I think Google made a mistake in buying into the idea that phones and tablets have be different at all. There is a big difference going from a desktop/laptop with a mouse and no touch screen, to a phone/tablet with usually no mouse and always a touch screen, but after that, do we really need the distinction? Wouldn't it be better if software (apps and the OS) allowed for a smooth transition across screen sizes from 3" to 10+"?

I personally want a phone in the current dead zone (except for the Dell Streak). I find even 4.3" too small, but 7" is too big. 5", or even 5.5" is my sweet spot. What am I supposed to use - Honeycomb?, Gingerbread? Why the hell do I have to make a choice?

Future smart phones are all going high resolution. Anything with a screen size of 4 inches or more is going to have 1280x720, 768, or 800 pixels at a minimum. 1920x1200 will probably push down to 7" devices. Software should be able to handle a range of screen sizes and resolutions and reflow text and icons (and allow lots of configuration to choose font and icon sizes and number of icons) to make working across this range not a big deal.

And another thing, at this point I do expect that some reasonably specified current hardware (single core, 1 GHz, 512 MB RAM, etc.) should be able to be upgraded many years into the future. Sure certain features may have to be disabled, and configuration sliders controlling animation may have to be turned way back, but I don't want the core Android to turn into some behemoth that won't even run on hardware that is a few years old. I'm ready to hop off the iPhone train and a big reason is that Apple screwed my phone (3G) completely with iOS4 and isn't even trying to fix it anymore (no more updates for that phone). I'd rather Google didn't emulate Apple on that front also.

I'm all for Google flexing some muscle against manufactures and carriers, both of which disappoint me orders of magnitude more than Google ever has. But a sufficient solution for me to the fragmentation problem is if they would push for a lot more Nexus phones and tablets available simultaneously. Just one phone at a time (and no tablets) isn't cutting it. At least one phone from each manufacturer on each carrier and a bunch of tablets would be more like it.

I was ready to move to a Nokia Meego phone (from an iPhone 3G), but I have no interest in WP7 phones whatsoever, it doesn't matter if they have the best call quality, camera, GPS, screen, keyboard, whatever. Nokia is dead to me now. So from my point of view, Nokia looks incredibly stupid. But I know I'm not a typical customer and perhaps they can pull it off as I see plenty of people praising WP7 (and plenty lambasting it). But their stock value seems to show a lot of investors don't have the confidence that they can. Too bad - I hope Zeiss finds some other manufacturers to use their excellent cameras if Nokia goes under (or even if they don't - damn, I wanted that N8 camera on a good phone).

If I were running the company, I would have changed the top-end phones (I have no comments on lower end phones - let them keep running Symbian I suppose) so that the platform was completely open and put a small team on getting the platform to run stock Android AND Meego and don't develop a Meego UX in secret that is only for Nokia. Stick to making the best hardware and run a completely open stack (that anybody else can run too). Now a few apps that are Nokia phone only like Ovi Maps would have been OK. I saw a great video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2KSCPOhQ7w) on a platform that was software agnostic and was targeting both Android and Meego, I see no reason Nokia couldn't have done this with an actual phone.

The bummer is that with Nokia's move, I'm left now with only Android in terms of an open ecosystem when the stupid manufacturers (like Motorola) or the stupid carriers (like most of the US ones) don't cripple it. I'm not crazy about the Nexus S or I would have gotten one last year. Google needs to get a lot more Nexus partners so that at any one time all the companies have a flagship Nexus device. That would get me a lot more excited about Android. Too bad WebOS is of no interest (lousy looking hardware, another proprietary OS), Samsung's supposed effort to do something open according to Rasterman is nowhere, and after that I only know of the main proprietary options of iOS, Blackberry, and Microsoft (all of which I've ruled out). Hello Android, but I'm not excited about it.

