Were the Nokia 770, N800, and N810 ahead of their time?

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ryan November 22, 2010

Were the Nokia 770, N800, and N810 ahead of their time?

It's an interesting question to ask now that the tablet space is finally picking up steam after all these years of failed attempts. Nokia surely wasn't the only company experimenting with tablets over the last decade, but they were certainly among the most prominent handset makers to try the form factor on for size, and they were always smart enough not to follow Microsoft down its numerous blind alleys (see: Windows XP Tablet PC Edition, UMPCs, etc.).

Still, it's hard to see Nokia ever being successful in tablets having made the same mistakes everyone else seemed to make in those days. Maemo was (and is) a slow, poorly thought out mobile OS, and Nokia was never able to justify their Internet Tablet series's reason for existence. (It could be argued that a really bad mobile UI is actually a strong reason for something NOT to exist.) To this day Nokia insists they were "hacker devices," but that implies they never actually intended to sell many of them (something I find doubtful); it also overlooks the fact that hackers and developers tend to want to build stuff for / on platforms and devices that lots of people use -- not the other way around.

I think definitely Nokia raised the bar a bit at the time, but not nearly high enough to become viable in the mass market.

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chris 2 years ago

I tend to agree that the line's existence was never fully justified -- you could've made the argument a couple years ago that the 770 line was a pet project aimed at eventually leading to a mass market platform, but at this point, it's been way too long... and the production version of MeeGo (as it pertains to Nokia devices) is only going to vaguely resemble Maemo. Then again, many projects at Nokia over the past several years have been deeply flawed and misguided, so none of this should come as a surprise to anyone.

I actually think that the 770 foretold the modern smartphone more than the modern tablet. Bear in mind that at the time the 770 was released, a phone with a 4-inch touchscreen was unheard of.

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banachek 2 years ago

To say that Nokia was ahead of it's time with tablets is to say Microsoft was with their tablet PCs. The idea of a tablet is not what is innovative. The magic mix of the capacitive touch screen, wide angle lcd display, long battery life, sub-$600 price, snappy performance (webkit browser), and an intuitive simple UI is what set the tablet off. If the iPad (or Galaxy Tab even) had been missing any two of those elements I don't believe it would of been nearly as successful is it is now. And that's leaving Apps off the table. It's both a mix of an idea whose time has come, and the work of an innovative software centric company (Apple) to push the market, and consumer's expectations forward.

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dgblackout 2 years ago

Nokia have always made awesome hardware but never satisfied in software. The only time i remember thinking "this works" was when they made the 3310, and that was possibly the most dumb phone anyone could have made.
How anyone considers them still relevant is beyond me.

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paul 2 years ago

I posit "ahead of their time" not as in "oh man they were so good and nobody knew," but in that they had ideas in them that were good, but technology and UIs and users and Nokias that weren't ready to make those ideas actually successful.

770 had a large super high resolution screen that would be wonderful for ebooks, had a full browser (albeit slow) and an actually pretty interesting community around it building a few apps.

What it really lacked was good text entry. If someone knew they could actually take this to a couch and pound out an email if needed, I think it would become a lot more valuable of a device. It's pretty clear that most people don't want consumption-only devices in this form factor unless they're ultra cheap.

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dgblackout 2010-11-22 20:04:10

Sounds like what people say about them was true, they had a great hardware department but the software was always an afterthought and the final specs were picked to match a price point/profit margin. They could have been massive with their utter dominance of the dumb phone market but they royally screwed themselves by under-performing. Hell, palm only really did that for a year and a half, and look where they ended up.

paul 2010-11-22 20:04:19

Oh, and I have a ton of hope for MeeGo, though they're obviously a long way out on that right now. Right now webOS is more Linux-ey than Android, which doesn't say much for Android, and I think there's room for a "pure" and performance-optimized (Moblin was blazing on Intel chipsets) mobile Linux, particularly in the tablet form factor.

ryan 2010-11-22 20:07:28

Much of the same could be said of UMPCs and slate tablets, although those didn't even suffer as much from lack of good text entry and developer ecosystem. In the end what was it that completely transformed the tablet market? A really, really good UI and user experience. That's pretty much it.

All these pre-iPad tablets products weren't unsuccessful because they were somehow so far ahead of their time that they couldn't get traction. These were solvable problems even back then. The long and short of it is Nokia failed to execute -- to this day Nokia hasn't fixed most of the user experience issues that plague Maemo -- and the product was simply too much of a dog to ever gain much mainstream appeal.

dgblackout 2010-11-22 20:11:55

Amen.

Let their smartphone/tablet dreams never come to profitable fruition.

ChrisXS 2010-11-23 01:11:08

Overlooking the painfully slow cpu, 128 megs of ram, resistive touchscreen, gps that required a hack or $130 to make useful if you can manage to get a lock, horrible keyboard, the N810 was released during the peak of standalone GPS heyday. I wound up purchasing it as a GPS with a superior screen and much more utility.

