Nokia has outlined its plans for the ‘Maemo’ Internet Tablet range, currently represented by the N770 and N800.
Speaking at the Open Source in Mobile conference in Berlin, Nokia’s open source director Ari Jaaksi said that the next generation of tablet devices - codenamed Maemo 5 - would come with 3G support and could use the new high-performance OMAP 3 mobile processor.
Lack of 3G is the only real downside to the N800 - you need to be within range of a wifi access point. If you could surf over a 3G connection, Nokia’s tablets would make a decent alternative to theiPhone/iPod Touch in terms of a usable portable web siolution. Add a VoIP app and you might wonder if you really need a ‘real’ mobile phone at all.
Is it too soon to be nostalgic about the Palm Pilot?
Anyone still hankering for the glories of PalmOS (and disappointed that Palm have dumped it in favour of Windows Mobile in several recent devices) would do well to grab a Nokia N770, N800 or N810 tablet and a free copy of Garnet VM.
Garnet is essentially PalmOS decoupled from the Palm brand (the result of some rather complex license wrangling) and the Garnet VM is a vitual machine for running Garnet on top of the Nokia tablet’s flavour of Linux.
Running Garnet in this way will give you A) a glowing sense of geeky pride and - more importantly - B) access to tens of thousands of PalmOS applications and games.
Garnet comes bundled with PalmOS standards such as Addressbook and Memopad and claims 80% compatibilty with existing PalmOS apps. PalmOS has a huge shareware and freeware library and this could be a simple way to squeeze a lot more functionality out of your Nokia tablet.
