Thoughts on the Nokia Booklet 3G

Aug 26

Mobile News David 6 Comments
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NOkia Booklet 3G

Nokia Booklet 3G

On Monday I saw the announcement of Nokia’s entry into the Netbook market, the “Booklet 3G” (promo video here). My first thought went to Nokia’s Maemo powered tablet devices, the N800 and N810. I instantly assumed that this would be the next generation hardware for Maemo. Alas no, it is likely running Windows 7. My knee jerk reaction to that is frustration.

Before I go onto my little tribal operating system rant, let’s go over it’s reported specification. The best information I can get so far is: 1.6GHz Atom CPU, 120GB hard drive, bluetooth and WiFi, none of which are surprising for a netbook. The nice additions to its hardware come from its mobile phone heritage, because it has built in 3G and A-GPS. Other premium features are: a single-piece aluminium body, a high-definition glass screen (resolution unknown), and a HDMI port too. But will its little Atom CPU have the power to render HiDef video? Oh, and Nokia are claiming 12 hours of battery life. Still, even if you scale this down to 60%-70% for real world usage, it’s still pretty impressive.

Going back to Maemo, according to an article by Ewan Spence on Allaboutsymbian.com:

“Maemo is unfortunately not compiled for the Intel Atom processor and the work involved for a smallish project would have been prohibitive. So the call was relatively easy – Windows”

It is widely reported that Windows netbooks have outsold Linux netbooks. Some say this is because people want the familiarity of Windows. This is a reasonable theory, and could well be right. Although, knowing from personal experience, that even my own mother can barely tell the difference between XP and Ubuntu, I wonder if the outselling has more been due to Microsoft putting pressure on netbook producers? I really do think this is a shame for the Maemo platform.

Another advantage for Nokia in using Windows on the Booklet 3G is that they already make their “PC Suite” software for Windows. So Nokia can (and have in their promo video) tout the pitch that this device will easily sync with your Nokia phone. But isn’t this an old and tired way of managing your devices? Perhaps I’m wrong, but I thought the way forward was for us to sync our PDA-like software & hardware in the cloud – a platform agnostic future. At least, that is how I’ve been doing it since 2007. Given that I can sync the calendar and contacts in my phone via the internet to the Ovi servers and view all this data on Ovi’s website, I thought this is how Nokia wanted me to do it too.

If we think about the limited performance of netbooks, doesn’t Windows seem an inappropriate choice? I know Windows 7 is highly optimised and is miles better for a netbook than Vista, or even maybe XP. Although, think about your real life experience of using Windows, apart from all the anti virus and malware protection you need, it just slowly over time gets ground down with little bits of software and code here and there. You need a mobile device to be fast and snappy. So while I could well be proved wrong, I just don’t think Windows is the best option for something like this, but then I haven’t heard any feedback from the Windows netbook users about long term usage. I know, I know, you’re all screaming at me right now, “But Windows 7 has been optimised for netbooks”. Well it may well have been, but Windows is Windows, and it will acquire digital gunk over time, and I don’t think the little Atom CPU’s will cope with it, even if a fresh install of Win7 runs lovely on it.

Then, software aside, are Nokia arriving to the now untrendy party too late? When netbooks first came out, they were smaller and cheaper than laptops; it was a compelling purchase. Now though, most netbooks cost almost the same as a basic laptop, but lack the performance. So rather than getting a cheap little computer, you’re looking at spending the same amount of money and asking yourself which is more important, miniaturisation or performance? Given all the bells and whistles in this offering from Nokia, I can’t believe that is going to be by any means low-cost.

Therefore, are netbooks still a worthwhile purchase, and in the long run, isn’t installing Windows, rather than a bespoke Linux, an ultimately troublesome choice for end-users?

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