03.21.07

What’s ahead for the tablet?

Posted in News, Views at 3:33 pm by Jonathan Greene

Om Malik has an interesting piece on the tablet up today following his meeting with Nokia at GigaOM HQ. From his post, it’s clear that the Rhapsody and Skype pending deals are just the beginning of the business development process. Nokia is interested in expanding the services offered from partners with mentions of additional music (Napster, Yahoo and MSN) as well as additional IM services beyond the installed Google Talk which I actually have really grown to like, is not where all my friends are.

I don’t agree with Om’s headline (Will Skype save Nokia Internet Tablets?) which implies that the table is in need of saving and that Skype will be the savior. Sure Skype is popular, but most people do it for free and would rather not buy a $400 device just to make calls. From my perspective, it will certainly add a great deal of utility for when I want to call another Skype user, but I am personally quite happy with the SIP-capable Gizmo and the video-enabled GoogleTalk which are already here.

Improved stability and feature enhancement (like flash performance…) are key and something I know are coming soon with the next update to the tablet OS. I hope Nokia takes proper care to enable future IM systems to embed in the OS rather than run as separate clients which will not only add additional resource needs, but will actually just be annoying as you’ll need to run multiple apps to simply stay connected. And yes I know and use GAIM which works pretty well actually… but will probably become a second choice to something provided by Nokia and partners. I have yet to see anyone embed with the system from a 3rd party perspective, but while those check books are out making deals, let’s do it right, ok?

Sales may be slow on the N800, but it’s only month 3 with this unit. The 770 was a sleeper that was positioned to geeks looking for a cheap linux system to hack. The real thing that the tablet platform needs is some marketing. It’s a new device in a new category and something that needs to be experienced and explained to be best understood.

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