D. JonesNot A Novice! Nokia UPDATES Their Tablet!
April 20th 2010 08:05
Call it a comeback!
Nokia is the latest in a growing line of consumer electronics manufacturers eager to produce a tablet following the buzz Apple created with the iPad. And this isn't the first time Apple and Nokia have gone head to head, the Nokia N97 and Apple iPhone have duked it out as well! But today, it's tablets!
According to TheStreet, the mobile giant is already working with partners to develop a new touchscreen tablet. The company aims to get it to market by fall in time to meet holiday demand. Nokia is in a unique position to develop an iPad competitor, having launched a line of tablet devices as early as 2005 with the Nokia 770. (Check out the pic and brief article when it debuted!)
Photo by Engadget/Mobileburn
It's an internet appliance aimed squarely at your living room, designed to replace that "extra" PC you might be tempted to pick up for basic web surfing/news reading/emailing. At an expected price of $350, it may just succeed, at that. It's connecting to your home network via Bluetooth and WiFi and sports a nice, large screen at 4.13-inches and 800x480 pixels. It'll ship in Q3 2005 (yeah!) with the Opera browser and apps for RSS reading, internet radio, media players, PDF reader, and Flash plug-in, with software updates planned in Q1 2006 for VoIP calling and IM (not sure what the deal is on delaying the IM client, but whatever!).
The whole thing is based on Debian Linux v2.6 and the Gnome UI (is that the sound of thousands of *NIX geeks rejoicing we hear?), they're calling the platform "maemo" and are making it completely open, and will provide an SDK for developers. Smart, Nokia, very, very, smart (Yeah, if they were so smart then, why didn't it sell like the iPAD?) Horsepower will be provided by an ARM based processor, the TI 1710 OMAP, and will come with 64MB DDR RAM and 128MB internal flash memory, expandable via RS-MMC card (a 64MB card will be included stock). So color us thoroughly hot and bothered, though we would maybe have gone with SD instead of MMC and the 3 hour battery/7 hour standby life is perhaps sub-optimal.
This was followed by two successors, the N800 and N810 (the N810 is pictured above), the Nokia Internet Tablets line never really took off. The company ended up retooling the latest spiritual successor, the N900, as a mobile phone. (Pictured below)
Whereas Nokia’s high-end smartphone line is heading toward the Linux-based Maemo for its standard operating system, the new tablet could potentially run MeeGo, the new mobile operating system the company is developing with Intel. If so, MeeGo-based tablets would join the fleet of other tablets slated to run Android (Android) and Windows (Windows) 7 coming later this year.
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