It’s been a month since I got an iPod touch as a present and I’ve been using it regularly since. I still have and use both a Nokia N65 phone and Nokia N770 tablet , but use of later has been diminished in last month.

iPod touch experience

I can’t help not to think of Touch as basically this decade’s Palm organizer. Thin widget with pleasant user experience that can be extended with myriad of applications, whose developers are — judging by iPhone versions — limited not by their imagination, but with device capabilities and limited expandability.

I still don’t like its on-screen keyboard and wish I had at least something like Graffiti . Hence I don’t write on it anything longer than two sentences and together with lack of camera, built-in microphone, GPS, Bluetooth or even just self-made software, it makes Touch a read-mainly device. Consumer device would be another, more ghastly, but appropriate description.

As a side note, even my now aged N770 tablet is more friendly to creators and hence I still find use for it. I just don’t want to browse web on it because of its very very dated browser that can’t be updated.

Still, even with annoying limitations I like iPod touch a lot. It’s hard not to with its polished interface and an App Store that is probably its killer application. Choice of applications in Slovenia is more limited than in USA, but still very wide and downloading them is so easy and cheap, you might have to fight against developing an addiction to it.

So what about Nokia?

Mobile devices space has become really interesting in last year. iPhone, iPod touch, Android with G1 and upcoming Palm Pre are finally bringing experience on web and otherwise, that we were promised years ago. But what this list lacks is any gadgets from Nokia.

I like Nokia. They had friendliest phones that are remarkably open in industry that likes to control everything. I think their tablets are great, even with shortcomings that should be resolved by now. But even with lots of innovation I get an impression that they are lagging behind.

As a complete outsider who only passingly follows what is happening in mobile industry, I can only ignorantly speculate about its reasons and plans.

I believe first problem for Nokia is that unlike Palm , Apple or even Google it’s not a niche player and tries to build phone for every possible user. It releases them too often. Taken together it is no wonder that just Nokia Europe lists 115 devices that are either selling now, were recently or will be in near future.

That’s too many devices, each with slightly different software, that create a very fragmented market. In such environment you can’t really hope that application would be pushing phones capabilities which aren’t there in most cases. Hence applications Nokia offers are not nearly as exciting as what Apple has.

Next problem presents development environment, which is simply awful. Symbian might have been a nice platform back when, but its time has passed and I doubt open-sourcing it will help. Java hardly works better, but it’s probably a bit nicer to use even though it feels slower. Python is nice for tinkering, but not really an option until it becomes pre-installed. There’s also a web runtime, which is mostly missing. Few phones support it and only one phone available can use it for something more significant than a window to web.

Much of what I just said is not true for tablets, but historically they didn’t seem to get much love from company. Too bad, since I think they are one of the most exiciting things Nokia has.

I do remain an optimist. Purchase and relicensing of Qt together with its upcoming S60 version signals that company is aware of development problems. Qt also offers a possibility of a framework that could be used everywhere and hopefully this will include Fremantle. Generally I don’t put too much faith in rumors, but some of them give credible hints that next tablet could be even better than an already great N810. If it also brings a distribution model comparable to App Store and a bit more polish, then it could be a big success even with non-geeks.

But what they need to do in my opinion is spend less time trying to build all encompassing services like Ovi and spend more effort in building amazing devices that integrate well with what is already out there. And by integration I don’t mean an app hidden in some folder on phone. Upload to Flickr should be available right after you took a photo. I also wish they didn’t try to leverage existing platform and users so much and were more daring and forward looking. If platform you have is stopping you from developing a phone you want, then find or develop a better one.

Until then I am sticking with what I got. A great phone for my needs that few match and a couple of nice tablets.