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This January 2010 I will have had my Nokia N800 tablet for two years. It's something of a little Debian Linux device that could, this chunky little internet tablet, since it can do a terrific number of open-source focused things, but it's a complete failure as a commercial mobile platform. Its developer community, however, while nowhere near something I would call "vibrant", is slowly and steadily plugging away at Linux-oriented applications of varying usefulness.

The tablets to date have occupied a rather strange niche, though. Nokia's stance on DRM -- namely, not shipping any way of locking software on the device, and not even providing any kind of central storefront for selling applications for the device -- made commercial developers never give it a shot. One of Michael Mace's quotes I like to keep in mind when it comes to mobile devices is (source):

Symbian happens to be Nokia's older phone OS now becoming open source. Maemo is considered its successor, but the lesson still applies.

The 770, N800, and N810 tablets have entirely walked away from that sector, leaving developers to a PC-style do-whatever-you-want mentality. Maybe Nokia thought this would be enough to grow an ecosystem, but it hasn't worked at all. As an ARM-based, non-x86 platform it can't even follow the netbook route and tag along with desktop Linux's miniscule marketshare gains and innovations. This thing had no chance in the modern mobile marketplace.

Tremendous Cosmic Power...
This puts the tablets squarely in the gadget geek camp. Software can be ported to it with some effort, and Nokia has done somewhat unpopular things by breaking compatibility to varying extents with each iteration of the Maemo OS shipped with new hardware, which implies a commitment to good software over bad, older designs. The most prominent onboard software is a Mozilla-engine browser with Flash, a browser which is not open source the way desktop Firefox is. The onboard email and chat software lack the unusually detailed feature sets demanded by the hacker elite that use the thing in general, and there are no PIM applications in the firmware. This ridiculous omission makes this flexible platform useless to all but the hackers, and the piecemeal state of replacement apps continues to be an embarassment for the platform.

...Itty Bitty Living Space
One other very strange issue with the tablet centers around the onboard application storage. The N8xx devices rather generously support external flash media (two SD cards on the N800, one micro-SD card on the N810), but applications can only be installed in 256 MB of onboard storage. That might sound like a lot up front, especially given what the very first Google Android G1 phone had available to its end users, but in actuality it's a terrible limitation on the platform. There are a variety of somewhat esoteric programs for it that all need to be installed in that space and can't run from the storage card for whatever reason. This keeps the ecosystem from showing off some really exceptional open source ideas. If you can't get all of the bits and pieces of your binary app into that space -- and not eat up all of it of course since the user might want something else to run from time to time -- you're sunk.

This has, of course, spawned an extreme hacking subculture within the already hacker-focused tablet subculture itself of people who clone the OS to an SD card, install a boot loader, and run the OS off of that card. It solves the problem but it's also frighteningly complex to do. Wikis have done a decent job of summing it up but the potential to brick the device doesn't cut it, and the fact that I have to do that at all is another sign of failure. If John Q. Public's first task is to subvert the core failing of your storage design by doing this, it's doomed to never make it off the hacker reservation.

Developers aren't going to flock to your platform if you make it tougher and tougher for them to do something great. This is where the N800 and N810 series have landed.

The N900
The new tablet is more than just that -- Nokia has made it the first Maemo phone complete with 3G support via a SIM slot.

The device has a very snappy set of features, including multiple desktops, software-driven social networking integration, and a very impressive browser that can even play Flash video rather well. Will any of the software that ships on the device be more open than the N8xx series was? We don't yet know. It will, however, apparently have something like 32 GB of onboard memory, while keeping a relatively slim 256 MB of main memory and 768 MB of virtual memory for running apps.

Lastly, and this is a big one, the device does NOT seem to fix the limited application storage problem of the previous tablets. This is a critical failure if it persists to the final product. From one preview:

Nokia has said to previewers that this phone is coming out now to spark developer interest. If this problem persists to the final product I'm going to wager that this could be the end of this smartphone platform before it gets started. Again, with such strong competition from Google Android on the open source front, and from the iPhone on the closed source front, anything that makes energizing the developers for your platform difficult could very well be lethal to the platform itself.

All of that said, I still like and use my N800. Look for a future post that will describe everything I do with it and why I still find it so valuable to have around.