While the GPS feature was a dud, the miniSD slot played well with my Treo 755P. I frequently swapped cards between the two gadgets. I also managed to get Bluetooth DUN enabled on my 755P which allowed me to tether the N810. This dynamic duo coupled with cargo shorts gave me a serviceable browsing experience on the go.

The Canola media player was serviceable. Automatic podcast, RSS, and youtube video snaking apps made the device very useful while offline. I also made use of google calendar sync widgets, the pidgen IM client, and some office document editors.

I even managed my own ghetto slingbox-like usage out of it by streaming live TV from my Neuros OSD.

While it eventually had to retire to the land of old gadgets, it lived a full life. It was far too complex for all but the geekiest of geeks to become mainstream.

EBone 2010-11-24 13:47:37

While Nokia was able to attract the "hobbyist" crowd with these tablets, they were never able to attract the huge surge of developers that the iPhone OS was able to. That huge catalog, combined with the ease of use touchscreen that the Nokia's didn't have, was the perfect jumping off point for the iPad.

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Dpmt 2010-11-22 20:16:59

Nokia definitely had some good ideas in these tablets it they had polished the software up, even to somewhat raw Maemo 5 levels, and put some money into advertising they could have had a real winner on there hands.

I still think that Maemo is a better OS the iOS, for example multitasking is much better then iOS and being able to download a bittorrent client with the stock software is something an iPad may never be able to to.

As far as hardware they had a WVGA screen before those were everywhere and the N810 had a version with WiMax. Again, something Apple may never do. (In there defense LTE is way better)

So I'd say that these were ahead of there time. Way ahead in some cases.

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Avi 2010-11-22 22:17:35

Nokia was certainly ahead of its time in recognizing the need for an Internet-centric tablet device, but even had Nokia put its full marketing and sales power behind it the line would have failed for two reasons: its UX (a terrible, terrible UI and lack of accompanying services) and size (it's just too small to provide a differentiated tablet experience - a lesson that Dell still hasn't learned with the Streak). I saw the 770 before it launched and begged Nokia's product manager to build a larger, usable one. They insisted that it needed to be pocketable so that you could use it on airplanes with WiFi. That was the use case - not checking IMDB on the couch or doing email in the den. At the time, only Lufthansa actually offered flights with WiFi, but apparently Nokia execs flew on those routes a lot in those days.

Nokia treated the maemo line like Apple originally treated Apple TV - as a "hobby" (AppleSpeak) "for learnings" (NokiaTalk). The hacker line refers to its unfinished, unfriendly UI - they knew when they launched the 770 that it wasn't ready for regular consumers, and they initially restricted the sales channel to avoid it going mainstream and Nokia getting a black eye. I could argue that Nokia didn't believe in maemo enough to give it a consumer-friendly UI, but I don't exactly consider S60 to be a paragon of usability and they had tons of people working on that (zing!). The success of the iPod touch and iPad have been based on Apple's cinematic yet simple user interface along with the iTunes and App Store ecosystems. Nokia still hasn't matched those today.

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Munk 2010-11-22 22:02:48

I was talking to my brother about Nokia a few months back & it something he said really hit me "Nokia is a phone company in an internet age". What he meant was that Nokia still views its devices as phones and the things they do really well are antennas, sms's and voice.

That they still do not understand how the world has changed in the last five years is really evident when you talk to Nokia employees. Just ask them about e-mail or web browsing and a Nokia employee or a fanboi you'll see them beaming when they say that their devices have been doing them since the early decade! But ask them if they have ever used them?

The iOS maybe a lot of hype but the appeal imho is that "it works" and thus is fun to use.
On Nokia devices it takes a minimum of 5 steps/30 seconds to do the simplest thing before you end up with an error message & things only get slower as you go on.

The company is great and the technologies are great (first to adopt webkit, nfc, wifi across n series, great camera's etc etc) but the culture is just too "fat"* to succeed.

*= fat because imho the talk of them being Finish and conservative is just bs. What the management is, bureaucratic, lazy and frankly scared to take chances. They are clearly detached from reality and have failed to realize how fast things have changed in the world.

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groovechicken 2010-11-23 14:19:11

They were ahead of their time in the effort to get this form factor into the mainstream, but the terrible OS made it a failure even among the people most likely to use it at the time: geeks. I always wanted one of these, so I borrowed an N800 from a friend with the intention of buying it if I liked it. As hard as I tried, I just couldn't live with the OS. All the cool things I had hoped to do with it, like VNC always hit limitations in the way the OS implemented even the most basic items like keyboard support. I gave up after a week. The possibility of putting a real linux on there just didn't appeal enough to overcome the limitations of the hardware for such usage. Poor little N series, we wanted to love you. :(

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