Secret Agent Community?

Moments ago, another Internet Tablet enthusiast said he was "calling me out" for being secret market research for Nokia. His evidence was that the new internet tablet features are directly in line with polls I have posted on TabletBlog.

This is news to me! If I had some sort of secret "in" at Nokia, I'd like to know who it is. Maybe I can talk them into making that North American 3G version of the N82 I've been wanting all this time.

The real secret agent is the community itself. The questions I posted for the polls are taken directly from community discussions InternetTabletTalk forums and other places. The potential replies were the standard deductive answers to those questions. The Nokia announcement means that they, too, are listening to the community desires.

I have to admit: this move by Nokia shows a big brass pair that we haven't seen in the Internet Tablet line so far. The N800 hardware improvements were a surprise and the developers knew about them at the same time the users did. The N810 confirmed a keyboard and GPS when (but not before) it was announced. This time, however, the developers were the first to know about the hardware improvements.

This is not ony for the benefit of the developers. Someone else at the Maemo summit (please take credit for it - I forgot who said it) mentioned that this was because the Internet Tablets now have competitors that were not there before. The onslaught of MIDs and netbooks are competing to be a portable, non-phone cloud computing/communications device in the $400 to $650 range. I assume the fourth Nokia Internet Tablet will fall in that price. They had to announce improvements now to keep people from hopping on the netbook and MID bandwagon.

What happens now? We wait.