The Mobile Web Tablet

The Nokia N900 mobile web tablet-that’s-also-a-phone has been hitting the stores after months of delay. Reviews are good and it seems like the speed of the device is what impresses the most. The downside is a somewhat clunky interface but an average linux geek should feel right at home. And honestly: can it get worse than S60?

Digital Versus writes:

Franck loved the fact that you can use the N900 as a terminal for getting inside the entrails of the phone (or how to make your life more complicated!) and the visual part of the interface. He regrets the lack of applications on Maemo.org, the fact that navigation isn’t always the most logical and that the keyboard is restricted to three lines (5 would have been preferable) “especially as you need to look up characters in the symbol bank that you often require for those famous “commands”".

PC advisor:

The Linux-based Maemo 5 OS is the star of the show. This really is an advanced smartphone – it’s a genuine handheld computer. Maemo can run multiple tasks simultaneously, the web browser is outstanding and the interface looks smooth and polished, unlike the Symbian operating system usually employed by Nokia. Menu icons and fonts will be familiar to any Nokia users, but Maemo ups the ante with some nice screen transitions; when opening new windows and browsing though running applications, for example.

While the N900 seems to be a great device, the big question is of course if Nokia can keep up against Android and Apple with the Maemo OS. Not just UI- or feature-wise but also when it comes to the developer community and availability of applications.

Then we have the Google Chrome OS and the rumored Apple Web Tablet so Nokia is being attacked from many directions. Never the less, 2010 looks to be an interesting year for web tablets.

Popularity: 17% [?]

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% [?]

Hey, why not?

Popularity: 11% [?]

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% [?]

Just finished updating my Nokia N800 from OS2007 to OS2008. What an improvement! The GUI is starting to take shape and find an identity if its own. The bundled applications are very good, for example the map application. Seems like the browser is a bit more stable as well.

So, how am I using the N800? Well, actually I use it mostly at home. The Sony Ericsson P1, together with Opera Mini, Google Mail and the built in web browser is a much better mobile solution. Why? It’s smaller, and more importantly: it can be used one handed.

Using the scroll wheel and changing the right side button to launch the task manager makes the P1 a very quick to navigate mobile device. I wish the N800 had a one-hand-mode…

Popularity: 4% [?]

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.)

Popularity: 7% [?]

GigaOm is listing a few “facts” about the so far non-existing Google Phone. The first two are:

1. Google Phone is based on a mobile variant of Linux, and is able to run Java virtual machines.
2. All applications that are supposed to run on the Google Phone are java apps. The OS has ability to run multimedia files, including video clips.

It looks a lot like the kind of phone I would have built if I had the chance to do it from scratch. Linux at the core and Java as the application platform makes a lot of sense for building an open, developer friendly phone with an already existing ecosystem of applications and developers.

I’m sure Google has the engineers to come up with a great mobile phone. The greatest challenge for them is the logistics involved in selling consumer electronics. As mentioned before, that’s a completely different business from selling adwords. Nokia is pumping out 11 phones per second worldwide. You can have all the Ph.D:s in the world in your staff and a supercomputer on top, that’s still a huge challenge.

Nevertheless it’s a telling sign that the two most talked about phones at the moment comes from the internet and computer industry.

Updated: New York Times on how the worlds of software and telecom meet:

Nokia used to be just a cellphone maker. Google used to be just an Internet company.
Now Nokia wants to be an Internet company and Google, according to rampant speculation among bloggers and technology analysts, may be about to enter the mobile phone fray.

“Devices alone are not enough anymore,” Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief executive of Nokia, said last week in London as the company announced plans for a digital music store, a game service, social networking links and other mobile Internet initiatives, grouped under a new brand, Ovi. “People want more; they want the complete experience.”

Popularity: 4% [?]

Wow, what a success. At least the first weekend, the iPhone went for a knockout and succeeded. Up to 700’000 phones is nothing short of amazing especially considering the price. The iPhone has already become and iconic product that has changed the market. Every other smartphone will be compared to the iPhone.

Iconic mobile phones are otherwise few and far between. For a consumer market the size of the mobile phone market, the following is quite interesting:

[...] there are now only two mobile phones in American history that consumers ask for by product name: The Motorola Razr and the Apple iPhone.

I would have added the Blackberry, but OK. This is nothing short of a failure for a market that size. Truth is, most mobile phones are clones of each other. Even the last couple of years explosion of features (cameras, mp3 players, web browsers, games etc.) hasn’t produced a single phone that really sticks out with personality (I’m probably a bit biased when I say the Sony Ericsson T610 is a candidate).

Innovation has been in features, not in usability, design or marketing. Apple has changed that. None of the features in the iPhone are completely new, but the packaging is.

Time for the established players to start afresh and stop the cloning.

If I was the CEO of one of the major mobile vendors, I would have set aside a team of the most experienced engineers and the best designers and basically give them free hands to do magic. Preferably, they would be in a separate building from the other company. Their mission: to go to the soul of the company, the roots, and make the phone everyone in the company wants to make if they weren’t prevented by legacy requirements and old code. Start from a blank slate and work upwards.

Of course, such an endeavor would hit the bottom line pretty hard, which is why most CEOs don’t do it. A classic innovators dilemma which an outsider can take advantage of in exactly the way Apple has done.

Nokia is trying to do something along those lines with their open source and web tablet team headed by Ari Jaaksi. While the Nokia web tablets have been far from as successful as the iPhone (don’t know the sales figures for the web tablets, but I’m guessing they’re far below 500’000) I think in the long term it will pay off. (For Nokia, this is quite a courageous move. Their customers are the operators and I’m pretty sure no operator asked for a linux based wifi web tablet!)

This is also how Motorola came up with the RAZR, by the way:

They kept the project top-secret, even from their colleagues. They used materials and techniques Motorola had never tried before. After contentious internal battles, they threw out accepted models of what a mobile telephone should look and feel like. In short, the team that created the RAZR broke the mold, and in the process rejuvenated the company.

Seems like companies are only capable of pulling this through during hard times. Motorola was in a pretty bad shape when RAZR was born.

Exciting things are happening in the world of mobile and the established players better watch out – especially the ones with wind in the sails. The iPhone is not the last wanting to go for knockout and it’s so darn difficult to be innovative when times are good.

Unless you’re Apple, it seems.

Popularity: 6% [?]