I was following Meego for the last few months and it was starting to look like the best alternative to Android for those that are completely annoyed by the closed Android phones and are left with only the Nexus S (with unimpressive hardware) or Geeksphone (even more unimpressive hardware) that are actually open in the true sense of the word. I was very disappointed to hear that Nokia isn't pushing Meego full steam onto the best hardware they can make. I considered WebOS for a bit based on some of the comments I've heard about the homebrew community, but my impression of the openness of system is that it is fully proprietary Linux and thus not an open system. Is there an equivalent of the AOSP? There other problem is that I don't get very excited about the Pre 3 hardware. A 3.6" screen? That is too small. I want something like Hitatchi's 4.5" 1280x720 screen and unitil that is available, I at least want a 4 to 4.3" 960x540 screen.

Is WebOS really going to grab any Meego deserters?

This is a very interesting point about the emulator. I haven't tried one yet, but I was thinking of downloading Meego (though I don't have a Linux PC right now - so I'd have to wait for Mac or Windows versions) and Android emulators and playing with them side by side as a way help make a decision on which platform to go to. I'm leaving iOS after trying an iPhone 3g for a few years. Among other things - I will never forgive Apple for crippling this model with iOS4 and then not supporting a downgrade to iOS3. That and the other non-open aspects to the platform have me definitely going to one of the two main open alternatives (I guess Symbian is a third, but although I've read some positive reviews of the N8, I've read enough negative comments to cause me to wait for the N9. I don't think I can stomach any of the current Android offerings except for a Nexus S and I've got plenty of gripes with that particular hardware. I totally agree with another poster recommending Dell get to a winning Android Tablet design by using the most current version of Stock Android.

I'd have to see what Nokia ends up offering for Meego, but I do like some of what I read, advertising the Meego core (perhaps not including many Nokia add ons that will dominate the N9 experience - I have no idea) being more open than Android. E.g., a big effort to modify code upstream before releasing in a handset, using open development practices such as letting users download betas, etc.)

So I wonder if the Meego emulator is any better than the Android one (on Linux). Has anyone done this comparison?

NewWorldDan wrote: Using very optimistic numbers, if a battery pack lasts 70,000 miles and replacement costs $3500, then the battery adds 5 cents per mile.

Agreed, this is the main problem. We need some type of battery technology where the initial cost is reasonable and either the lifetime is competitive with gas cars - say 125k mi (I spent $3500 on a transmission once for a car that only had 80k on it), or the replacement costs (which could include whatever valuable materials are in the battery and are traded in, cost something like 1-2 cents/mile instead of 5. Perhaps this isn't going to happen for quite a while.

Gas cars often need items replaced too (O2 sensors, catalytic converters, etc.) many of which do not exist on an EV doesn't have - nothing as expensive as the battery of course, but you could get unlucky with one and be out several thousand over 100K also.

I look forward to seeing real world maintenance costs (and battery life) data from EVs as more of them are on the road. I'm not in a position to buy one in several years at least.

The energy equivalence between gas and electricity (gal to kWh) is not very interesting although I know the EPA is trying to make such an equivalence to say what the MPG equivalent value for the Leaf is. The reason that it is pointless is that efficiencies at the production end and the consumption end are different between the two energy delivery systems. So why not use a metric that roughly tracks efficiency (not counting subsidies) - cost:

If the Nissan Leaf gets 3.4 miles per kWh (http://gas2.org/2010/11/22/epa-gives-nissan-leaf-99-mpg-rating/) then those 3.4 miles costs 10 cents or 34 miles/dollar (2.9 cents/mi) assuming your 10c/kWh number.

My 2005 Prius averages around 45 mpg and gas is around $3.40 where I live, so 45/3.40 = 13.2 miles/dollar (7.5 cents/mi).

So the Leaf is 2.5 times better than the Prius on cost per mile basis. Now the cost of the Leaf's batteries must be taken into account of course, but it is at least possible that future battery technologies and gas and electric costs will result in a trade where it is cheaper to run electric cars over their life than it is to run gas cars. I sure hope so - I hate gas cars for their noise and their pollution which is never as good integrated over their lifetime as an electric car.

