The Mobile Web Tablet

I use my Nokia N800 as a surfboard before sleeping. It gives me my final dose of internet before I doze off. It’s not a phone, though and it can be a little slow sometimes. I also miss a physical keyboard and in order to replace my phone it would have to smaller.

Enter the N900.

By the looks of it it fixes all my issues above and may turn out to be the best phone Nokia has ever released.

The one thing that nags me a little bit is the fact that is’s based on Maemo, the linux phone OS initiated by Nokia. While this seemed like a bold move when the N770 and N800 came out, today there are other alternatives. Or will Maemo, Android and iPhone all be the platforms that the mobile infrastructure of the future is built on?

Maybe the mobile OS doesn’t matter at all as long as there as a compatible browser? On the other hand, browsers are also platforms and on the PC there are still huge fragmentation problems when it comes to browsers.

It will take a long time before the dust settles on this platform battle, that’s for sure.

Popularity: 7% [?]

A short video showing what the Sony Ericsson Satio can do when it comes to 3D graphics.

Popularity: 10% [?]

The David Report blog points me to Milan based design company V12 and their concept Canova laptops.

The key innovation: replacing the keyboard part of the laptop with a touch screen.

Popularity: 26% [?]

The mobile phone manufacturers are so busy competing against each other that they very well might be missing competitors coming from the side. Like for example full blown PCs that fit in your jacket pocket such as the Willcom D4 by Sharp. Based on the Intel Atom platform, the size (188x84x25.9mm) is not that much larger than a Playstation Portable (170x74x23 mm) or a Nokia N800 (144x75x13 mm) but it’s actually a PC running Windows Vista and a full QWERTY keyboard.

You can watch a video of the device here.

The smartphone of the future is a PC. Let’s call it mobile web tablet.

Popularity: 3% [?]

In a few years time, every photo you take with any camera will be geotagged. What does that mean? The location of where you took the photo is embedded in the photo file. Now you can organise your pictures not just by time but also by place.

Nokia just released an update to their GPS-enabled Symbian phone N82 that enables geotagging in the photos taken with the camera. Expect the same from other manufacturers soon and I hope the old camera companies follow the competition from the mobile phone companies, otherwise there’s two reasons instead of one to choose a mobile phone camera over a “real” camera: connectivity and geotagging.

More on the upgrade here.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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.

Popularity: 5% [?]