Nokia Internet Tablets

» see nokia.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

the nokia 770 was announced at linuxworld in may 2005 and shipped that november for around three hundred and fifty euros. it was a small device with a 4.13-inch touchscreen at eight-hundred by four-eighty, sixty-four megabytes of ram, a wifi radio, and a debian-derived linux called maemo that ran a real opera browser and a finger-stylus desktop. it was not a phone. it had no cellular radio. you used it on home or cafe wifi, like an ipod touch two years before the ipod touch existed.

the n800 followed in january 2007, announced at ces a few days before steve jobs walked on stage with the iphone. the n810 came in october 2007 with a slide-out qwerty keyboard. the three devices together were nokia's attempt at a non-phone linux pocket computer, sold to engineers and tinkerers who wanted a small device that ran ssh and python and a working web browser without being tied to a carrier plan.

i did not own one. by 2007 i was on a turkish ttnet adsl line at home and a windows xp laptop, and the nokia tablets were not on shelves in turkey at any visible scale. they were a niche european device for the kind of buyer who already had a linux desktop and wanted a tinier one in their bag. by november 2009 nokia had pivoted the whole maemo line into the n900, which was technically a tablet with a phone radio bolted on, and the tablet-only line was over.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the 770 was a hard sell from day one. battery life was under four hours of wifi use, the cpu was slow for the price, and the screen was beautiful but small. reviewers were not kind. but the device had a working terminal, a real linux userspace, and a community of people writing software for it. inside a year there were maemo ports of pidgin, of x-chat, of various ssh clients, of mplayer.

the n800 in 2007 fixed the worst of the hardware complaints: more ram and a faster cpu, plus a front camera for video calls. it also showed up the same week as the iphone. the n810 later that year added a hardware keyboard. nokia was on the right track for what handheld computing was going to be, but every device they shipped was instantly compared to a thing apple had just sold a million of, and nokia did not have an answer to that question.

~ what got buried with it ~

the tablet line had a working open-source linux phone-class device, in shipping form, a full year before android existed and two years before the first android phone. it had a real package manager. it had ssh. it had a python repl in a pocket. the technical foundation was there. nokia could not put a usable cellular radio on it until 2009, and by then it was already too late.

maemo merged with intel's moblin in 2010 to become meego, which then got abandoned in 2011 when nokia took the microsoft windows phone deal. the n9, the last meego device, shipped in september 2011 without being sold in the us at all. the whole line of work, every internal tablet team Nokia had built over six years, dissolved into the microsoft transition.

~ what carried over ~

the maemo and meego codebase survived in two community forks. mer became the base for sailfish os, which is still alive at jolla. the nokia internet tablet hardware itself is still tradable on european auction sites for collectors who want to run a 2007 debian on a touchscreen and remember what it felt like when nokia was on the right track and ahead of everyone.

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