"If everyone stopped eating meat today, they would have to immediately slaughter billions of cows, chickens, pigs, sheep etc. as the market as every day keeping them alive would be just sinking money for nothing. Nice short-term outcome, is that what you want?"

Yes.

I'm OK with all the dairy going away too (we can figure out plant based milks on a larger scale if needed).

I'd be happy to see pets go away and people reduce their fertility so we can head to a saner Earth human population like 2-3 billion.

Of course I don't expect any of these to happen in my lifetime - doesn't mean I don't want them.

300+ DPI screens may be tough to scale past 7 inch screens, but there are two sizes that I hope manufacturers don't give up on:

1280x720 at 4.5" (326 DPI)
1920x1080 at 7" (315 DPI)

I still think 4.5" is not too big for a phone, though for some reason it seems everyone stops at 4.3" except for the Dell Streak at 5".

I haven't played with tablet devices to know for sure, but I suspect I'd prefer 6.5-7" over Apple's 10" for the ability to use it one handed and to fit in a jacket pocket.

I work in the aerospace industry and though I haven't been involved closely with any of the major programs (Iridium, Globalstar, TerreStar, SkyTerra, ...), I'm familiar with Thuraya which is apparently making a profit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuraya). As others have said, satellites cost a lot of money, and many large systems were thought up anticipating a given customer base and willingness to pay for monthly charge and minutes that just wasn't there by the time the systems were operational (I believe this was due to mis-predicting cellular network penetration).

At this point, I don't know if any non-GEO systems will be profitable in the future. GEO satellites are really expensive, but at least you only need 1 (with a spare) to server a pretty big market (like the Middle East, parts of Europe and Africa). The bummer about GEO though is in addition to latency, you may not have coverage in many situations (high latitude, obstruction from hills, trees, etc.). What I'd like to see is a LEO network with satellites as cheap as possible that provide store and forward text/data messages only. Orbital Sciences tried to get this market with ORBCOMM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbcomm), but I don't think their market ended up as big as they hoped for either. What you really need is just about every cell phone on the planet carrying the hardware needed to interface with the satellite (which means it has to be a small and cheap addition to standard phones). Then every user can opt to use the satellite system to receive or send email or text messages when outside of the terrestrial network (when you are willing to pay extra). I would think this is a fair amount of money to capture, but I haven't done any estimates. It would fit my customer pattern perfectly since I normally wouldn't want to pay a monthly fee, but I'd probably send a few 1 dollar emails if the situation required it. Whether the world aggregate demand is in the 100s of millions of dollars for revenue per year is the question.

$20 a month discount is almost $500 over two years. A Nokia N8 is $550 at Newegg.com, but I think one can do a bit better. Most good phones cost over $100 on a subsidized plan. So I think the case can be made for consumer appeal right now - regardless of whether you can change carriers or not. What I want my government to do is its job - foster competition by mandating that all US carriers have to offer non-subsidized plans with significant discounts to allow manufacturers to make phones and market them directly to consumers and not have the consumer screwed over by paying the same rate as someone who buys a subsidized phone.

Going forward, we really should be converging on not necessarily a single worldwide standard, but a group of standards and frequencies that can easily be achieved by phones that cost around $500 in a few years. Then it will be even better when you can move the phone across networks in the US. If only the majority of the US realized how often we are not #1 in a particular area (cell phone plans, internet, health care, transportation infrastructure, ...), maybe we could apply enough pressure to get our government to do something. But so many of us think that we do things best and the government should just get out of the way. Do we have to fall down completely before figuring out we can be better?

I wish I had a chance to follow this topic after my lunchtime post as I see a lot of replies I'm interested in.

AC points out leaked images of a supposed N9 were of the E7: This means my camera comment may be unneeded - I hope so.

