Mobile Web Tablet

My newly purchased Nokia N800 web tablet together with, a somewhat larger, Apple bluetooth keyboard became my setup for the day during the Hubbub-conference in Stockholm yesterday.

I tried live blogging during the presentations but gave up. Partly because I didn’t really get up to speed with the WordPress blogpost editor in the browser on the N800 and partly because the Jaiku backchannel for the conference consumed most of my attention.

All in all, the N800 + BT keyboard combo worked fine. I mistyped some Jaikus (like this one), but could take notes without problems.

So, what about the conference itself?

It was arranged by nuStart, describing themselves this way:

nuStart was established by aspiring entrepreneurs from the National University of Singapore (NUS) who are on a one year internship program in various start-up companies in Stockholm. The program is a collaboration between NUS and Royal Institute of Technology (Kungliga Tekniska h??gskolan, KTH).

The conference was free and open for everyone. It gave a good overview of Stockholm startups, especially the ones coming from KTH. Add to that industry insights from veterans such as Ola Ahlvarsson and Hjalmar Winblad and you get a pretty good mix of content.

A big thanks to all the Hubbub-people for arranging the conference. Pictures from the conference are here. More here.

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Got myself a true mobile web tablet yesterday: a Nokia N800. Let’s see if it will replace my Sony Ericsson/UIQ + Opera Mini-combo for doing all that micro-surfing to kill off dull moments throughout the day. Time will tell.

First impression: a much better device than the Nokia 770, which was a typical 1.0 showing great promises but failing to live up to them. Can’t say that the N800 is a high performer but it’s certainly faster than the 770.

Also got myself an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard to use with the N800, my Macbook and whatever needs a keyboard and supports Bluetooth HID. Will try it out today at the Hubbub conference.

(I’m also considering buying the QNAP TS-209. This is a small linux machine whos primary purpose is storage, but it also has a MySQL-server, a web server and a few other goodies running on it. Together with my Macbook, that’s two linux devices that will make my life a Microsoft-free zone.

Linux might never conquer the desktop, but it might very well take over everything else.)

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Platform battles… aren’t they fun?

Actually, they’re not. They keep a lot of innovation from happening. Will Google’s move to launch the alliance make the platform battle finish sooner than it otherwise would? Probably not. From that perspective, the Open Handset Alliance was a disappointment.

If you expected a cool device from Google, you should be also disappointed. What we got was yet another mobile linux initiative. Problem is, there are many mobile linux alliances out there, we don’t need another one.

It makes sense for a company like Google not to start building devices. As I wrote before, Nokia pumps out 11 phones per second and distributes them worldwide. They’ve probably sold a couple of hundred phones before you’ve finished reading this blog post. Feel like competing with that?

If it takes you one hour to decide, they’ve sold 40’000 devices.

Still feel like competing with that?

I didn’t think so.

No, Google is a software company and should remain a software company. Any software company that survives for some time becomes a platform company. Any platform company that survives for some time becomes an OS company. Maybe that’s where Google is today.

If anything good comes out of this, that would be a set of java applications or maybe even a java framework on top of MIDP. Can we hope for that? On November the 12th maybe we’ll know. Until then, disappointment is the word I’ll use to describe what Google launched.

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…and it’s a… web page?

With… robots. And a dog.

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This small notebook with a 7″ inch screen is yet another sign of how there’s opportunity in the black hole of portables: the market between the mobile phone (<3 inch displays) and the laptop (>10 inch displays). The market of web tablets:

It’s not a laptop. It’s not a notebook. It’s not a ultra mobile PC (UMPC). It’s everything above.

Linux seems to be the OS of choice for these devices. Let’s just hope there’s not going to be too many flavors of it. Developers need one and only one platform.

Photos of the Asus EEE can be found here

You can click your way through screendumps of the interface here.

Here’s a video of someone unpacking and booting up the device.

If you live in Sweden, you can order one here.

As Web Worker Daily has noted, there are now three quite interesting linux boxes out there. The EEE, the Nokia N***-series and the gPC (which is a sub-$200 desktop computer).

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Your OpenSocial network.

It’s Google and partners against Facebook (and Microsoft) now.

The address book in your mobile phone is a very simple social networking application that has remained basically unchanged since it first arrived. Adding OpenSocial to the Google Phone might bring some innovation to this application (which probably is amongst the most used applications in the world). Will be interesting to see what Google comes up with.

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Spent the afternoon at the Daytona Session here in Stockholm. A mini-conference focusing on the future of the internet. One of the speakers was Stefan Waldeck from Yahoo! Sweden. He talked about mobile (which by the way was a common theme amongst the speakers – seems that’s where the future of the web is) and mentioned that the Yahoo! Go Mobile client will soon be preinstalled in available for (?) more than 200 devices from all the five major device manufacturers.

Sounds like news to me. At least I’ve missed it.

I wonder what the deal is between Yahoo! and the manufacturers. A not too wild guess would be revenue sharing of ads shown in the application. Consequence: your next phone might be subsidized not only by the operator but also by Yahoo!. In other words, mobile advertising is coming and it will take the shape of value added applications in your phone.

Another example of this: Yahoo! is also the search engine that pays for you to use Opera Mini (you didn’t think it was really free, did you?). Together with Yahoo! Go Mobile in 200 devices, Yahoo! can take a significant chunk out of that mobile revenue that Google wants with their as-of-yet-non-existing GPhone.

Microsoft has been trying to break in to the telecom market for years with Windows Mobile but they will most likely join the advertising war. They’re just a little late for the game.

Microsoft, Google Phone, Yahoo! Go Mobile… looks like the future of the web really is in mobile.

Pictures from the event here.

Updated: Lotta Holmstr??m at Citizen Watch also wrote about the Yahoo! presentation:

Yahoo! Go is a small java applet which lets the user access email, flickr, search and more. It will be in 200 cellphone models at the end of the year.

What does “in” mean? Preinstalled or available for?

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A few disruptive innovations are getting ready to hit the market, opening up for small device manufacturers to fill the hole between the <3 inch display devices (mobile phones) and the >10 inch display device (laptops). The hole reserved for web tablets.

One of them is flash memory replacing the hard drive. Another one is new form factor motherboards, small enough to put in a box of matches. A third one is WiMAX, promising broadband speed (well, sort of) wireless internet access (problem for WiMAX is, it’s been promising it for so long that good old 3G UMTS is catching up). Yet another is the Linux OS.

What do you get when putting all of them together?

Something like this.

The device is called MUnit and runs a 1GHz VIA CPU which is x86 compatible. You should be able to run Windows Vista on this one, if you want to. What the web tablet market needs is not Vista, though, but a Linux version that’s stable and has a developer ecosystem fertile enough to produce killer applications. The problem (some would call it a strength) with Linux is its many flavors.

Many flavors is great when eating ice cream but not so great when you want to build a commercial software application that must run on as many devices as possible for as little cost as possible. Linux is not there yet and maybe it never will get there. Why? Because Linux is a fertile environment for operating systems – not for applications.

That’s why I think Linux and Java is such a good combination – and I’m not the only one.

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