The non-PDA handheld future

Will Nokia with its Internet Tablet 2005 succeed in creating a non-PDA handheld market?

How about all the failed Linux and Windows (CE and XP) efforts?

Challenges abound. “You don’t have the benefits of the larger devices or the portability of the smaller devices,” the Guardian Unlimited has quoted Gartner analyst Ken Delaney. He says it’s a “1 kg wasteland,” neither standard notebook nor PDA/smartphone.

Within the last four years, we’ve seen announcements for a lot of computers with what I call e-book-compatible design goals. Some of them haven’t gone into production or been brought to the U.S.; and some of them, like the OQO and Motion Computing LS800, are so fantastically priced that they’ll never have a big market.

Still, Bill Gates, for one, thinks the future lies this way. Earlier this year he described the Ultra-Mobile 2007, a tablet he hopes will be under 2 pounds and under $1,000, as the “hottest” in the spectrum of carry-around devices.

In the Guardian article quoting Ken Delaney, reporter Mary Banscombe identified “ill-fated Linux-based WebPads launched by Sony, Honeywell, Gateway, 3Com, Intel and even AOL.” And there were others. Just having Linux as the underlying OS hasn’t meant a device would be able to run all that open-source software or have it ported. It’s been a wasteland, but plenty of people see opportunity here.

And this time, I think we have a winner, with the $350 8-ounce 800×480 Nokia 770 being just the first Internet Tablet Nokia will produce.

Why? Well, it has to do with the phone market, and the $140 million Nokia is expected to pay in licensing fees to Symbian (of which Nokia owns about 48 percent). There’s a huge potential savings for Nokia if Linux can replace Symbian.

And so Nokia has gone about pushing the Linux angle much more thoroughly than its predecessors. It’s not just passively assuming good things will happen. It has actively wooed the Linux community, pledging to use its patents in support of the Linux kernel. It created the Maemo development environment so developers could port applications without having to purchase an Internet Tablet. It hired a number of the developers working on open-source software to port applications — two years ago. The Plucker Viewer and AbiWord are two such applications you’ll be able to use on an Internet Tablet that Nokia paid for but won’t be charging you for. They’ve done everything possible to make porting applications from existing Linux distributions painless and quick. And they’re hiring more full-time Maemo/Internet Tablet developers now.

Nokia wants this to happen. And it is a huge company that won’t go under if it doesn’t make a profit on Internet Tablets right away. When the Nokia 770 arrives, it won’t have phone capabilities, but Nokia has announced VOIP for the 2006. Linux for Internet Tablets and for cell phones lets them hedge their bets on which way telephony is going. And this is good news for those of us who want a small-form-factor computer with great ebook reading and browsing and email instead of a PDA with make-do capabilities.

Full disclosure: I participate in Nokia’s Developer Device Program, which will eventually allow me to purchase a 770 at substantial discount. Thanks to Mike Cane and Al Herrera for links. [Update: Found an article at Mobile Pipeline that supports the notion of Nokia using Linux on its phones. Link from nokia770.com.]