Hyartep says the n8 is a cameraphone and the n9 will have other selling features: This may be true, but it is still disappointing and doesn't entice me as a customer. The camera is now a very integral part of a flagship phone and when you've already done that much design work AND are getting such critical acclaim, why not just reuse the whole damn camera module in the next phone and upgrade the display, processor, and other modules.

CockMonster says it is unlikely Nokia is capable of backporting Meego to N8: I read of people speculating the machine just isn't powerful enough, but haven't come across details on why the hardware isn't capable of doing it. If it is a hard task that Nokia doesn't want to be bothered with, they need to streamline their future offerings and use standard architectures (as was suggested in another post) to get both OSs working.

ChunderDownunder says:

"Nokia talks about open source. How about instead of a symbian or meego phone - one device architecture that can run both.
The handset division can then focus on compelling hardware."

I couldn't agree more. I agree that those that want Symbian should be able to stay with it (though I wrote my first post as a customer that would just view it as a transition to Meego.

sznupi (719324) says:
They only said that N-series will go with Meego from now on, it leaves plenty of space for Symbian (and devices with the latter exploit the somewhat more frugal hardware requirements, so a port of Meego is not feasible; ...

True. I'm not very interested in frugal hardware phones anymore - maybe when phones get absolutely amazing, frugal then will seem satisfactory and I'll go away from top of the line, but for now, I find the top of the line phones lacking. What we need is N8 camera like performance in every arena the phone works in: GPS performance, screen display, etc.

pavon gives a link from July 2 from Nokia stating future N series phones could use Symbian^4. As another poster (dartservo) said, I heard they abandoned Symbian^4 but perhaps they will use Symbian (incrementally updated) on N series phones. I still am not enthusiastic about it. Maybe if most of the apps I care about run on either OS (say using Qt), and Nokia releases a device that can run both, I'd find that I actually like Symbian. But it sure has a lot of negative publicity to overcome for me. It might not be that bad, and it might evolve into something better. But I wouldn't invest in a Symbian only phone at this point.

Finally wintermute000 says there are a ton of third party apps for offline map usage. True, I own two of them for the iPhone (Topo Maps and TopoPoint USA). They are both OK and perhaps it is unfair to compare them to Google Maps with a WiFi connection, but I don't find them as user friendly (they aren't street map oriented though). At some point I'll try an Open Street Map solution like Gaia GPS. I'd like to be able to download and save maps on a computer and then swap them in and out of the phone to save space. My first comment on third party apps related to programs that that let you cache Google's own maps. (I think there were some when I looked on the iPhone before I lost interest in that platform). But to have the main mapping program for a platform support this feature out of the box (Ovi Maps), that is way better.

This was fun. I typed up some thoughts earlier which offers advice to Nokia on what would win me as a customer in terms of hardware specifics at Matthew Miller's blog (http://www.zdnet.com/tb/1-86976, search for Dara Parsavand). I hope next year Nokia will have some interesting kit to read about.

I've been following the Meego 1.1 release news (I enjoyed http://www.visionmobile.com/blog/2010/11/the-meego-progress-report-a-or-d/), and have read up on a few other Nokia stories (N8 reviews, rumored N9 devices, etc.) and I don't quite understand what their long run goals with Symbian are. I mostly read bad opinions of it, e.g. Engadget (http://www.engadget.com/2010/10/14/nokia-n8-review/) loved certain aspects of the N8's hardware but didn't like the software. Symbian is probably the main thing keeping me from getting an N8 (that and the screen is disappointing). Nokia has announced there will be no more high end phones (higher than the N8) that will run Symbian, they will all run Meego. Phones are always getting more capable and I imagine the Meego stack will be optimized going forward, so how many interesting phones going forward are even going to run Symbian?

Given that Meego isn’t ready, I could be a lot more interested in Symbian if Nokia released hardware that they promise will support Meego when 1.2 is released, but for now runs Symbian. I was hoping that would be the case with the N8 since I really like the camera on that phone, and it literally seems to have no competition right now, but I can find nothing online speculating that Meego will ever work on an N8. Going with a transition strategy would let them release more phones even though Meego isn’t really ready (I hope it is ready in Q1, but maybe it won’t be working all that well into Q4 or later.

