Internet Tablet OS2008 Review
(This post is huge with stacks of photos so I temporarily changed my site feed to “short." Visit tabletblog.com directly for the full article. I will return to full content feeds in a few days.) — Nokia's maemo team officially announced OS2008 for Nokia Internet Tablets (N800 and N810) today.
Context & Ripple Effects
The review lands at the end of a fast-moving year for Nokia's Linux tablet line. The N810 was unveiled in October 2007, an early software update for the N800 leaked to fan sites in November, and the maemo team had already shipped a feature upgrade to Internet Tablet OS 2007 edition back in July — so OS2008's official December announcement closes a loop the enthusiast community had been following for months.
What makes the release notable is its audience: TabletBlog's photo-heavy walkthrough speaks directly to the installed base of N800 owners deciding whether to flash their devices, while Nokia is simultaneously pushing to regain U.S. sales against Apple and Google and pitching convergence-driven change at Nokia World 2007.
First-order effects
- Existing N800 owners gain a no-new-hardware upgrade path to OS2008, extending the device's life without a purchase — the same free-update pattern maemo set with the OS 2007 edition release in July 2007.
- New N810 buyers get the updated OS out of the box, sharpening the tablet's positioning as a standalone Linux internet device rather than a phone accessory.
Second-order effects
- A faster software cadence on the tablets pressures Nokia's own phone division and rivals like Apple and Google — both named in Nokia's U.S. push — to treat over-the-air OS updates as a competitive expectation rather than a one-time event.
- Enthusiast coverage from outlets like TabletBlog and Ars Technica effectively becomes Nokia's marketing channel for the tablet line, since mainstream attention has been skeptical — InformationWeek argued in October 2007 that the N810 'doesn't make sense.'
Third-order effects
- If maemo keeps shipping annual OS editions across two hardware generations, Nokia is building a small developer platform around Linux tablets — a structural bet that open mobile OSes can compete with closed ones, with the outcome still genuinely uncertain as of late 2007.
The trend: Mobile devices are shifting toward regularly refreshed, updatable operating systems as a product differentiator, with Nokia's maemo tablets an early test of whether open-source platforms can hold consumer mindshare.