my 2011 CES wishlist
Here goes, my first real entry to this failed experiment of a blog. Wish me luck.
Back in 2007 I was fortunate enough to attend CES and was a heck of a trip. It was awesome to get to visit all of those manufacturer's booths, and the most awesome thing I witnessed was a transparently cased homagé to Zero Cool's present from The Plague in the movie Hackers. They had a rare lab prototype of the Toshiba Protégé R400.
However, I am left feeling as if I picked a very anti-climatic year to go. Maybe I was staying current on all of the kewl new toys back then, who knows. This year however, I'm holding out luck that Nokia (preferably) or some other MID/tablet/UMPC/whatever manufacturer is going to make my day. For several months now there has been minimal actual news about Nokia's next Linux powered device. The much anticipated MeeGo device was due out last quarter 2010, but like many Nokia products these days, was delayed until 2011. The MeeGo conference came and went, so that leave CES and CTIA Wireless as the best bets for news on possible MeeGo devices.
I'll try not to go off track too much, but this is one of the annoying things about the current tablet craze. Nokia has been doing this for years, and has been very popular in the geek market for it. They had a large, touch screen tablet on the market 2 years before Apple, the Nokia N770. But over the last year have been off and on about making a non-phone tablet device. I get that some people want their internet access integrated. Personally, I want to pay for it once, not per device. Bluetooth pairing with a cellphone should be the standard, not the carrier-profiting-bill-per-device-cellular-data-plans.
But I digress, back to the wish list. I have two items I would like Nokia to make, but the first I would accept from almost any quality manufacturer. First, I would like to see a non-cellular device running MeeGo with hardware similar to the Samsung Epic 4G. Slide out hardware keyboards for the win! This does bring me to a side-request, please Nokia!, don't settle for a 360×640 pixel resolution on this high end N-Series device like the E7 and the N8. If you make my dream device or just the N9, either way please do the screen some justice. The N8xx and N900 both had 800×480 resolutions. Unfortunately, I am a part of supposed minority of people that do not want the N9 to be a phone. One of my favorite devices of all time was the Nokia N810, which when paired with a 3G capable feature phone was a brilliant combination. I'm comfortable with carrying two devices, and felt that the size of the N810 was very comfortable in my pocket. Interestingly enough the Nokia N810, Nokia's 3rd Internet tablet, was released only 6 months after the original iPhone, but its sister device the N800 was released 6 months before the iPhone/iTouch.
The next item I would like would be a lower end Nokia E-Series device running Symbian^3. What I'm thinking of would likely fit as a great E3-xx device, effectively positioned as the E-Series version of Nokia's Touch and Type devices, the X3-02 and C3-01. What I like about this device concept is the simplicity of a T9 based business class Nokia phone, similar to the Nokia E52; with the idea of having a touch screen instead of traditional navigation buttons increasing the appeal. You would be amazed at how often people try to navigate on my Nokia E71x as if it was a touch screen. The benefit of running Symbian^3 over the other Touch and Type devices' Series 40 is that it would integrate more effectively with my work systems, but the T9 aspect prevents it from falling into the cellular carrier classification of 'smartphone'. Why do I want to avoid that? Because with smartphones I currently pay so much more for my internet access than I do for my home access. Maybe my plan is not right in AT&T's eyes, but I have some sever philosophical differences of opinion related to how cellular carrier should be run than the US mobile carriers do, so we'll just have to agree to disagree.
So that is it, that is what I would like to see at CES or sometime within 2011.
For those of you think I'm a Nokia fan boy... maybe your right. Personally, I prefer to look at it as that I don't like iOS or Android, because I'll leave Nokia for anyone else providing me what I'm asking for. Unfortunately, Nokia, being the largest cellular manufacturer in the world, and the only one not embracing those other two OSes, is currently my primary choice.