One more gripe for Nokia - I sure hope they aren’t considering releasing an N9 with a camera that doesn’t match or supersede the N8. The leaks (which could be totally bogus) implied the camera was not as capable (smaller sensor size, no Zeiss, less pixels). What the hell. I’m not going to feel great about spending money on a Meego phone when older Symbian phones can outperform it in ANY area (GPS, call quality, speed, picture/video quality, you name it).

One big plug for Nokia - good job making offline map viewing a key part of Ovi Maps. One of the things I hate about my iPhone (and Android phones I’ve tried) is that getting Google to cache maps seems like a super pain - I don’t want to install third party programs just to be able to use this fancy piece of electronics with huge memory, nice display and a GPS as a stand-alone GPS. It is the main thing that got me to investigate Nokia as an option to move to from iPhone instead of Android. But I’m not really sure I can wait long enough for Meego and Symbian isn’t inspiring enough.

I'm happy to see research on higher DPI small screens because perhaps this forecasts seeing the next resolution jump in phones soon. As others have noted, the 4"+ diagonal screens on phones now are typically 800x480 or 854x480 and that just isn't good enough for my eyes (a bit worse than average). But go to 1280x768 (my favorite aspect ratio sitting between 1280x720 which seems kind of narrow for a phone and 1280x800 which is a little wide) and you have the following DPI vs. diagonal:

4.1 364
4.2 355
4.3 347
4.4 339
4.5 332

For me, bigger is better up to about 4.5 and after that (e.g. Dell Streak), devices get too big to comfortably pocket. But any screen in this range with at least 1280x720 will be a welcome addition to Android or other phone platforms.

I don't think companies should give up on this model (selling and supporting an unsubsidized phone). Google failed, but my understanding is they didn't have the right support infrastructure (and the phone with the carriers available had too many initial problems requiring support). But a better phone and organized support could still succeed in the US (elsewhere is easier I hear). But there needs to be better promotion of how much it will cost you assuming you don't break your phone in the first 2 years (most won't) compared to plans that subsidize phones. I don't even know what the best US carriers are for offering unsubsidized plans. How much cheaper are they per month? Since phones are often subsidized $350 or more, they'd have to be $15/mo cheaper compared to a 2 year subsidized phone plan.

I'm sure most slashdotters know of this phone (geeksphone.com, great video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC1M77xKn6w) , but I just found out about it - out of the box rooted. That's the way all phones should be, but how many will by this one (which is seriously outdated now - I'd only consider their next model).

This problem is annoying. I tried a G1 for a month and didn't like it, and have been using an iPhone 3G for almost two years (it is marginally better overall than the G1 but with a different set of problems for me).

Really in the long run, the solution is to break the carrier subsidy altogether for phones that can only be used on that carrier. To increase real competition, one needs to be able to buy a decent phone for about 3-$400 in today's money and then get month to month service from different networks at a price that overall after 2 years is not any more expensive than getting a carrier subsidized phone and a plan that locks you in for two years (hopefully it will be less with competition). I come from the perspective of wanting a lot more government regulation so I see no problem with the US government telling carriers they have to do it this way so we can have a truly competitive market. I know it's unrealistic now, and there is an added problem that different networks have some different hardware requirements (for different waveforms), but future silicon should be able to handle this (I think there is already at least one model that will do CDMA or GSM).

I'm frustrated enough with the current Android situation that I find myself musing about the Meego OS. Tne Nokia N9 is nothing but rumors now - I'll have to see how good it actually is. Won't be available when my contract is up though (Dec), so I may just search for an Android phone that I know can either be rooted or is essentially a stock Android release (3.0 I hope) with very little crap added on and nothing taken away (as is my impression of the original Droid).