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.

Why should I make my flickr feed for my own photos only? I created a flickr pool open for everyone to join and contribute. Maemo Nokians or Community Council Members: Contact me via Email with your Flickr user name and I'll make you administrators.

Regarding additional content from the Summit: Fate conspires against me. I've made it to Phoenix, but my luggage is still in London.

More photos were posted to the flikr feed mentioned in my last post, but tagging, video, and articles will have to wait. The plane from Berlin to Heathrow was delayed and I missed my connection. The options were to take a three leg flight with long layovers or to take my same flight tomorrow.

What is fun in London on a Sunday night?

I started uploading into my maemo summot 2008 photo stream. Here's the link to the set and all subsequent photos will be added there.

I opened up the permissions on these so anyone with a Flickr account can add tags and labels. Please label the people you know and add comments to the photos. Humor is welcome in the comments and labels!

Fremantle (maemo 5) is coming. There is a great deal of information about how it will help developers (SDK, maemo.org, online training, and the Nokia Forum.) On the consumer side, this includes the announcements in Ari Jaaksi's keynote.

The bullet point for multimedia said "encode and decode video at DVD resolutions" under the OMAP3 support. Looks like the new camera will support high-res video capture.

Here's a big announcement:
Hardware accelerated graphics with OpenGL ES 2.0 and Clutter.

Expect a full editorial on what all this means later.

The so-far-nonexistant http://maemo.nokia.com will also be a way to bridge from developers to Nokia. I'll link Nokia's official explanation of that in the near future.

Reggie Suplido of InternetTabletTalk is now talking about what users of Internet Tablets want. First, info on itT:

• Reggie has done a number of forum sites and user sites in the past. itT started in July of 2005.
  
• Currently there are 19,000 new members/day and about 416 posts/day.
• So far, the discussion about the latest platform announcement two days ago has over 200 replies.
  
• New product announcements spike user growth to the site.
• Over 1,000,000 unique visitors and 39% are new visitors.
• Tablet Scene: Created more geared for new users of Internet Tablets.
• maemo apps: a section of itT for software downloads
• Beginner's Guide Book: Intro to Internet Tablets

Now on to "What maemo users want?"

• Current tablet users are using it for web surfing, instant messaging, social networking, Skype, and a personal media player.
• There is a divide between 'one device' and 'multi-device' people.
• Great out-of-box experience
• A good balance between features and experience
• Focus of user experience over just design
• Software availability and ease
• Software updates (especially OTA updates)
• Provide feedback easily

On specific applications, he's giving examples of how to make things faster with predictive notifications, fewer taps to navigate, widgets, and more. My words won't do it justice, so I will wait for him to post his slides.

Harri Kiljander, the UI director of the maemo team, just gave a fantastic discussion about the user interface on the maemo platform. It showed actual metrics on the amount of time between touch and feedback plus metrics between screen area and accuracy.

In the Q/A, he was asked if multi-touch or accelerometers are being considered since they are such hot-button items in 2007-2009 consumer devices. The answer: he jumped back a number of slides to show one with several fingers on a panel. That's no confirmation that multi-touch WILL be in future devices, but it is certainly being considered heavily by UI developers.

No answer about accelerometers, but the demand may be just too low to need it.

The proposed Fremantle user interfaces look nothing like existing maemo / Internet Tablet 2008 Diablo interface. The left side bar is gone. The top full bar is gone. It looks far more organic.

The disclaimer here, of course, is that none of them are reality. They're PROPOSED UI designs. I'll post the pictures here when available.

One topic that is very important and recurring in Berlin is "fragmentation." This is the concern that too many players in the open source mobile market will hurt everyone in the future.

Nokia is highlighting the fact that they do as much as possible to take existing open-source software, improve it, then submit the improvements back to the code base.

Expect an editorial on fragmentation, what it is, how it is important, and what it will do.

Ari Jaaksi is giving the opening speech at the maemo summit. His first point is that we should all ask the tough questions and facilitate discussion that can lead to solutions. Following that, he talked about how different the S60 and phone platforms are different from maemo: maemo is not just about making the device great, but it's about making the future great as well.

TONS of photos will come.