After my last night's posting, I had a small exchange with @moximilian and @jludwig about my claim that calling the N900 a computer is BS and nobody wants a computer. Somehow, Nokia has gone from calling the N-series devices "multimedia computers" a couple of years back to "mobile computers" today, but it's a totally horrible thing to do from a market positioning point of view. I suppose I should clarify my reasoning a bit.

This is how I imagine the thought process has gone: Nokia, an engineering-led manufacturer of fixed-function devices (phones) has had the ambition to "put the Internet in your pocket" for quite some time. So far, so good. Now, an engineer designs a brilliant package of a high-performance programmable microprocessor, significant amount of working memory and storage memory, and a rich set of input and output mechanisms. To an engineer, this fits the definition of a computer, thus it must be a computer.

However, that is not how the world at large sees computers. The general understanding of a computer is a device which requires constant management, is at risk from viruses and other malware, produces incomprehensible error messages and, despite being a window to the wonderful new world of Twitters, Facebooks and all kinds of information and entertainment, is best left alone when at all possible. Yes, the computer industry has made great progress in the last decades in making their produce more approachable and human-friendly, but it's not there yet. Apple, for all its faults, is generally regarded as the gold standard in "computers for the normal people". Yet who hasn't seen a Mac or even an iPhone (once loaded with applications, at least) bug out in the most bizarre of ways?

Computers don't have any built-in value of their own. The value is completely attached to the applications, services and solutions to which they provide access. If it was left at that, and calling something a "mobile computer" would be simply a bad choice of marketing titles, I wouldn't mind. However, as long as the engineers working on the future devices think it's desirable to think of them as computers, they will carry the problems I mentioned along to future devices, because that's what computers do.

The device in your pocket is a terminal, a window onto the services of the Global Computer, and a flexible access point to things no one has yet to invent. It is programmable, it does have memory, and it can compute. Even so, lets not call it a computer.