Inquirer Reviews the Nokia N800
The Inquirer reviews the Nokia N800 in Nokia’s cheap UMPC alternative is future-proof, giving it nine out of ten “beers” for a very positive result.
“With [the N800], the expensive UMPC vendor camp and the PDA vendors both have something to worry about. At the same time, road warriors needing web browsing and e-mail on the go can finally consider leaving notebooks at home, only using them as desktop replacements.”
Lots of good photos in this review, and it demonstrates an understanding of the real importance of the Maemo’s open source nature (which is why they call it “future-proof”).
The Maemo platform is in a very strong position for the web tablet market, probably analogous to what DOS achieved in the early days of the PC market. And web tablets, or something similar, will probably replace the expensive and awkward UMPC category entirely.
Further, open source has proved (witness Apache), that once it starts strongly in a new market niche, it is nearly impossible to dislodge it. I expect the future product category of web tablets to be another area where open source completely dominates, like web servers, because of the strong position it is already carving out for itself now with the Maemo and N800.