Can Nokia Build a Compelling Tablet? (Spoiler: Yes)

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It’s unclear what we can expect from an upcoming Nokia tablet, but the company has experience building affordable, consumer-friendly tablets stretching all the way back to 2005.

770Did anyone here have the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet? I did. I actually just donated mine to the school my wife teaches at for the kids to take apart in their after-school computer club.

Even in 2005, the Nokia 770 “only” cost $360. It had a big (for the time) 4-inch screen AND YOU COULD SURF THE WEB ON IT! And there were apps!

booklet3g_ice_front_left1_302x302Nokia also did a commendable job of making itself stand out from the crowd when it released its Booklet 3G netbook in 2009—a time when the market had already become relatively saturated with netbooks.

It was made of aluminum, ran Windows 7, had a 10-inch HD display, was less than an inch thick, weighed 2.75 pounds, and had a battery life of over 10 hours—all of which were unheard of for netbooks at the time and are arguably still pretty decent specs by today’s measures, too.

Unfortunately, Nokia fell into the same trap that tablet makers are falling into nowadays and decided to outfit its netbook with a 3G chip and sell it through wireless carriers. The end result was that unless you bundled it with a two-year contract, the $300 selling price turned into a whopping $600. The fact that Windows 7 ran like me doing long division (very slowly, if at all) didn’t help its case, either, but the machine’s design was certainly impressive.

If Nokia can manage to cobble together an ahead-of-its-time tablet like the 770 was and use ahead-of-its-time design and features like the Booklet 3G had, while at the same time avoiding the pitfall of pricing itself out of competition—NOTE TO TABLET MAKERS: QUIT PARTNERING WITH WIRELESS CARRIERS—the company might be able to make a decent dent in the tablet market.

More on TIME.com:

How to Sell a Tablet: Apps and Price First, Tech Specs Second

Nokia and Microsoft Partner to Build Windows Phone 7 Devices

The BlackBerry PlayBook: Another Interesting Unfinished Tablet

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